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2005 Targa Newfoundland Daily Log

Introduction

Targa Newfoundland is an international tarmac rally for historic, classic and modern sporting cars. Targa Newfoundland 2005 is scheduled for September 10 to 17. For more information visit www.targanewfoundland.com.

Targa consists of 5 legs (days) of competition covering a total of 2,100 kilometers of the challenging, twisty roads including more than 500 kilometers of closed-road, flat-out Targa Stages. Stages are held on open country roads, through small fishing villages and suburban residential roads.

The winner of the event is the car that accumulates the lowest number of time penalties. (ie: they are the fastest through the Targa Stages)

In 2004, we finished 2nd in the modern division and 4th overall. We were 8 seconds behind the overall winner (Bill Arnold) after 500km of targa stages. Our goal is to reach the top spot in 2005, however, Bill and several other top teams will have similar aspirations.

Qualifying for the competition takes place on Sunday, Sept. 11 just outside St. John's. Qualifying consists of two stages in the St. John’s area. The Pleasantville and Flatrock stages will determine the starting order for the first leg of the competition.

Leg 1 leaves St. John's for nine stages traveling along the northern Avalon Peninsula. Monday's final stage is one of our favourites, a blast through the suburban streets of Gander. Monday and Tuesday nights will be spent in Gander.

Leg 2: Thrifty Car Rental, leaves Gander on Tuesday morning with a reverse run of Gander. Leg 2 travels through the Exploits Valley for eight stages. Lunch is held at Oceanview Park in Leading Tickles. Leg 2 also includes a new stage in Grand Falls/Windsor. The Leg ends again in Gander.

Leg 3: Subway Kittiwake: This leg includes the very challenging Greenspond stage. Greenspond is a small island just off the coast of Newfoundland. The stage is very short with incredible elevation changes. I am sure that we run through just about every residents back yard. The final stage on leg 3 is a blast through Clarrenville. Last year, this stage was quite difficult due to a setting sun obscuring your vision on several of the up hill blind corners.

Thursday’s Leg 4 consists of a long transit down the Burin Peninsula to Marystown for eight challenging stages in the area, with lunch in Burin. Some new stages have been added for 2005 and the day ends at the Marystown Arena.

Friday’s Leg 5 will conclude with several fast stages including two new stages to complete the event. This final stage will likely determine the overall winner. We hope to be in contention for the win and will be hoping for an exciting shoot out on Friday.

This year, web cams will be used to allow distant spectators to see some of the cars in action. The known web cams are listed in the daily updates below.

Our vehicle preparation has been ongoing since the end of the One Lap back in May. We have made some substantial changes to the car for this year's Targa and we have had some great test sessions to sort out the handling. Some of this year's improvements include:

Thank you to everyone who helped us prepare.  It took a tremendous amount of effort again this year.

Glen Clarke    Evan Gamblin
Car #604
Porsche 911

Our Favourite Charity: Roger's House www.rogershouse.ca
We are beginning our work to raise funds and promote the awareness of Roger's House, a children's palliative care facility currently under construction at the Children's Hospital in Eastern Ontario.

 

Special Thanks to our 2005 Sponsors:

Results Updates:

Results and Scoring: www.rallyscoring.com
Daily Commentary: www.openroadmotorsports.com/WhatsNew.htm
www.thetelegram.com
General Interest: www.targanewfoundlandgander.com

 

Click here for Detailed Stage Maps

Thursday September 8th, Friday September 9th

We arrived in St. John's late Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday was spent finalizing the car prep for the event.

Changing Rear Brake Rotors at the Hotel, Mustang Park

So you think gas prices are high in Ontario? On the trip down we encountered $1.48CDN/liter of regular gas in New Brunswick.

The Porsche will burn close to 800 liters of fuel during the Targa competition. We will be blending 110 octane fuel with Newfoundland's premium gas (91) to get a working octane level of 100. We hope that this blend will prolong the engine life during the event. The cost of this blend is close to $3CDN/liter.


Saturday, September 10th

During registration we met many old friends from past competitions and caught up on all their latest updates. Many of the old challenges were renewed about who was going to beat who and by how much.

Mile One Stadium in St. John's, Ferarri 250 Tour De France

The big decision that has to be made on Saturday is tire choice. We brought two different types of tires to Targa this year and we have to decide which we will use. Targa rules allocate 6 tires per team, so you must wisely choose a tire that will work well in the expected conditions as well as last for the entire event.

The weather forecasters were predicting rain for Sunday's Qualifying and Monday's first race leg. However, the rest of the week looked clear. We had done some wet testing in August and knew that our dry tire would not be competitive in the wet. We also knew that our wet tire would not allow us to be competitive in the dry. What to do?

We studied the dry and wet factors carefully and decided that we should be able to just make our wet times using our dry tires. So we rolled the dice and went with the Toyo RA1s. (This would turn out to be a significant mistake later in the week)


Sunday, September 11th

Qualifying: K-Rock Prologue - Pleasantville and Flatrock

Sunday's qualifying stages are meant to seed the field for Monday's start. The slowest cars would start near the front of the field with the fastest cars near the back. Our strategy is to look after the car and not be too concerned with our qualifying times as the start positions are constantly changed through out the week. Generally we like to put in some conservative times and start mid pack on the first race leg.

Unfortunately, things would not go as planned on Sunday.

It is a long slow drive leaving Mile One Stadium to the first qualifying stage. Lots of traffic lights, stop signs and general congestion. During this slow transit, we managed to foul our spark plugs. This would guarantee that the engine would not run clean during qualifying. (Not a significant problem) It was also raining quite heavily and the grip level of our sticker Toyo's would be put to the test.

Our qualifying runs were very conservative and we were one of the slowest teams. Again this was not a problem for us. The organizers were quick to see through our sand bagging and seeded us 4th fastest for Monday's start.

When we returned to Mile One Sunday evening we parked in our usual make shift garage and went to work on the engine. After much consultation we decided to go with hotter spark plugs and we leaned the fuel mixture at low rpm conditions. (This would solve our problem for the rest of the week) During summer testing we had tuned the engine to work very well under high load conditions but we were a bit wide of the mark for idle and transit conditions. The high overlap cams that help the engine run so well at high rpm make it difficult to tune down low.

The Kloostermans Survive Qualifying, Paul Brassard repairs car 409

 

The Drama Queen
It is interesting that regardless of the level of testing or pre event preparation we tend to run into annoying little problems like this at the start of every event. We decided that these problems must be the car looking for extra attention to calm its nerves. (It must understand the punishment it is going to take over the next week) As a fitting moniker for these seemingly repeatable situations, the car has been renamed "The Drama Queen".


Monday, September 12th

Leg 1: Somers Lithium - North Avalon

Monday morning started out slightly damp with a drying surface. This fit well within the performance of the car and we had some great stages to build confidence.

While waiting for the start of the Marysvale stage, word came back of a big crash involving Casey Holzman's beautiful 69 911. Casey had tried to jump the intersection of two roads and had landed hard, launching himself into a rock cut. Casey and Bob were OK but the car had been destroyed. The road was blocked with Porsche parts and the stage was cancelled. While transiting through the crash site we were amazed by the level of damage. The fact that these two were not injured was a real testament to the cage design and the Porsche's structural integrity.

Our final run through Brigus was great. This is a very nice town stage with very challenging turns and jumps over two bridges. This was a good confidence booster.

Monday afternoon was much more challenging. It was raining by the time we reached Spaniard's Bay and we would soon have our first wet stage. We were not too concerned as we knew the stage well and were confident that we could meet our times in the wet. However, the organizers had other ideas. Although it was raining lightly and the road surfaces were very wet, the organizers decided to classify the stage as dry. Now we were going to have to work very hard to meet our time. Mid way through the stage the back end of the car stepped out entering a corner at about 180kph. Not fun, but we did keep in on the road and cleaned the stage.

Osprey trail was the next stage and again it was classified dry although it was raining and visibility was not the best. We pushed hard in the stage but eventually had to back off after a couple of close calls. We took our first time penalty of the event on this stage.

On the transit to Gander our Windshield wipers failed. At first we thought if was simply a failed spline on the wiper arm, however it turned out that the mechanical assembly had broken and there was no way that we would be able to repair it before the Gander stage. This would be a significant problem during our Gander run.

I think it was darker than this in Gander.

 

Gander has always been one of our favourite stages. However, this year it was not to be. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong at Gander. We were one of the last cars to run the stage and it was starting to get dark. It was just dark enough that the headlights really did not have any effect on visibility. Combine this with our lack of windshield wipers in the rain and our visibility was basically zero. It was impossible to see the tape and the corner arrows from any reasonable distance. If that was not hard enough, our intercom failed during the run and our rally computer was acting up. To make maters even worse, my seat slid backwards two notches and I could barely push the clutch all the way in. What a night mare! We drove as hard as we could but we certainly could not go as quick as we should have and we took a 30 second penalty on the stage. This was pretty hard to take and it took me several hours to calm down after the run. We work very hard to be competitive at the event and to throw away so much time with such silly problems was very annoying. However, our experience and determination not to give up came into play. We fixed all the problems with the car that evening and prepared to come back hard on Tuesday.

Chrylsler Entries: Charger and 300C, Marc Bullock's Porsche Cayene

Tuesday, September 13th

Leg 2: Thrifty Car Rental - Exploits

Our first run through Gander on Tuesday morning was wet again. So much for the weather forecasters. We ran the stage hard and managed to get the best performance from the car. The second half of the stage was tough with lots of standing water. Exiting one corner we slid sideways down one complete straight. Fortunately the car came to a rest pointing in the right direction and we were lined up perfectly for the next corner.

Fortunately the rest of the day was dry and we were able to make our way back up through the field with excellent runs through Grand Falls and Bishops Falls. Grand Falls is a new stage for 2005 and has become one of our favourites.

Wednesday, September 14th

Leg 3: Subway - Kittiwake

Wednesday was definitely a high light for us. Greenspond is one of the toughest stages in the event and we were pumped up. It is very intense and takes a lot of commitment to cary speed through some of the difficult corners. We had a flawless run recording the fastest time of the day and the highest speed through the radar trap. It took me ten minutes to stop vibrating after this run.

We finished the day with great runs through East Port and Clarrenville.

By the finish of Wednesday we had moved into second place in the modern division and into the top 10 overall.

Thursday, September 15th

Leg 4: Rogers Yahoo - Heritage


Thursday morning started with a long transit to a small village called Harbour Mille. Harbour Mille is a small fishing village on the west coast of the Burin Peninsula. The village is one of the oldest communities in Newfoundland and was settled over 400 years ago. There is only one road into Harbour Mille. The plan called for all competitors to transit into Harbour Mille, have breakfast and then race back out the same road. To accomplish this, all competitors had to clear the finish check point by 8:45 am. At 8:45am, the road would be closed and no one else would be allowed in. No problem, we decided to leave Clarrenville at 6:15am which would give us plenty of time to complete the 140km transit before the road was closed.

Unfortunately, The Drama Queen strikes again!
The engine would not start. After working for 30 minutes on the problem we determined that the injectors on cylinders 4, 5 and 6 were not firing. A quick decision was made to push the car into the trailer. Mike and Evan would drive the truck and trailer to the check point and I would stay in the trailer with the car to fix the problem.
What a ride. I rewired the ECU relay/fuse panel behind the drivers seat with a flashlight in my teeth and a butane soldering iron to reconnect the wires. The roads were anything but smooth and Mike wanted to prove that he could drive as fast as any of the competing teams. After about 90 minutes of being pounded around in the back of the trailer, I completed the work and fired up the engine. Everything seemed to be working well again. Shortly after completing the work, the trailer stops, we push the car out and clear the check point with just minutes to spare. I felt very sea sick and my body felt like it had just done the first week of rookie orientation at football camp but we were still in the race.

The Harbour Mille stage turned out to be one of the highlights of the event with very fast flowing corners following the coast. We look forward to going back again next year under a bit more relaxed conditions.

During the week we had been experiencing problems with our rally computer. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it was way off. It worked perfectly on transits but would fall behind during the competitive stages. We didn't know why and our efforts to correct the problems did not find improvement. This became a significant issue on the run into and out of Burin.

Burin is a very fast long stage and accurate navigation is key to making your time and staying on the road. We experienced some odometer problems on this stage and Evan did his best to keep us on track. We had some very close calls with the guardrails and a couple rock cuts however we did make our time.

On the way out of Burin, we were flying blind again and we had a very close call with Giannou corner (named after Scott Giannou's guard rail impact in 2004). As soon as we entered the corner I knew where we were and knew that we were way to hot to make it. It ran through my mind about how embarrassing it was going to be to hit that particular guardrail. (especially after we set up a pool to see if Scott would hit the guardrails again in 2005) I put the car sideways mid corner and managed to miss the armco by a few inches. Embarrassment saved for now. Little did we know that Marc Scott and Chris Paine had hit this guard rail just previously and they were parked on the inside of the corner watching everyone come through. They made a good point of letting us know how bad we looked through this corner.

On the run out of Burin we saw a very sad site. The beautiful 1966 911 of Klaus Sebert was parked on its roof on the outside of one of the corners. Apparently his right rear tire blew on entry and it caused the car to roll. The car was a bit crumpled but he was able to rejoin the race on Friday morning.

We encountered a new problem coming out of Burin. Something moved in the pedal cluster and the clutch was now interfering with the brake pedal. To get full braking it was necessary to depress the clutch first. Once we figured out what was going on it was pretty easy to drive around the problem but it did make it interesting on a few occasions.

For the 3rd year in a row we took a time penalty in Fortune but we followed it up with a great run through Marystown. Marystown has been one of our favourite stages. It has always been very challenging to drive quickly.

Frenchman's Cove claimed a number of cars this year. During the morning, Chrysler's SRT Charger left the road and struck a steel I-beam and a very large boulder. The car was not fixable but it is a testament to the cars strength that it survived this very big impact in more or less on piece.
The afternoon run through Frenchman's cove claimed a Porsche 911. The 911 caught a bit of air over a crest, the driver lost the back end of the car and it rolled 4 or 5 times before ending up in the ditch well off the road.

Thursday we noticed that the driver's front strut tower had separated from the roll cage. We kept an eye on it during the day and were prepared to make repairs on Thursday night. However, the separation did not get any larger so we decided to leave it as is and repair it during the car's winter rebuild.

Always a good crowd in Marystown, Sometimes it is faster to push in Placentia

After Thursday's event we were 2nd in Modern Division and 7th overall. Unfortunately we were not too far back to attack Ernie in 1st place. Fortunately we were well clear of the Kimber team in 3rd place. Unless someone made a big mistake on Friday, the finishing positions were pretty much decided.

Marystown Arena: Never to young to start.

 

Friday, September 16th

Leg 5: Goodyear Tire - South Avalon

Friday was another wet cold day. Now we were really wishing that we had chosen the wet tires instead of the Toyos. Special thanks to the weather forecasters.

Most of the Friday stages are high speed runs that can be handled at a reasonable pace. However, the high speed run through Point Verde was quite exciting. It was raining with dense fog. At 180kph in the fog you need to follow the center line of the road and keep you eyes open for the unknown. At one point we exited a fog bank to find that we were only about 20 feet behind Rob Pacione's Mustang. We never new he was there.

Marc Scott and Chris Paine on Marine Drive

 

Our windshield wipers failed for the second time of the event on route to the final two stages. It was raining hard enough that visibility was poor and the rain-x did not seem to be helping. We ran the final two stages, Seal Cove and Killick Coast, with very poor visibility and although we drove as hard as we could we took significant time penalties. We were feeling pretty bad and we were certain that we had lost 2nd place in Modern.

Placentia in the wet.

 

Fortunately, when the results were announced later that evening, we had held onto 2nd in Modern and actually moved up to 5th overall.

Final Overall Results:

1 Bill Arnold Alan Ryall BMW Bavaria
2 Ernie Jakubowski Bill Comat Porsche 911
3 Tom Silver David Fuss Ford Mustang
4 Jud Buchanan Peter Wright Acadian Canso
5 Glen Clarke Evan Gamblin Porsche 911
6 Ralph Grant Alisha Grant Volvo
7 Richard Kimber Brian O'Kane Toyota Supra
8 John Paynter Clarke Paynter Subaru WRX STI
9 Mark Swain Mike Bell Corvette Z06
10 Keith Townsend Jen Horsey Subaru WRX STI

 

Conclusion

We came into Targa 2005 with very high hopes of challenging for the overall win. Although we fell short of this goal we are happy with the results we have achieved:
1st Place: Modern Class 6 Modified
2nd Place: Modern Division
5th Place: Overall

We also won a gold targa plate. The gold plate is awarded to teams that complete all of the stages over three concurrent events.

The car performed very well and all of the problems that we did encounter were fixed or resolved without too much drama. We do need to work on some of the details and we do need to improve our wet weather performance for 2006.

Special thanks to everyone who helped us compete in 2005.


Introduction
8-9 Sept
10 Sept
11 Sept
12 Sept
13 Sept
14 Sept
15 Sept
16 Sept
Conclusion