Leg 3 – Navigational eccentricities, a mystery penalty and new miracles
We were in very good shape entering Leg Three on Wednesday. The car felt strong with the slightly higher boost pressure co-driver/chief mechanic Stewart Hoo had dialled in. And if it wasn’t good, he would whip out his computer and change it as we rolled on in a transit. How cool is that. One of the reasons Stewart was able to jump into the co-driver’s on Monday when official co-driver Keith Townsend woke up in pain is that he routinely sits in the right seat of race cars, at race speeds, on tracks like the formidable Mosport GP course and changes the engine mapping on his laptop without even looking up.
Things turned a little weird on the second special stage of the day – Frederickton/Carmanville – that starts with a kilometre-long drag race into a medium right-hander and an immediate acute right turn into a narrow uphill and then a series of kinks before a 90-degree right-hand turn onto an open sideroad (I’m beginning to sound like a co-driver myself. These instructions are getting to me…).
We then get to motor seriously with our stronger STI and Stewart soon becomes alarmed when he sees our Timewise rally computer rack up more than a minute of ‘ahead, time’ against what he has inputted as our target time and average speeds. You cannot average more than 135 km/h, at the risk of being fined, and then penalized, so we slow right down.
Soon, I see Steve Millen and Mike Monticello’s orange Nissan GT-R come up. They started 30 seconds after us, slow down a bit and motor on. Then, it’s the glorious Group B Audi Quattro with Frank Sprongl and Rod Hendricksen on board. At that point, Stewart suspects a problem and says: “ok, just go!”
This part, I really enjoyed. After booting it, I was able to keep up with rally master Frank as he set the Quattro up for high-speed corners, obviously with a dab of his left foot on the center pedal: “I only brake with the left foot, ever”. It’s not often you get such a treat at Targa with the staggered start times.
A kilometre down the stage, our problem remains whole: we still are more than a minute ahead on the clock and want neither a fine, nor a penalty. So we slow right down and almost come to a stop to let the seconds slip before rolling by the red ‘Flying Finish’ boards (!) at barely a snail’s pace.
Still totally puzzled, Stewart shows the target times we had used with Frank Sprongl who quickly recognizes that these times are from the ‘Trophy Times’ sheet that follows the one for proper base times in the official route book. These times determine a crew’s admissibility to the coveted Trophy plates and reward consistency and speed at Targa Newfoundland and are notably longer than the base time. In this stage, our correct target time was 4.52 and our Trophy Time was 6.24. Experienced co-drivers typically rip the Trophy Times pages out of the route but this one slipped through as Keith prepared the day’s instructions to help Stewart, who was still in his third day ever as a co-driver.
It’s just one of those things in a rally that has been eventful for our team, to say the very least. We would have easily ‘zeroed’ this stage and instead will take a big penalty. Stewart thinks 1.32 but the official Leg Three results say 1.17. What I simply don’t understand is the 1.44 of penalties we have actually picked up during the entire Leg Three have turned into 6.44, which drops us to 24th place overall, not quite the position we were shooting for. It’s either a simple mistake and our 2.23 total penalties nevertheless leave us in 14th, or we’ve been assessed a 5-minute penalty for unknown reasons. The ‘detailed penalties’ page still says ‘Not yet available’ at the moment. We’ll put Keith on this case.
At the top, Glen Clarke and Andy Proudfoot are still penalty-free in a Porsche 911 Carrera that blows great billows of gray smoke like a low-slung diesel dragster at every stage start. Tied in second place are now the German team of Michael Stoschek and Philipp Spaeth, who are reportedly – and puzzlingly – running their immaculate lime-green 1965 Porsche 911 with full WRC rally-style ‘pace notes’ and the 1967 Acadian Canso of three-time second-place man and sole Platinum Targa Plate holder Jud Buchanan and co-driver Jim Adams, with only three seconds of penalties.
And it's still a three-way battle in Grand Touring between Brian Jarvis and Daphne Sleigh in their Mini Cooper S/JCW, Alan Kearley and Greg Martin in their blue Mazda3 GT and the father-son team of Ferdinand and Christoph Trauttmansdorff in a red 1990 BMW 325i, all still with zero penalties after three days of competition.
That said, the most exciting part of my day was watching Stewart whip out tools and dismantle our Targa STI’s electrical control panels minutes only before the start of the Gooseberry Cove stage. The ignition was dead, inexplicably, seconds only after I had driven the car up the hill to pick Stewart up. I was fully strapped in, ready for action but strangely calm, in utter fascination at Stewart’s frantic wrench-turning and probing of all the possibly faulty wire connections, breakers and relays in our rally car. Somehow, I must have known that Stewart would get us going again and he did, with a few minutes to spare. Just enough to slip his helmet back on, strap in and to bring his heart rate down a bit.
Another miracle for our Targa. Without Stewart, we would again have been out of this rally. The man is my absolute hero. We stopped at the stunning Vernon’s Antique Toy Shop car museum (www.vernonsantiquetoyshop,ca) on the way back. Stewart then drove the Targa STI to Marystown with Cathy Cole, the Great Overseer of all things for Subaru Rally Team Canada (and his everyday accomplice) at his side.
What a day, indeed. All normal at Targa Newfoundland.
