The property is called Wandle Downs, 550 hectares of North Canterbury high country near Waiau, about an hour north of Christchurch, tucked in the shadow of the Mt Lyford ski area. The racetrack I stumbled across was not a circuit thrown together by a rich hobbyist. It is a 4.8 kilometre professional test facility with multiple configurations, designed entirely by its owner, resurfaced with specialist asphalt imported from Germany, and built to the same engineering philosophy that governs everything else on the property. The Stage 2 layout is a 2,350 metre, 12 turn rollercoaster of dips, blind crests and difficult cambers across 53 metres of elevation change that Dicker himself describes as "frightening."
The man behind all of it is David Dicker, a 72 year old Australian technology billionaire who founded Dicker Data in 1978 with his then wife Fiona Brown from nothing, having taught himself to program computers after a career as a refrigeration mechanic. Dicker Data is now ASX listed, turns over more than $3 billion in annual revenue distributing technology hardware and software across Australia and New Zealand, and Dicker remains its CEO and chairman. He does not pay himself a salary. Instead he draws income exclusively through dividends, a system he said he borrowed from Kerry Packer. He owns more than 38 million shares. When the stock hit its record high, his personal stake was worth around $1 billion.
He could have retired anywhere. He chose a remote farmhouse in rural Canterbury.
"I have houses in Australia, Dubai and Italy, and for the moment I am living in the old farm house until I design and build something more appropriate. It's my choice, as I spend most of my time up here in my studio, living, breathing and creating my dream, and need little more than a warm bed when I need to sleep."
The dream in question is Rodin Cars, established formally in 2016 and named after the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the man behind The Thinker. The company's founding philosophy reflects the pose: to think critically and completely about every problem before acting. Dicker designed the racetrack himself. He designed the cars himself. The factory complex that now sits on Wandle Downs houses one of the largest and most diverse collections of manufacturing machinery and 3D printers in the Southern Hemisphere, including one of the largest 3D titanium printers in the world. The ambition is for almost every component, from the chassis to the engine to the smallest titanium washer, to be manufactured on site.
The first car to come out of Rodin was the FZED, which began life as the failed Lotus Type 125 project. Lotus had intended the Type 125 to bring a genuine Formula One experience to paying customers on track days. The project stalled and only five of the planned 25 cars were ever sold. Dicker bought the entire programme, the parts, the rights, and the engineering, then spent three years rebuilding it into something reliable and extraordinary. The Rodin FZED uses a Cosworth built 3.8 litre V8 producing 503kW, weighs 609kg, reaches 100km/h in 2.9 seconds and tops out at 300km/h. Dicker has described the FZED as training wheels for his real goal.
That goal is the FZERO, and it is the most audacious project in the company's history. A single seat track car with a 4.0 litre twin turbocharged V10 engine producing 864kW and 1,026Nm of torque, supplemented by 130kW of electrical assistance. It revs to 10,000rpm. The car weighs 698kg with fluids and the V10 alone weighs 132kg. Only 27 examples will be made. The price is just over $3 million. To put that in context, a current Formula One car costs up to $25 million to develop and build, requires an entire team to operate, and by Rodin's own reckoning will not match the performance of the FZERO.
"The Rodin FZERO is the physical representation of the ultimate heights in vehicle performance. Without the restrictions of building to a set of rules, we are able to make the car lighter, more powerful, and produce significantly more downforce. The only real restrictions we face are the laws of physics, and we have even pushed those to the absolute limit."
The benchmark sitting in the factory is a McLaren Senna GTR, the only one in New Zealand, kept not as a trophy but as a performance target. The Senna GTR exists at Wandle Downs to be beaten.
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Rodin is not just a car company anymore. In 2023 Dicker acquired a majority stake in Carlin Motorsport, one of the most decorated feeder series operations in European motorsport. The team was rebranded Rodin Carlin and later Rodin Motorsport after a fallout with founder Trevor Carlin, who was fired by Dicker at the end of 2023. The team currently competes in FIA Formula 2, FIA Formula 3, GB3, F1 Academy, F4 British Championship and Spanish F4. The end goal, which Dicker has not been shy about stating, is Formula One team ownership.
The original racetrack on the property was destroyed in the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, a magnitude 7.8 event that cracked the tarmac badly enough to lose a rugby ball in. Dicker rebuilt it, extended it, and had it resurfaced with materials imported from Germany. Hurunui District Council approved the track under resource consent for private testing of prototype vehicles. Public events are not permitted. The nearest house is more than a kilometre away.
It is the kind of operation that makes complete sense only once you understand the man running it. David Dicker is not a wealthy dilettante who decided to build racing cars for something to do. He is someone who has spent 47 years building a business by doing everything himself, understanding everything from first principles, and refusing to compromise. He applied exactly that mindset to a sheep station in Canterbury and is in the process of building something that the rest of the automotive world is starting to pay serious attention to.
If you find yourself on a back road north of Christchurch and see a small sign that says Rodin, now you know what is on the other side of it.
Sources: Rodin Cars | Bloomberg, December 2024 | NZ Herald | NZ Autocar | 66 Magazine | Rodin Cars timeline | Wikipedia / Rodin Motorsport