About this site

Wigram Trophy is a searchable history of motor racing at Wigram airfield, Christchurch, built from the Motor Racing Club's own scrapbook of newspaper cuttings. It's a sister site to Bruce Jenner Racing, and is laid out the same way.

Acknowledgements

The archive

The MRC P History collection is 1,112 scanned scrapbook pages, numbered and dated, running from August 1948 to 2004. Most of the cuttings are from Christchurch's two daily papers, The Press and The Christchurch Star (the Star-Sun in the early years), with some from magazines such as NZ Speedsport. There are race previews, reports, results columns, photographs and captions, programme pages, letters and the odd advertisement. They cover every Lady Wigram Trophy meeting, plus the hill-climbs, beach races, airfield and street circuits the Christchurch papers followed. The pages were scanned in 2004 as black-and-white 200 dpi images. Every page is in the archive, at full resolution.

How it was built

1. Reading the scans. Each page was split into its columns and text blocks by finding the white gutters and column rules, then read with Apple's Vision text recognition one block at a time. Reading block by block keeps narrow newspaper columns from running into each other.
2. Understanding the text. The text of each page was read clipping by clipping to pull out what it says: headline, summary, the meeting it reports, every race result (position, driver, car, time), every lap time and speed, the other people named, photo captions, and standalone facts such as crowd sizes, records and accidents. Obvious OCR slips were corrected ("Francevie" → Francevic); anything too garbled to be sure of was left out rather than guessed.
3. Putting it together. Results are grouped into meetings and races, and a result printed in several clippings (preview, report and results box) is counted once. Names are matched across the years: "S. K. Haig", "K. Haig" and "Kevin Haig" are joined only when the initials and years leave no doubt. Cars are grouped by make and model, so "Chev Camaro" and "Chevrolet Camaro" are one car.
4. Checking against other sources. The history pages and the Lady Wigram Trophy winners were checked against published sources: the Air Force Museum of New Zealand, Christchurch City Libraries, Te Ara, Wikipedia, the Motor Sport database, oldracingcars.com and others. Every fact cites its source, and where sources disagree, the page says so.

What to be careful of

• The records are only as complete as the scrapbook. Many races were reported only in part, and some years are thinner than others.
• OCR can misread names, positions and times, especially in small-type results columns. Every result links to its clipping; the scan is the record.
• The papers often printed only initials and a surname. Two people with the same initial and surname in the same years can't be told apart and may share a profile. One person printed different ways may still be split across two profiles.
• Cars are grouped by make and model as printed, not by individual chassis.
• Lap times come from different layouts of the circuit, so compare them within an era.

Corrections and contributions

If you raced at Wigram, worked on the meetings, or have programmes, photos or results that fill a gap, or if you spot a name that's wrong or a driver split across two pages, please get in touch through the Motor Racing Club or the contribution page on our sister site. Tell us the page address and what should change.

Copyright

The clippings remain the copyright of their newspapers and photographers. They are reproduced here for non-commercial historical research. Summaries, tables and indexes on this site are original. If you hold the rights to a clipping and would like it credited differently or removed, please get in touch.