Targa Newfoundland 2009

Confederation Park in St. John's was set up as a spectator special stage starting here. This one wasn't scored and didn't count for anything other than practice and entertainment value. We could go as often as we liked and as fast or slow as we liked. Of course everyone pushed as hard as possible.

We were warned to watch out for a "bump" crossing the lane in front of the Confed Buildings, where a raised walkway crosses the lane. We made sure to slow right down for that on our first run. The spectators called us wusses for that, so we went a little quicker on our second pass. A little too quick as it turns out.

It's interesting to see what a huge difference a bit of experience makes. On this, our first run, we're rather tentative preferring to take it easy. It's a long week, this demonstration run counts for nothing, so why risk damaging the car? We did the stage in 1 minute 57.5 seconds (1:57.5).

Confederation Park 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wlbgLQEKP0
=======

On our second run I felt comfortable pushing a bit harder. We were 9 seconds faster with a time of 1:48.5.

Early on there is a section of roadway that is shaved down in preparation for being re-paved. On our first slow pass I had noticed and avoided a raised manhole cover sticking up out of the pavement. The sharp edge of the cover is painted yellow so it's easy to see. On this second pass, at slightly higher speed, I had to change my line a bit through the jog left where we cross the median into the other lane, and damn, there was a second manhole cover that I hadn't noticed before. I smacked that one hard. Luckily there was no damage.

Then I didn't slow quite enough for the bump over the raised walkway. Whoa that thing is evil! It launched us hard with all four wheels off the ground!!

Click on this image for an animated view.


We got some applause for that, but it was really dumb. What if we had ripped the oil pan off the engine? Prologue day counts for nothing. We still have five days of competition to go. Don't be stupid now.

Confederation Park 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxT7QKbW4cI
=======

We weren't quite as extreme as these guys though...



Our 3rd pass was our quickest with a time of 1:46.6, almost 11 seconds quicker than on our first pass. Now I knew to avoid to the manhole covers and to brake hard before the jump, but to give 'er everywhere else. Practice makes a huge difference. Better lines, more aggressive in the corners and under braking.

If you've run the same stages before in previous years it gives you a huge advantage over novice teams who are running the stages blind for the first time.

Confederation Park 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBkZbH4BmJk
=======


My 4th run was a Charity Run, carrying a paying customer. Media and local celebrities pay for a ride-along, with the proceeds going to charity.

Even though I was taking it relatively easy, our time of 1:49.4 was still 8 seconds quicker than on our first tentative run. It is a challenge to push all out on your first blind run with no practice. However, if you plan on completing all five days of Targa Newfoundland you really do need to keep a healthy safety margin and NOT push 100% on every stage.

Confederation Park 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxtFAozA-tI

Quote
Earendil
Ferd, if I may add a request to the usual event write-up, could we get a brief description of the car, and what you did to it? Or have you posted such information in another forum I could take a gander at?

I bought the car in March for US$7500 from "alexd" on r3vlimited.

See this thread for details.

It needed a transmission. I found a used one for $100. Otherwise, it's pretty much untouched from when I bought it.

I enlisted my wife, Chris, and my mom to come with us on the trip in a second car, our Subaru Ouback, to act as our "support crew". It is really handy to have a second car, because at the end of each day the rally car is put on display and locked up overnight in the local arena. It's nice to have a second car available for going back and forth to dinner and the hotel etc.

The idea was that Chris and my mom would chase us around all week, carrying our spare parts and tools, meeting us at all the designated Service Points in case we needed any hasty repairs or whatever.

Luckily we arrived in St John's a couple of days early and had plenty of time to relax and enjoy the warm sunny weather and do our sight-seeing. Unfortunately, having spent several nights camped in the same hotel rooms in St John's, we had accumulated more "stuff" like groceries, souvenirs, and other junk. When it came time to consolidate all our "stuff" from the two cars into just one car, and still have enough room left over to carry four people back and forth from arenas to hotel rooms, we soon realized that we had WAY too much "stuff".

Also lucky, I spent some time Sunday night trying to re-organize all this accumulated crap into the back of the Subaru Outback in such a manner that I might actually be able to access our tools or spares if ever we did need them in an emergency. We kept only our toothbrush kits with us overnight in the hotel, in preparation for a very early Monday morning check-out and departure to begin our week of competition.

I say lucky because, when the wake-up alarm went off at 5:30 Monday morning, I peeked out the window and saw... nothing. It was still pitch black outside, and there was a hurricane passing through with howling winds and horizontal pounding rain. It was raining so hard I could barely see the car parked right outside our hotel room window! Just perfect.

In the few minutes it took us to dash outside and jump in the Subaru, we were all soaked to the skin. Thankfully I had packed the car the night before. Then we had to wait several more minutes idling in the parking lot because all the windows fogged up so bad we couldn't see anything at all. Chris wanted to stop for breakfast on the way, or at least find a Tim Hortons somewhere. The whole time Christoph was anxiously checking his watch, with his carefully planned schedule already completely shot.

Forget breakfast! We have to get to the arena NOW. The girls dropped us off in the parking lot, promising to meet us later in Placentia, while we dashed inside, again soaked to the bone.

We did the mandatory morning breathalyzer test, then hopped in the BMW and hit the road for the long hour and a half transit from St John's to Argentia. This was probably the scariest drive of the entire week. The rain and wind was amazing!

We were riding in relative comfort in our heated and enclosed BMW, whereas other crews in track-prepared race cars were riding with NO side windows, just window-nets! Yeesh.

Day 1 - Argentia 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge9GxF1NEFE

We safely made our start time in Argentia only to find the stage delayed because the stage crew was having difficulty tying down their equipment. All their sign boards kept flying away...

The Argentia stage is run on the grounds of an old military base. Some of these "roads" are obviously no longer maintained. I'll bet the potholes were an eye-opener to all the teams in their fancy-schmancy race cars with stiff suspensions and low profile tires.

For us in the GT category, Argentia was run at a very easy pace. Still, as our first real stage of the event, it was nice to start with a simple and slow one.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2009 07:04AM by Ferdinand.

Day 1 - Stage 2 - Placentia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hnm4VRq7mw

From Argentia, we go straight across the street to the start of the Placentia stage. This stage was also relatively easy, with an average speed of only 53 km/h. But it's only easy on the straightaways. Then it goes into a whole series of acute left, acute right, etc. and it suddenly becomes much harder to maintain the speed.

There was some confusion at the finish line o this stage. There are supposed to be yellow "Finish Ahead" signs, then the red "Flying Finish" boards, and finally another set of red boards marking the "Finish" where we slow to read the clock displaying our time.

The finish for the Placentia stage should have been located in the same spot as when I did this five years ago with my brother driving. And we screwed it up then, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG42kNhD054.

Placentia was run later in the week then, and we had to do an average speed of 60 km/h. That was a bit tougher, and the end of the stage was quite a bit busier back then. We were already late in the dash to the finish line, then backed off crossing the yellow boards only to realize the actual finish wasn't until much further around the corner yet, at the red boards. d'oh.

So this time, with me driving, I was going to make sure not to back off early at the yellow boards, but continue at speed until reaching the actual flying finish at the red boards after the corner. Imagine my surprise when there were no yellow boards. Instead, where the yellow boards should have been, there were the flying finish red boards before the corner. Whoa!

Then around the corner, where the flying finish was supposed to be, there were the yellow "Finish Ahead" signs. Huh?

By then we had already slowed down. So, at which boards were they actually measuring our finish time?

Oh well, time for a rest. We get breakfast here, and Chris and my mom met us as planned. So far so good.

But we nearly had a mutiny in the "support crew". They did not at all enjoy the long scary early morning drive from St John's to Placentia in the monsoon conditions, and they really weren't looking forward to the even longer drive to the various service points between here and Gander. They suggested that after the next Argentia stage, they could instead have Christoph drive the Subaru "support car" on the long transit up to the following Osprey Trail stage.

Um, hang on, wait a sec. "Competition Crew" vs. "Support Crew". I need my navigator to navigate us to the next stage on time. He can't be jumping back and forth between cars.

Fortunately, after a good breakfast, the weather cleared up a bit and things didn't look quite as grim anymore and the mutiny was narrowly avoided.

Day 1 - Stage 3 - Argentia 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2Orcswf2jI

The second Argentia stage was run a bit quicker, at something like 54 km/h. It was still very easy.

I'm glad we got these ones out of the way, because they're relatively boring compared to the next days'.

I don't want to turn you off thinking all the videos are this boring. Day-1 is designed to be easy.

Day 1 - Stage 4 - Osprey Trail West: [www.youtube.com]

Another uneventful stage, starting here.

Day 1 - Stage 6 - Port Blandford: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwBdZAa1gA

Stage 5, Adeytown, was no longer on the schedule. So we went straight to Stage 6, Port Blandford.

We thought we were right on schedule here, only to cross the line 2 seconds late. Not really sure why. But it was a bit disconcerting, considering that by the end of the week we would need to be within +/- 3 seconds everywhere.

Day 1 - Stage 7 - Eastport 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEZQ8WIvaPE

"Grey skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face."

Things were pretty grim this morning, what with the monsoon weather and our reluctant support crew. But now it's all sunny skies again.

The ladies met us for lunch in Eastport after these two stages. Big relief. They're having a good time now and really getting into it.

Meanwhile we're still trying to figure out why we're a couple of seconds off in our timing. It's really not an issue on Day-1 when we still have a +/- 30 second window to play within. But it's bothersome nonetheless.

Day 1 - Stage 8 - Eastport 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhhc7a7f9Gg

We watched all of the Targa cars launching into the stage. That was cool.

Chris and my mom were watching from the first Tee-Right into the stage and caught us on video.

After this second pass on the Eastport stage we had lunch at the Legion Hall. Afterwards we had a free transit to Gander, so Christoph got to chauffeur his mom in the Subaru after all, while my mom rode with me in the BMW.

In Gander we went through the car wash, then parked the BMW in the arena for the car show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1oW93-FnJ8

Good car. No problems at all. Just lock the doors, and head for the hotel.

At the end of Day-1, ten GT teams still had zero penalties but four teams collected penalties.

Day-1 was (thankfully) uneventful for us. The first day is not intended to be difficult. However, it would be bad Karma to suggest it was easy. The potential for making mistakes is always there, as we would find out for ourselves soon enough on Day-2...

Day 2 - Stage 1 - Appleton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6taUZItVQFw

Day 2 was gorgeous and sunny, and challenging.

On Day-2 our allowable time window tightens up a bit to +/- 20 seconds. That's still a very generous window, but our goal was to be as close to zero as possible at all time controls. Take advantage of all the "easy" stages to practise for the harder stages to come.

And, damn, we nearly screwed it all up and almost took a penalty today.

Heading west from Gander, the first stage of the day was Appleton.

Although Appleton was supposed to be an "easy" stage, with no ITCs, we still couldn't manage to cross the finish line exactly on time. We were 2 seconds early. That's easily within our allowed +/- 20 second window, so nothing to be concerned about. But we're still worried about how we're going to ensure that we stay within a +/3 second window on Day-5.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/03/2009 04:48PM by Ferdinand.

Day 2 - Stage 2 - Bobby's Cove: [www.youtube.com]

While we were running the Appleton stage, our "support crew" scampered ahead to meet us in Point Leamington at the start of Stage 2, Bobby's Cove.

They were there to offer "support" in the way of smiles, cheers, and thumbs up, while filming us launching from the start line. As we did the run out to the end of the road in Pleasantview, and back, they boogeyed up the other road before it closed in order to meet us up North at the popular lunch stop in Leading Tickles.

The Bobby's Cove stage went well for us. We zeroed this one spot on. But this stage went badly wrong for one of the Subaru Targa teams.

About 4:20 into our video, there's a very long right corner. It was no big deal for us as we're going at a relatively sedate speed. But the Subaru ran out of road on the exit of this corner, fell off into the ditch, and rolled multiple times. It's absolutely astounding what a comprehensively spectacular job they did of trashing that car. Even more amazing though is the fact that there were no serious injuries other than a broken wrist suffered by the co-driver when he, reportedly, punched himself in the helmet.

The true hero of this incident is Maxime Vadeboncoeur, another fellow from the Ottawa club, who calmly and assertively took control of the situation, sending his own driver ahead to the finish to report to the next radio location, while Max ran back down the road to set up a warning triangle, and assessed and stablized the condition of the crashed driver/co-driver while awaiting the arrival of the emergency crews.

Max deserves a medal for the way he handled that.

Day 2 - Stage 3 - Pleasantview 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KbuRB00slo

This is the same stage as Bobby's Cove, but run the other direction starting from Pleasantview.

It was another run with no problems whatsoever. It's very dangerous to become complacent though. That inevitably results in silly screwups...

Day 2 - Stage 4 - Point Leamington to Leading Tickles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWaem-vtLgQ

The stage up to Leading Tickles and back is the longest of the week. It's about 20 minutes long for us, too long to fit into a 10-minute YouTube clip. You'll be happy to hear I edited half of it out. Happy because it's dead boring otherwise.

We start in Point Leamington with a run through some tight sections at 64 km/h average. Then we hit the open highway to Leading Tickles doing 91 km/h all the way, until it gets busy once more through Leading Tickles to the finish.

The Targa cars go WAAAAAAAAAY faster than us on this stage. It would be fun to see their in-car video instead. For us, as always, the challenge is to stay exactly on schedule over the entire length of the stage. Although the speed seems dead slow, this is actually one of the most challenging stages for the GT category because of its long length.

There are very few landmarks along this route. That makes it difficult to confirm your odometer is still accurate. You may think you're perfectly on time according to the distance shown on your odometer but, depending on the odo's accuracy, you may in reality be several seconds away from where you think you should be.

Over a long distance like this, it can make a significant cumulative difference whether you always stay in the right lane, or whether you take a shorter distance cutting corners through the left lane.

Late in the stage, when we finally figured out that we had drifted nearly 10 seconds off schedule, Christoph punched an odo and timing correction into the rally computer. Except he went the wrong way, adding time when he should have subtracted time, or whatever. We quickly realized that, and it was easily re-corrected.

But our plan had been to enter as early as possible, at the front end of our allowable time window, into the tight busy end section of this stage. Instead, by the time we had fumbled our way through the necessary timing corrections, we really had to hustle through Leading Tickles to make our finish time.

I love the Leading Tickles lunch stop!

Chris and my mom, our support crew, got there early enough to have a look around and enjoy the scenery before we arrived. They were in good shape, excited to see us, took lots of photos, listened to our stories, provided hugs and encouragement, and otherwise did a great job providing us with "support".

We enjoyed the moose stew and other delicacies before heading out for the return run down the long Leading Tickles stage.

The ladies would be stuck here until all the Targa cars had left, before the road is re-opened. They would have to wait until then before driving straight back an hour and a half to Gander to find a good spot to watch the Gander stage, while we did a second pass on the Bobby's Cove and Pleasantview stage.

Unfortunately the long Leading Tickles stage had to be cancelled, and run as a transit instead, after radio communications broke down between the start and finish.

Before I get to the sad mess we made of the second Bobby's Cove stage, first a word or two about "average speed".

We are assigned an average speed target for each stage, or sometimes several different average speed targets for different portions within each stage.

A fairly quick average speed of 90+km/h is relatively easy to maintain if the road is straight and long. A comparatively slow average speed of 60 km/h can be hellishly difficult to achieve if there are never any straightaways long enough to reach that speed.

Another important thing to realize is, if let's say the target is an average speed of 60 km/h, it does not mean that you simply accelerate from a standstill to 60 and then hold 60 from there on. The target is an "average" speed. It would take you until infinity to reach an "average" of 60 that way.

For all the time you spend driving below 60 km/h, i.e. accelerating from a standstill or slowing for tight corners, you need to spend a correspondingly similar amount of time driving above 60 km/h in order to hold the average at 60.

Starting from a standstill, the goal always is to accelerate to as high a speed as physically and legally possible, as soon as possible, in order to take the shortest amount of time possible to reach your target average speed, in case Ross has hidden a surprise ITC around the very first corner from the start line. Only once you've attained the correct required average speed can you slow down and set the cruise control to hold that exact speed for the remainder of the stage.

Of course that's never possible, as you usually still have to slow for hairpins and whatnot throughout the stage. But in theory that's the goal.

Our first pass on the Bobby's Cove stage was a relatively simple run on a smooth flowing road with one constant average speed target throughout. On this second pass, Bobby's Cove Long, we finish at a similar pace using the exact same stage as before. However, this time we start the stage in a short town section running at "only" 62 km/h.

Looking at a map beforehand, we realized that 62 km/h was going to be very tough to achieve, as there are no long straights and several tricky tight turns.

We were totally focused on pushing as hard as possible through here, fully expecting Ross to have placed an ITC at the exit of this first tough section, before we change speed up to 90 km/h on the easy stuff out on the rest of Bobby's Cove.

We actually made the speed by the end of the tough section, feeling quite pleased with ourselves, then were disappointed to discover there was no ITC at the corner where the speed changes. Well damn.

Unfortunately for us, in the sudden mood swing from the elation of having actually reached the corner on time, to the disappointment of not finding the expected ITC there, we completely forgot to switch the rally computer over to the new speed setting. D'oh!

Everything nearly went into the toilet from there on...

This next video of the Bobby's Cove Long stage turns out to be one of the most interesting of the entire week. It is truly embarrassing. Even though it's painful to watch, it is educational.

The Grand Touring Category, like any normal TSD rally, actually is easy.

You don't need to be able to drive like Frank Sprongl. The pace is not that tough. You don't need to have a car like Steve Millen's. Any street-legal car will do. You don't need an expensive rally computer. Our toughest competitors, winners the two last years, were running unequipped. You don't need to be a mathematician to calculate the times. Anyone with a calculator and half a brain can figure this stuff out.

If you've watched our videos so far, I'm sure you will have noticed that it doesn't appear all that difficult. That's the beauty of the Grand Touring Category. It's open to anyone and it's not difficult. Anyone can do this. When things are running smoothly and everything's going according to plan, it really is dead simple.

The true test however, like in real life, is how well you cope under pressure when something unexpected happens.

Being first on the scene of a potentially serious car wreck, are you going to handle it as competently and confidently as Maxime did? Flying your Airbus on just another routine flight, when suddenly a flock of geese are ingested by your jet engines and both quit, are you going react as professionally as Captain "Sully" Sullenberger did? He calmly declared an emergency, realized the powerless plane could not glide far enough to reach any of the many nearby airports, then avoided certain catastrophe by gliding his plane to a dead-stick ditching in the middle of the Hudson River, saving everyone's life. You can't practise stuff like that.

It pains me deeply to admit that I'm not like those people. When faced with a trivial minor crisis of our own, Christoph and I did not cope well with the challenge.

Christoph forgot to switch the speed setting on our rally computer. No big deal. It happens. There are a hundred different ways we could have easily recovered from that. In fact, there was no actual recovery even required. I knew we were supposed to be averaging 90 km/h from that point on. I was already doing 90 when I first noticed the computer was still incorrectly set to 62. Had I simply continued on at 90 km/h we would have had no problem reaching the finish line on our correct time. On Day-2 we're still allowed a generous time window of +/- 20 seconds. It's easy.

Instead, we panicked and manufactured our own crisis out of nothing at all.

The challenge in the Grand Touring Category is not only in reaching the finish line on time. We need to be on time everywhere within the stage too, in case we stumble across a hidden ITC along the way. We could no longer rely on our ALFA to tell us whether we were on time. I'm sure there is a proper procedure for resetting the computer to correct the problem. But we had not practised that process, and if you start pushing buttons blindly you're only going to screw it up even worse.

As a backup, in anticipation of something like this happening, Christoph had cleverly pre-calculated arrival times at select landmarks for each stage. But not for this stage.

Christoph knows how to do the calculations for such time marks. He's already done it for most of the other stages. It's not at all difficult to do. However, in a crisis like this, under pressure, his brain froze up completely.

Poor Christoph. It's not his fault. I'm sure he inherited that gene from me.

I suffered the exact same brain cramp when navigating for my brother back in 2004. I screwed up on the Garnish-FrenchmansCove stage back then. Coincidentally, this is the same stage where Craig & Ian did their own famous dead-stick landing, ditching their Porsche 944 into the Garnish harbour. In our case, my brother and I knew we were too slow coming out of the tight town section of Garnish. I then wasted the next four minutes of relatively easy cruising, babbling nonsense, unable to calculate a correct speed to the finish, then telling my brother to slow down because we were 20 seconds early, when in fact we were really 20 seconds late, only to realize my error as we were nearing the finish, far too late for my brother to do anything about it. I felt like such a moron.

That's the true test of the Grand Touring Category. It's best to avoid making mistakes altogether. But how you recover from mistakes after they're made, and there will be mistakes made, that's the real test. And we failed miserably at that.

I've watched this video many times already, and each time I see more ways in which this was pretty much all my fault. Yes, the initial mistake was made by Christoph. But nothing I did or said from there on helped in any way. I should have just shut my mouth and concentrated on my job of driving exactly 90 km/h, leaving Christoph to figure out a solution. He would have had it solved on his own much quicker that way. He's no dummy, that kid. But my "helpful" suggestions only distracted and confused him more.

It took us three and half minutes of fumbling and stumbling until, a mere 30 seconds from the finish, we arrived at a solution. Poor Christoph, you can hear it in his voice as he's doing the countdown to the finish line, he was almost in tears of frustration thinking he'd let the team down and we were about to get nailed with our first penalty points. It was just dumb luck that we made it across the line within our allowed time window to escape with another zero.

Day 2 - Stage 6 - Bobby's Cove Long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a09jymXuqg

Day 2 - Stage 7 - Pleasantview2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_qbsh0VlEA

Our confidence took a beating on that last one. So we're a bit more subdued going into the return run over the same road, but without the tight town section at the end.

Otherwise, no problems with this one.

From here, it's the long transit back to Gander, during which Christoph constructively used the time to beaver away at his notes.

Up next, the first really challenging stage of the week through the in-town subdivisions of Gander.

Day 2 - Stage 8 - Gander: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUaoO-BPyFE

The Gander stage is amazing! Check out this map route. It's really busy.

There are very few straightaways long enough to get up to the required speed. We had to push pretty hard on this stage.

Again, Ross was devious in his ITC placements. Once we got into a rhythm, push hard, rev that engine, brake hard, turn square left or square right, rinse, repeat, there'd suddenly be one straightaway just a little longer than the others. Push, push, push, trying to keep up and, whoa, suddenly we'd find ourselves ahead of schedule and needing to slow down. And right there is where Ross puts his ITC trying to catch teams coming in too hot and early.

We weren't pushing at 100% by any means, certainly not on the longer straights where we were forced to lift to avoid being too early. But it was better than 80% effort most of the way on this one, our first "brisk" stage of the week. This is a great stage.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/03/2009 07:42PM by Ferdinand.

Day 2 - Gander Car Wash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wcdlE0mSZQ

From the hot Gander stage, straight into the car wash, then parked in the arena overnight for the car show.

Good car.

"Ridden hard, put away wet."

Check this out!

In stark contrast to our pedestrian GT pace through the Gander stage, here's what it looks like from the onboard camera of Steve Millen's Nissan GTR in the Open-Class Targa Category.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54Dd8TNHzuI

It sure looks like that car has bags of understeer. But, OMG, it goes like a scalded cat in a straight line!

At the end of Day-2 there were still eight GT teams tied with zero penalties. But today, on Day-3, it's starts getting tough. Only three GT teams survive this day with zeroes still intact.

On Day-3 the allowable time window shrinks to +/- 10 seconds and small errors become more costly.

Day 3 - Stage 1 - Davidsville: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcQ7SDJqiLs

Davidsville, the first stage of the day, started under grey overcast skies and wet roads.

At the stage start they displayed a board declaring this stage as Road Condition 2, meaning the road is wet. In Grand Touring we get two different target speeds for each stage, one for Condition-1 (dry), and another slower speed for either Condition-2 (wet) or Condition-3 (pouring rain and standing water).

For the GT category, this undemanding first stage was to be run at 89.1 km/h if dry, or 84.1 km/h when wet. :o

In comparison, on this stage, the fastest Open class Targa cars are aiming for an average speed of 130.9 km/h in dry Condition-1, 123.2 km/h in wet Condition-2, or 117.0 km/h in Condition-3 pouring rain!

Day 3 - Stage 2 - Frederickton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2rfz-RAlJM

For a little extra treat, we got to transit over a 7 km length of gravel road. Jane and Bruce, with their rally suspension equipped Subaru, said, "Yeeha, finally a real rally road!" They blasted through at a healthy pace. We took it a little slower.

The route instructions said there were an extra 5 minutes provided for teams to stop before the gravel, to allow their sticky R-compound tires to cool before heading onto the gravel. We didn't need to bother with that, but with our relatively slow pace on the rough road, we only just barely made our start time at the next stage. I can't imagine how any of the stiffly-sprung, low ground clearance, all-out race cars made their start times, if they actually stopped for 5 minutes beforehand.

Stage 2 was a little more complicated.

First off, there was no board at the start line declaring a Road Condition. In the absence of a board, we are supposed to assume it is Road Condition-1. The road appeared to be dry but, just to be safe, we asked the start line crew and they confirmed that it actually was Condition-1. Several other teams made the mistake of continuing at Condition-2 speeds.

The stage starts at 74 km/h avg, switches to 60 km/h, then goes to 88.9 km/h to the finish.

Everything seemed to be under control, we're cruising along right on time, until about 3:45 into the video Christoph suddenly announced that we were either a whole minute too early, or too late, or too something, oh bugger...

Wait a sec. I think I've seen this movie. Except last time the confusion arose because Christoph forgot to switch speed settings on the rally computer. I know he switched it all correctly this time. I know I've been doing the correct speeds all along. How could we be off by a minute now?

I'm not going to panic this time, just carry on at this speed until he figures it out.

It turns out he had miscalculated his timing point and everything was fine.

However, our computer timing was off again by several seconds at the finish line. It indicated that we crossed the line 4 seconds too early, whereas Christoph's stopwatch countdown had us crossing the line 1 second late.

Our odo calibration is off by a tiny bit, and this makes the computer believe we've come further than we actually have, whereas in reality we should already have been 3 seconds further down the road.

Quote
Ferdinand
The Grand Touring Category, like any normal TSD rally, actually is easy...

If you've watched our videos so far, I'm sure you will have noticed that it doesn't appear all that difficult. That's the beauty of the Grand Touring Category. It's open to anyone and it's not difficult.

You know that bit there where I said it's easy, and not difficult? Well...

I lied.

Sometimes it's not at all easy. It can be quite difficult.

This stage was a bitch. Only four GT teams got a zero on this one.

We came oh-so-close to not making it on time.

Day 3 - Stage 3 - Musgrave Harbour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGPb-D7XUc

*grabs popcorn and sits down*

Quote
Ferdinand
I lied.

Sometimes it's not at all easy. It can be quite difficult.

This stage was a bitch. Only four GT teams got a zero on this one.

We came oh-so-close to not making it on time.

Day 3 - Stage 3 - Musgrave Harbour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdGPb-D7XUc

In response to your written comments at the end...
After crossing the finish line you verbally said "That was tough" in a seemingly monotone bored voice. So while lifting your partner up is admirable, and perhaps his nerves are made of tougher stuff, do give yourself some credit :-)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1989 - E30 - M20 - Manual. Approximately 270,000 miles
2000 - E46 - M52TUB28 - Manual. Approximately 110,000 miles

Quote
Earendil
After crossing the finish line you verbally said "That was tough" in a seemingly monotone bored voice.

It was Christoph, my son, who said in a monotone bored voice, "That was tough." I was still busy trying to catch my breath.

Our target speed of 89 km/h was quite "brisk", but certainly not impossible. As always though, what makes it tough for us GT competitors is that we cannot go much faster than that on the few straight sections to put time in the bank. We cannot run ahead of our allowed +/- 10 second window without risking an early penalty at a well-hidden ITC.

We knew that it would be impossibe to maintain an 89 km/h around the tight U-shaped driveway in front of the school. So we aimed to be as early as possible starting into the driveway.

The school driveway is an ideal location in which to hide an Intermediate Time Control. You'd catch those teams trying to cheat coming in too early, and you'd catch those other teams who would be slow because they hadn't realized yet that it's impossible to hold 89 km/h through there. Naturally, being such an obvious location, there was no ITC there. Well damn!

Five years ago, when I ran this same stage in the opposite direction with my brother, there was a surprise ITC hidden behind a bush right in front of the school. At 2:00 into this video, you can see the yellow ITC board on the right as I say, "That's nasty."

Five years ago we only had to do an average speed of 78 km/h on this stage. But the road has been re-paved since then and is much smoother now, hence the significantly faster 89 km/h target speed. The school driveway however has not been re-paved. It is nasty bumpy and has an evil frost heave across the road near its exit.

I'm so glad we decided to use my old stock 14" rims instead of the expensive 15" BBS rims that came with this car. With their low profile 15" tires, I'm sure we would have smashed the BBS rims over this "bump". Wha-Bam! That hurt.

Exiting the school driveway, we Tee-Right back onto the main road. Worried that both front tires may have gone flat over that wicked bump, I took it easy into the Tee-Right. And just like that, now we're 8 seconds behind schedule. That's still within our +/- 10-sec window, but we know the road gets tougher from here on.

I managed to make up 5 seconds, but every time I hesitated over a blind crest, or lifted for a corner that I couldn't see far enough around, time slipped away again. The 18-wheeler tractor trailer parked outside of a hard-right near the end kind of freaked me out too.

Still, I didn't realize quite how late we were until Christoph started his countdown to the finish. Crap, he hit zero already as we were passing the yellow "Finish Ahead" boards. There's still an acute Tee-Right and a 100 metre dash to go!

Here's a Google Map of the route. The school driveway, not shown, is at the middle dot. The last Tee-Right, at "Doting Cove", is just before the finish at "B". You can see on the map that it's a tight corner. I didn't realize just how tight that was until we got into it.

I went into that last corner a little too hot, and was surprised when the ABS kicked in. For a bad moment there, I thought we might yet end up in the ditch straight across the intersection. I grabbed the handbrake to get the car turned in, then stood on the gas to the finish. Phew. We just barely made it.

Four GT teams zeroed this stage.

The Targa teams all have much tougher target times than us. We "only" had to make an average of 89 km/h. The fastest Open-Class Targa cars had to achieve 124.9 km/h! Even the slowest Targa category had a target speed of 99.7 km/h.

Our target speed of 89.0 km/h over the stage distance of 5.76 km works out to an Elapsed Time of 03:53.
The fastest Open-Class target of 124.9 km/h works out to an ET of 02:46. Yikes.
The slowest Targa Class speed of 99.7, gives an ET of 03:28.

None, not one, not a single Targa Category team made their time on this stage. The closest anyone got was the eventual overall winning team of Roy Hopkins & Adrienne Hughes in their BMW 2002, whose target speed was 110.3 km/h, giving an ET of 03:08. They only missed by 2 seconds.

Quote
Earendil
After crossing the finish line [Christoph] said "That was tough" in a seemingly monotone bored voice.

Coincidentally, those were the exact same words used by Jane & Bruce Leonard as they crossed the line 8 econds too late, taking their first penalty of the week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpSJCJgzloY

Day 3 - Stage 4 - New-Wes-Valley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqRXJ0jmmVE

After the adrenaline rush of Musgrave Harbour, our pace on the much-shortened New-Wes-Valley stage felt a lot slower. Nothing exciting here.

The highlight of this stage, one of the best of the entire week, was passsing the Memorial Academy school on the transit to the next stop. All the school kids were lined up in their chairs out in the parking lot waiting for the Targa cars to pass by, at which point they erupted into loud cheers and waves. That was really cool. There's a photo on Jim Kenzie's blog, here.

Following the New-Wes-Valley stage, we headed to the Barbour Living Heritage Village for a great lunch stop.

Day 3 - Stage 5 - Greenspond: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1vyO324z-A

Greenspond is a classic. It's a short stage that starts and finishes with relatively easy straight sections, but in between it has incredibly narrow, steep, uphill, downhill, tight, hairpins, etc. And it's beautifully scenic.



My memory of this stage, from five years ago, was that the start and finish sections were dead easy. In the tight stuff in the middle though, it was really difficult to maintain a proper average speed through there. So we did need to push pretty hard to keep up.

This year however, Ross played a nasty trick on the Grand Touring Category.

Rather than asking for an impossibly quick pace through the difficult tight section, Ross instead imposed an excruciatingly slooooooooooow pace of only 36.7 km/h. This was painful.

It's a legitimate challenge though. Driving this slowly is frustrating, but it's not at all easy. It's tough to accurately maintain such a slow pace while staying within your window the whole time. Only four GT teams zeroed this one. The other eleven of fifteen teams incurred a penalty, getting nabbed early at the ITC halfway through the stage.

Back in 2004, our target speed was 55.0 km/h http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLz-qgYmyvs

This year, the Open Class Targa cars were shooting for an average speed of 86.8 km/h.