Nothing we humans can conjure up is ever as bizarre and inexplicable as life itself, and although this month’s top truck ticks all the boxes on the spec sheet, it’s the boxes it ticks in its driver’s heart that makes it all the more special.

Unicorns – the mythical horned horse too scared to board Noah’s Ark, according to the famous Irish Rovers song, The Unicorn. In modern parlance, it’s a label often assigned to something that simply shouldn’t have existed, yet does.

When Neil Powell arrives at work each morning and walks toward the Klos Custom Trucks- embellished Legend Kenworth W900SAR he drives for Graham and Michelle Redington’s Northchill Group, he certainly has to pinch himself. What he’s walking towards shouldn’t exist. It simply shouldn’t be here in Pukekohe in 2024, waiting for him to climb into the cab, waiting for him to turn the key and fire it up, to ease it into gear, and then together – man and machine – roll quietly out of the yard. But it does exist, it is here, and the sequence of events described above is Neil’s unbelievable reality every workday morning.

Setting the scene

Neil (57) is a Rotorua-born third-generation truck driver who spent a good portion of his formative years in Australia following the decision of parents Doug and Elizabeth to pack up the family and head over the ditch in 1978. Doug drove and owned trucks all over the east and south of the big land, and as a result, a young truck-mad Neil lived the maverick years of late 1970s early 1980s Aussie trucking right alongside his dad. Neil knows all about driving off ‘Aeroplane’ on the Hume Highway at speeds more aligned to aviation than trucking.

“I was there beside him every waking moment I could be. Mum said when I was home she’d turn on the vacuum cleaner in my room so it sounded like a truck engine, and then I’d be able to sleep.”

To put the Legend SAR he drives today into context, we have to go back to Adelaide in 1983 and the Kenworth W900SAR Doug relief drove for his mate Bobby Fountain. With twin stacks, a 36in bunk and running a Detroit Diesel 8V92 and 15-speed Roadranger, Neil remembers looking at his father as the two-stroke Jimmy’s signature note filled the cab, and saying “What about this thing, Dad?” Those rides in the Fountain SAR sealed the deal – there was only one truck and there was only one model.

But history waits for no man, and it certainly didn’t wait for Neil. Kenworth ended the original W900SAR line just four years later, shattering our young hero’s dream. He figured by the time he became worthy of the SAR wheel he dreamed of, they’d all be long gone. “I was heartbroken,” he says with a laugh.

“We came back home in 1984. I only had one grandmother and she was aging rapidly. Dad said we’d missed out on spending time with her having been over in Aussie, and we should come home and make the most of it while she was still with us. We set up in Pukekohe. I was 16 at the time.”

Neil went to work at Ted Tyrell Engineering as a welder, but the call of the road was too strong and before long he was behind the wheel of his first truck – a Nissan Caball – at local firm Edwards Carriers, where Doug was also employed as a driver/ painter.

In the succeeding four decades, Neil has lived the trucking dream on both sides of the Tasman, working for some famous names, owning gear himself, driving and operating some spectacularly cool trucks.

It was while driving for Auckland-based Nigel Livermore Trucking in the mid-1980s that he thought he’d ticked the W900SAR box.

At the time, Nigel owned the ex-Barry Butterworth W924AR Black Bitch and the ex-Steve Gutschlag W900SAR (originally the Uhlenberg truck), running them on linehaul Turangi swap work, servicing his Feltex contract and general freight. Both units ran Detroit 8V92s with 13 and 15-speed Roadrangers respectively, and prior to Nigel selling out, there were certainly shades of living the dream for Neil. As far as fulfilling destiny was concerned, little did he know that was just the warm-up.

Neil returned from a 12-year stint over the ditch in 2013 working at Balle Brothers in Pukekohe for three and a half years prior to joining Graham and Michelle Redington’s Northchill Group in 2017.

He started his time working in the controlled temperature division before moving on to general work driving the Kenworth K200 Fat Cab DUKE. For the past four years, he’s been in the tanker division delivering timber treatment product to various sawmills around the North Island.

It’s a comment we’ve had repeated to us every time we’ve encountered the Northchill operation: “It’s a great place to work. A great culture, and a real trucker’s trucking company.”

In 2020, Neil was handed the keys to a new Kenworth T659 8×4 tractor with IT sleeper, a truck you could say is a bit of a unicorn in its own right, and a machine he rates right up there. “That was – is – a great truck. I’ve got nothing bad to say about the 659 – I loved it, and still do.”

Here we go

Following the release of Kenworth’s first two Heritage Series Legend models – the T950 and the T900 – news broke of a third Legend Kenworth timed to celebrate 50 years of Kenworth truck assembly in Australia. Of course it could only be one model; its most famous region-specific model, the W900SAR.

No Legend T950s made it to Aotearoa – the fixed production number set underestimated the tsunami of interest the concept garnered, but Graham and Michelle Redington did secure a T900 in the second release (New Zealand Trucking magazine, November 2019). He was also sure not to miss out on the W900SAR.

“They’re just really cool, and we needed to have one in the fleet”, says Graham. That Graham felt the SAR was worthy of being named in honour of his mum, Perl, probably tells you all you need to know, and its build No.42 is the year of her birth.

Prior to the SAR’s arrival at its new home at 72 John Street, Pukekohe, a trip to Klos Custom Trucks North Geelong in Victoria, Australia, for the required accoutrements of class was necessary, as was a stop-off at Southpac Trucks on arrival in New Zealand for fifth wheel and engineering requirements. It’s a breathtaking sight to behold, with its 36in Aerodyne sleeper and decked out in the group’s grey livery plus the superb four-axle Tanker Engineering semi on-hook – color-matched to the tractor.

The only detail left to complete on this special machine was allocation of Kenworth Legend W900SAR No.42 to just the right driver – someone who ‘got it’, who ‘understood it’, and someone who would appreciate it. Maybe even someone whose own history was inextricably connected to it?

And so, in 2024, some 37 years after the original model was discontinued, that’s the story of how the teenage boy who thundered up the Aussie highways four decades ago sitting next to his dad in a Kenworth W900SAR, vowing that one day he would drive one for a living … did it!

SPECIFICATIONS
Kenworth Legend W900SAR No.42 – 6×4 36in Aerodyne sleeper