President’s Report - February 2026
Happy 2026 everyone and welcome to the 69th year of the RROCA Victoria Branch. I trust you all had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year and are ready to get back into our club activities.
Firstly, a big thank you those of you who attended our January picnic meeting at Ironbark Station. A lovely festive evening was enjoyed by all, and it was also interesting to see the new carriages that Darren and Angie have added to their collection. Darren tells me that the horns his longhorn cattle will have probably be 2m wide by the time we come back next year. We also had the opportunity to present Rob Collins (Partner of our esteemed treasurer Tony Wood) with his Partner of the Year award and Tony Wood with his best-in-class trophy. The club is very grateful to Darren and Angie for their hospitality.
Our marques were well represented at the Festival of Motoring at Cruden Farm yesterday. We had models ranging from a prewar tourer to later Goodwood cars and everything in between. All up we had around 50 cars on display and this attracted much interest for the public and fellow enthusiasts alike.
Our next two events, like the Festival of Motoring are fabulous opportunities for us to promote our club and marques and are also two club favourites. The ever-popular AOMC British and European Motoring show will be held at Yarra Glen Racecourse on Sunday 15 February from 9am onwards. This is the show that fuelled my interest in motor cars as the variety of vehicles on display as well as the passion of their owners is tremendous. It would be great to have a strong showing of Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motor Cars from across the eras on display.
The 68th Kalorama Rally will be held on Sunday 15 March, at the Kalorama Memorial Reserve and this will be our March club run. This event is a fundraiser for the Kalorama CFA and our club was one of the founding participants. There is a mystery tour to the display being organised by the Vintage Drivers Club commencing at the Manhattan Hotel Carpark, Heatherdale Road, Ringwood, 9am for a 9.30am departure. If this doesn’t suit, you can go straight to Kalorama but please arrive before 10am. This display is focused on cars pre 1990 and it would be great for our club to have a good display of our prewar vehicles as well as some of our pre 1990 RR and Bentley models.
On entertainment of a different nature, our February Technical session will be back at LGSI and will focus on Batteries, chargers and jump start kits. This session will certainly add some spark to your life and, from our survey, was one of the topics that members were keen to learn about. This will be at LGSI on Sunday 1 February commencing at 10am. Fine BBQ cuisine will be available at the conclusion of the session.
We are very fortunate to have some members that are experts in many fields and our guest speaker for February is none other than Dr Wayne Fitzgerald. Wayne is a Vet by profession and has some very interesting tails (yes deliberately spelt that way) from his vast experiences with a huge variety of animals during his career. Something for us to get our teeth into. (see what I did there).
Finally, as stated by email I was planning on running a few pop-up midweek and early morning runs but given the fire and flooding situation at present, I don’t think this is wise or will be perceived in these areas at present. When the time is right, we will be doing some runs to fire impacted communities to assist by spending some much needed $ in local businesses, I trust this meets with your support.
Keith Mortimer
