Written by:Steve Hart
9/15/2009 6:47 PM 

I will start with the last ride of the day. I Started about 6:30 pm and it was a 7.34 Km run through the Gander Community Center. This is a fairly new (maybe 10-15 year old) residential development. There were 19 ninety degree right and left turns through this neighborhood and and the average speed for our division was 60 Kph. The time that we had to complete this section was 6 minutes and 53 seconds. Tom was driving and he took off like a bat. We needed to get up to average speed and maintain it throughout the course. my job was to always keep relaying the speed to Tom as he could only watch the road and concentrate on keeping the car in the road. He did a masterful job of getting to and maintaining our speed on a very challenging course. I could not imagine going any faster but there were cars in the targa division that had a average speed 25 kilometers higher. Tom finished the stage three seconds over our target time which was amazing. It was an incredibly fun and adrenalin filled stage and a great way to end the day. I drove the first four stages in the morning and we had a 20 second time window for all the stages. Tom did the four stages in the afternoon. We did well today except for one stage we were right on with our time. The one stage we had incorrectly put down the wrong average speed and time of stage on our reference book and realized we had made that mistake when the car behind us caught up. We quickly accelerated and might have still made our time window. We will find out tomorrow when we check  the results.Tomorrow the time window is reduced from 20 to 10 seconds. Thursday it goes to 5 seconds and Friday to 3 seconds. That means that on a stage which could be as high as 15 minutes we have to arrive within 3 seconds or incur a time penalty. One of the coolest parts of the trip are the people who come out to spectate the race. We saw thousands of people who watched.The children ( from age 2-18 ) come out in droves to watch and to get autographs cards from the competitors. We didn't know but most of the drivers had autographed postcards with information about them, their navigator and their car. In one village, Point Leamington, all the village kids missed school so they could watch the Targa race. It's been a thrill meeting them and all the adults who organize our lunches and organize the race. We also ended a race by a mussel farm and they prepared fresh mussels for us to sample. The economy has hurt the mussel business this year so go out and buy a bag of delicious mussels. One of most beautiful areas that we saw (we had lunch there) was a place called leading tickles. The views of the sheer rock cliffs,pebble shoreline, and the bays were breathtaking. There is a beautiful small cemetary overlooking the ocean at leading tickles. Well I am very tired and we start driving at 7:30 am tomorrow. More tomorrow...

Future driver

Leading Tickles lunch where the moose stew was great!

Some local fans

Getting the car washed

Blanford stage

Lunch stage 6

Leading Tickles

Thankfully not our car

Mussel farm

Fan of our car

Some more fans

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Location: BlogsRace for Hearing - Targa Newfoundland 2009