Organisers blown away with success of ROEF2022
If success can be measured in compli-ments, thank yous, attendance and memo-rable experiences, then the Running On Empty Festival (ROEF2022) held in Cobar over the past week was most definitely a success!
Festival organiser, John de Bruin, said over-all he was really happy with how things went.
“We had so many amazing cars in town, you could feel there was a real buzz,” John said.
This sentiment was echoed numerous times by other locals and also lots of visitors.
“We had a lot of originals come back from the 2018 festival and also lots of new people here for this event,” he said.
“I’ve already had people asking me what’s the date for the next one?”
“There were however a few things we could have done better, it’s still a learning process, but we’re now in a much better place than we were at with the first festival in 2018,” John told The Cobar Weekly on Monday.
“We learned a lot from 2018, simple things like traffic control and education (letting visi-tors know what we have on offer in town, things such as food etc).”
He said all of the planned events were well attended.
Running On Empty movie producer John Clark was among the special guests and do-nated two original copies of the movie script.
He presented one to Cobar Mayor Peter Abbott which will go on display at The Great Cobar Museum and the second one was auc-tioned off. (It went for $2,000 and was bought by visitor Allyson Malone.)
Other auction items included a Redbull Rac-ing Mag Wheel (which was bought by Emily Miller for $4,000 and a Scott McLaughlin signed piece of the chassis from his 2019 history making supercar which Rhett Corbett (from Corimal) paid $2,000 for.
Also among the special guests was the mov-ie’s lead, Australian actor, Terry Serio, who made an appearance at Saturday’s Show ‘n’ Shine event where he happily posed for pho-tos and signed autographs.
The Show ‘n’ Shine competition, organised and run by the Cobar Dust Bowl Fuel Burners Club on Saturday at Drummond Park, was one of the highlights of the festival.
It attracted 162 entries for the competition along with a number of other vehicles that were there for display only.
The Grand Champion vehicle of the show was Paul Vella’s, 1957 Chevrolet 210 sedan, from Quirindi.
The People’s Choice was a 1978 Holden Sandman Panel Van (owned by Rodney and Jennie Barnes, Parkes, pictured oppposite) and the Judges’ Choice award went to Mark Molyoak’s 1936 Ford 3 Window Coupe.
Other category winners were: Best Origi-nal—1970 Ford Falcon XY GT (Pete McConnell); Best Late Model Sedan—2013 Mustang Super Snake (Peter Kiel); Best Late Model Ute—2008 Holden SS (Bruce ‘Agro’ Barnes, Parkes); Best Early Model Ute—1985 Toyota Hilux (Peter Garner); Best Early Mod-el Sedan—1958 Chevrolet Bel Air, two door hardtop (Leanne Babbage, Qld); Hard Luck award—1938 Graham Shark Noise (Andrew McRae, Qld); and Best Bike—2012 Harley Davidson Soft Tail Slim (Stewart Simpson).
Another highlight of the festival was the free Bands Night at Ailsa Fitzsimmons Me-morial Oval on Friday night which attracted a big crowd to hear “the locals” along with Sydney band, Edgecliff, who released their new single, Running On Empty, which was written and recorded for the event.
Early figures suggest this year’s festival made over $25,000 which will go towards the construction of a War Memorial in Drum-mond Park.
The winner of the “Fill Us Up” shop locally competition was Tania Ritter who got to rub shoulders with John Clark and Terry Serio.