After the engine failure in our Evo IX, we’re back in competition. Our new car is a little unlikely — it’s a maroon Chevy Impala, with front wheel drive, no ABS (which could be fun), no limited slip differential, crappy all season tires, and NO amenities — but we plan to wring every last drop of performance out of this turd.

We’re now entered in the Touring competition at Targa Newfoundland. I’ll be honest and say that this has always been the “poseur” class to those of us who run in the full race Targa class, but after running in the event for a couple of days we do agree there is some real skill involved, especially when driving a less-than-capable car.

The Touring competition is a time/speed/distance event. What this means is that rather than driving as fast as you can on the stage, you are given a precise average speed to complete sections of each stage in. Show up too early or late, and you are penalized for your discretion. To further complicate matters (and to keep you from driving like a mad man until the finish and then waiting for your arrival time) there are “Interim Time Controls” that are hidden on the stage where they check your average speed up until that point. The average speed they ask you to accomplish is certainly a brisk pace. It’s street legal speeds; on fast roads it’s downright boring (I drive faster than that in my daily driver), but in tight town stages you have to drive HARD in a POS like our Impala. Whee!

There are two divisions within Touring; Equipped, for cars with special rally computers that will give you precise mileage, calculate your average speed, times, etc., and will tell you what speed you need to average at any given point in time to correct, and Unequipped, where your only tool is a stopwatch and the (usually incorrect) odometer on your car. Last time I checked, Hertz doesn’t provide rally computers in rental cars, so we had to run unequipped. This necessitated my co-driver Scott Smith (who so eloquently stated that he “has a fucking master’s degree from MIT!” and refused to fail at this ) to update our route books from the pace notes that he would normally call to make sure we didn’t blow through a junction or spit ourselves off the road in Targa, to a format that told him what time we theoretically had to arrive at each note and what average speed we’d need to hit that. Serious math geek stuff if you ask me, so I was grateful Scott was doing all the work.

The Touring class was populated with a handful of serious sports car (Lotus Exige S, Porsche Carrera 4S, Roush Supercharged Mustang) with rally computers. If you ask me, that is the most pussy way to run the event and how anyone who enters that way doesn’t arrive precisely on time at every stage is beyond me. What many others do, however, is show up in classic machinery running 100% period correct, many without any rally computer whatsoever. These guys have to WORK to make their average speeds, and this must be a truly exhilirating way to run the Touring event. More power to them.

When we first started running Touring, we agreed that we would try a handful of stages to see how well we would do if we had entered the competition for real. Being that we’re racers at heart, this causes a pretty significant conflict. On one hand we are COMPETITORS who absolutely MUST win at any event we enter. On the other hand, the high speed stages would be OH SO TEMPTING to bomb at top speed if only to see what we could do with this big maroon pig.

On the first stage of Leg 3, an extremely fun roller coaster of a road out to the small village of Brigus, I got about a half a kilometer into the stage at Touring speed before I gave up. I looked at Scott, said “this blows”, and proceed to floor it. By the rules of the class we cannot exceed the speed limit, but most sane people would not try to push a Chevy Impala at the posted speed limit on these insanely twisty roads. The first time we got REALLY LIGHT over a blind crest, and the first time I simply HAD to left foot brake on a sweeper to make sure we stayed on the road, or the first time I saw a marshall slack-jawed and staring at this unlikely car flying by… all worth it.

I got a scolding from the organizers (as I suspected I might) and was told to NOT PASS anymore cars on the stages and interfere with their competition (I passed 5). Though I did not actually cause anyone to slow, and though I passed 3 cars running nose to tail (2 of those 3 were VERY wrong on what time they needed to arrive), I completely understood and made sure to get some open road on any future stages I did that on.

So how did we do? Suffice it to say that if we had entered the competition for real, a rental car probably would have won Touring unequipped. In one particularly hairy tight town stage on Leg 5, we managed to limit our penalties to 9 seconds of lateness (I’m still unsure how I ran through there that fast with this barge) in a 2-minute stage, while the class leader in a race-prepped Mazda3 took 13 seconds! At the next stage, my co-driver was floored at how fast we ran it and so started asking how others did. The Mazda driver proceeded to rant that the only way anyone could have gone faster was if they “were in a Subaru with all wheel drive and traction control!”. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that we blew him away in front wheel drive heap that was a few years old and clearly past it’s sell-by date!

One of the few pleasures that came from running the Touring event is that the pressure was completely off. We were wound up pretty tight trying to compete with the fast cars in Modern, and it wasn’t apparent just how stressed we were until the day after the Evo blew up on us. Not only were we now doing what we love — flooging someone else’s car at unlikely speeds for something so incapable — but we just didn’t care about results. We ran the radio at full blast on each stage, blew off all of our mistakes, and belly laughed the ENTIRE time. I honestly have not laughed as hard or as long as I have in my life than when we were on the road in the Impala.

With the pressure off, we also got to truly enjoy the gorgeous scenery of Newfoundland. I carried my camera the entire time of the event in the cupholder of the rental (that would be EXTREMELY dangerous in a Targa car) and got to take pictures of the lovely places we visited. Some of those shots are below this post.

And so we finished Targa Newfoundland 2008 (my 5th finishers medallion and Scott’s 4th) behind the wheel of a car as different from the monster we entered in as was possible, but we still managed to have a blast. In fact, I would argue that we might have had the most fun of anyone entered in the field.

Though the trophy for this went to a very deserving class Mini team who had to work their butts off to keep their car running, in my book we exhibited the true “Spirit of Targa”. At least the spirit of young hooligans like us.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Targa NFLD 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.