The club had decided to change the start from one end of the course to the middle, a popular innovation with the spectators, who could now easily see the start-finish line and both turns. The crowd was kept off the track by heavy ropes strung along posts driven into the sand, although this didn't deter one man from wandering on to the course to fossick for toheroas, the highly prized shellfish that can be dug up at low tide.
The premier event of the day, the Ten Miles Open Championship, had been flagged away just a few minutes before and onlookers watched horrified as the three leading motorcycles bore down on the man who was now bending over with his back to the action, ignoring all the shouted warnings. The lead rider, who was mounted on a very rapid 350cc overhead-valve Velocette, veered to the left, missing the man by centimetres at something like one hundred miles an hour. A split second later the second machine, a big 1OOOcc Indian, screamed past on the man's right. Bert, who was thundering along in third place and whose vision was obscured by the two leading bikes, did not see him until the last moment. How he managed to avoid the man, who was now reeling about the beach from the shock of the first two near misses, was something spectators would talk about for some time. He seemed to almost lift the motorcycle sideways and then skate down the beach in a frightening series of full opposite-lock skids, until by some miracle he brought the machine back under control. The toheroa hunter scuttled back to the rope barrier without endangering the rest of the field which was now streaming past. Someone in the crowd gave him an almighty boot in the pants to the cheers of all who witnessed it. They then turned back to the furious action on the beach.
One Good Run Tim Hanna p 100