I got a phone call.
Ed: "Want to do Targa Newfoundland in a MINI Cooper S John Cooper Works?"
Me: "F___ yeah."
Ed: "You'll be co-driving with Ron from Motor Trend, but will probably have the chance to drive, too."
Me: "Um, OK then."
After I hang up, I remember my little secret: I get motion sickness. Ironic, yes, and a major bummer for a speed junkie. I put it to good use as a test of cars. If I can make myself sick flogging a given car, it's good. Few make this cut. I procure solutions: chemical anti-nauseant (Bonine), a homeopathic cure (ginger root), and a $60 Reliefband that looks like a watch but zaps nerve meridians or something.
Next stops were the various blogs and websites of past Targa Newfoundland competitors. It's true: pay your entry fee (ranging from $3600-$4500), install a cage, find a sucker to sit in the passenger seat (me), and you can spend six days driving damn near as fast as you can on public roads. Since the FIA is involved, complexity mounts like a horse, but the core remains man, machine, and challenging roads.
Three weeks later, I step into a typically grey Newfoundland afternoon, where I meet our steward for the event and fleet manager of MINI Canada, Kyle. He hands me a custom, snazzy black driving suit with my name embroidered on the waistband and MINI splashed across the chest in improbably large letters. I usually make it a point to have the skuzziest driving suit in the paddock, lest I look like one of those crisp Sparco-suited doctor douche-bags, whose six-figure German sleds get lapped by the entire Rabbit spec series. Well, that and I'm poor. I immediately go to my hotel room and don the suit in a moment of private enjoyment. If a tailored suit makes a more confident businessman, does a bespoke racing suit make a better driver?
Within hours of mingling with locals at the inevitable pub, I learn some important facts. The first is that I love Newfoundlanders. They are rightfully celebrated for their warmth and salacious wit. And tempting as it may be to call them Newfies, it's a pejorative term, to be used only by Newfoundlanders themselves. The second is that Newfoundlanders like the Targa, usually in inverse proportion to the size of their town. While people in St. John, the capital city, are not terribly impressed, natives of small towns like Dildo are all smiles. Over the course of the event, unpaid local volunteers stand in the sun and rain for hours. The third is that Canadian beer is to American beer what C16 is to 87-octane. It took a couple of days to learn the fourth, and most important lesson: a large percentage of trees on the island are spruces, a coniferous evergreen whose resilient wood is ideal for building airplanes, ship masts, and resurfacing cabinets. It will also resurface a MINI Cooper.
Cool morning light filters in from hotel windows facing the container activity in the port. I stumble down to the garage to inspect our ride. The dapper driving suit is a reflection of the entire operation. Our blue and white MINI is an exercise in mechanical goodness. The Sprongle brothers, renowned rally champions and owners of Four Star Motorsports, fabricated a cage that wouldn't make Petter Solberg look twice. Done right, the roof was removed to properly weld and tuck the cage as tightly as possible. It's the little touches, like black film over bars in eyesight so as not to distract, and carbon fiber over oft-rubbed bars, that speak volumes about the level of preparation in this car. Heck, the entire dashboard is covered in synthetic suede to reduce glare. A proper racecar like this is like Christmas for someone used to driving ghetto budget racers, and we later hear the transformation was hammered out in only three weeks-ah, the power of cubic dollars.
Ron and I flew in a couple of days early to take part in an Open Road Motorsports course to prepare us for the event and provide proper certification. I need a serious primer in rally navigation and how to use our car's Terratrip 303 Plus rally computer.
I shortly have a stack of route books in my lap. Without sufficient explanation, the hundreds of pages striped with columns of numbers, decimals and variously shaped arrows are sufficient to make a math-phobe (me) recoil in fright. Evan and Glen, who run the one-day school, break it down quickly, and the sea of numbers unmasks itself as incremental and total distances, and the arrows as tulip diagrams depicting different kinds of turns. Although signs with arrows and colored tape are installed on many portions of the closed courses, there are instructions dictating turns down to the hundredth of a kilometer (five-eighths of a mile), which matters in a tight town stage when there may be six cross streets within 100 yards.
Course books don't advise you of every turn on the course, so the driver has to drive what they see, but when the navigator indicates a turn, it's not just a suggestion. Most crucially, the navigator will advise of potentially tricky or dangerous parts. The learning curve is so steep that I resign myself to the fact that I'll probably navigate for the entire rally-all 1375 miles, a quarter of which are closed-road special stages with the remainder being transit stages run at posted speed limits on open roads.
We sit through a mandatory first aid class and are treated to slides showing severed fingers, partially severed hands, and other loveliness we might enjoy when responding to an accident. We learn CPR and mouth to mouth. We learn how to stabilize peoples' heads, as neck trauma is a distinct possibility in automotive accidents. We are told cautionary tales of people waltzing into the emergency room to find their spinal cord is connected by nary a thread of nerve tissue.
Canadians covet ice enough to coddle it in large, roofed structures. Which is a boon to the Targa organizers, who need not look far for stadiums (be they for hockey or the rough-and-tumble sport of curling) in which to park the cars each night. Registration is bustling despite our early arrival at the first of many rinks. The collection of machinery already gathered is tremendous and diverse, from a factory Subaru STI WRC-clone to a caged Volvo P1800ES wagon, an SR20DET'd Datsun 510, a turbo Integra, and a 650-pony Mustang-58 cars in all.
A quick survey of the parking lot separates Targa regulars from first-timers-most of the 'fast' cars sport taller-than-stock ride heights, to increase travel for the numerous jumps, dips, compressions, potholes, etc., that will otherwise test the resolve of strut tops to remain on the bottom side of the shock towers.
Competing cars are divided into two classes: Touring and Targa. The Touring class is mostly unmodified production cars. While it runs over the same roads as the Targa class, it relies less on power and stick and more on navigator skills-a different, but no less difficult task. For the Targa cars, there is a target time for each stage and each sub-class within the Targa field, with the open class having the toughest times to meet. Basically, you need to drive as fast as you can to 'zero' most of the stages. At no point can you exceed 120mph, and you can never average over 80mph (only an issue on the long, fast stages).
We're registered in open class, battling gazillion-horsepower Mustangs, the other official MINI entry (driven by the same duo that won last year's event), and other impressive machinery. Judging from the MINI win last year, it's not necessarily the fastest car that wins, but the car that is driven fastest-driver confidence is paramount. 500hp won't prevent you from gargling saltwater, but solid brakes and predictable handling will.
In protracted races of attrition like Dakar, Monte Carlo or any Targa, a crash or a mechanical failure are probable outcomes. There are thousands of opportunities for the driver or navigator to make a terminal mistake. And road surfaces in Newfoundland are more evocative of Detroit than a super speedway. The MINI isn't a straight-line rocket, but it's reliable and, most importantly, one of the easiest to drive at stupid speeds.
The PrologueThe prologue is a two-stage warm-up the day before the official start that counts for starting order and nothing else. It's the first time Ron and I get to test our driver/navigator mojo. "Perfect moment to test my $60 anti-puke electronics," I think. Too bad some crotch-biting baggage handler stole the unwrapped unit out of my suitcase while it was 'lost' in transit. After cursing his/her fetid existence, I skip breakfast-figuring liquid vomit will be easier to clean off-and swallow a Bonine.
The largest city in Newfoundland, St. John's, has a population of 172,000. George Street, downtown, has the most bars per square foot anywhere in North America. Due to the closure of nearby Atlantic fisheries in the 90s, most men have to leave town to work-usually in oil fields or other provinces-where they can make up to four times as much money. The result for single men visiting Newfoundland is that there is a surplus of single, charming, attractive, and forward women. There's a direct flight from Newark, New Jersey to St. John's. Given the, um, temptations of the island, we're not surprised to hear that before being allowed onto the stages each morning, all competitors must register a blood alcohol content of 0.00 on a police-issue breathalyzer.
Breathalyzed and belted, we leave for the first prologue run. It's a sweeping trot up the coast, which we handle well, up until the point where I tell Ron to slow down after passing the indicator board announcing the flying finish line a few hundred feet later. My bad. The next stage is a tight run through a residential area with tricky turns aplenty. We do fairly well here too, only risking a curb kiss when a hairpin left really meant a hairpin left.
"Not so bad," I think, after seeing us in the top half of the results, and noting it hadn't occurred to my guts to paint the dashboard.
The shortest car sold in America is well-suited to a competition with roads as wide as an oxcart, whose turns are as regularly cubist as they are organic. As race cars go, our MINI is near stock. Other than wheels, tires, coilovers, and safety equipment, the car is a John Cooper Works edition as driven off the lot. For the extra JCW go, it's a combination of little tweaks (like more boost, coated vanes on the blower, a gasket-matched head and freer-flowing exhaust) that bump horsepower by a healthy 39 to 207bhp and torque by 18lb-ft. It weighs something close to stock, as the entire interior (including sundry NVH material and airbags) was removed to install the cage.
Perhaps the most dynamically effective piece of the JCW kit is its torque-sensing, limited-slip differential. Even so, our car has enough grunt to spin both 225/50 Hankook Ventus Z211 R-compound tires on corner exit. Easily. To help the suspension cope with changing race conditions, Bilstein PSS 9 coilovers with nine-way adjustment are fitted. This suspension was designed for street/track performance; the front perches are screwed to the top of the threads for maximum ride height and travel.
The JCW's front rotors are slightly thicker, 0.7 inches greater in diameter, and wear larger calipers. The rears are balanced with more aggressive pads. In order to fit over and properly cool the larger front brakes, our car requires 16-inch wheels. Robust and light, the Compomotive MOs are hewn from heat-treated magnesium alloy.
Tires will make or break a Targa. We are allowed six tires for the entire event. Using more incurs penalties. The weather in Newfoundland is unpredictable and often wet. There's no such thing as the perfect tire, both blindingly fast in the dry and grounded in the wet. About half the field is running R-compounds, with the remainder running ultra-high performance street, dedicated wet-performance, and, in the less demanding Touring class, all-season tires.
Mini's strategy of fitting its Targa cars with Hankook Ventus tires worked the year before, where Canadian journalist Jim Kenzie and champ navigator Brian Bourbonniere won the open class. The Z211, at full tread depth, is a competent tire in damp/wet conditions, but lack of tread depth creates hovercraft handling in standing water, which frequent hurricanes are happy to provide.
Targa NewfoundlandDay 1, Stage 1Game time. Ron and I arrive early at the first stage. I pull my belts so tight I can't draw a full breath. I run through the checklist:
Discuss tricky parts of stage with Ron.
Start video camera.
Zero odometer at start line.
Zero stopwatch.
There are 10 cars ahead of us, then five, then two. Calm abandons me. The clock times us down and as the last of five yellow lights disappear in succession, the revs come up, we see green and we're off.
"No instructions for two kilometers," I call through the lip mike. The first stretch is long and fast, gentle lefts and rights over slightly rough pavement; we top 100mph. Ron is pushing hard. We are hauling ass, going for it, when perhaps "it" is not what one goes for on the first stage of 37.
I call the turn, a downhill right into uphill left, with the associated "Danger!" for the listed gravel and guardrails and look back down to the route book to prepare the next instruction. I hear the crunch of gravel, and feel the car swing sideways. The next sound I hear is the caruuuump of yielding steel and aluminum.
Silence.
"You okay?" I ask.
"Yeah. You?"
"Yeah. My neck hurts." It feels like Tony Jaa kicked the back of my head.
No wonder they make masts out of this stuff-an eight-inch thick spruce, and the bank it's attached to, has stopped us cold.
Remembering the next racecar will be arriving in 30 seconds, I scramble out to put up the emergency triangle and flash the OK sign included in the route book. The rest of the field whizzes past, most slowing a bit upon seeing the triangle and crumpled car mid-corner. A TV presenter, who of course happens to be filming at that corner, drops the typical 'How do you feel, what happened?' line. How does he think I feel? I yammer something, and he runs off to bug Ron.
A course marshal approaches and says: "Tis be goin' ya stir right turd bye."
I smile and nod. "Shit," I think, "my melon got thumped good." Then I remember where I am. The dialect of Newfoundland English is an amalgam of archaic English, Irish, Gaelic and French, and its accent can be anything from a slight Irish lilt to something totally unintelligible, depending on the region.
With the lecture of partially-severed spinal cords still echoing from the first aid class, we board an ambulance for the hour's ride to the hospital. Stretched out, I close my eyes and the crash sequence loops in my head. And then it replays in Newfoundlander:
Ron was givin 'er bickies. The MINI, she was lif'en up the road, an he was goin' right da wing he was. Da' road and gravel is like da' bottle. Jumpin' lard, we're goin' arse foremost! That spruce, she's right block solid. Lucky we're not cold junk. I take off me helmet and got a head of hair on mes like a chicken's arsehole in a gale of wind.
The video man says "How ya be fer getting' on boy?"
"Say nothin' and saw wood," I says, "Ye's just a fart in the mitten."
Me sufferin' lord, we'll gets enough sympathy cards to shingle hell over twice.
Let's go for a gargle at the pisser.
Eight X-rays, four hours, a four-minute doctor consultation, and $988 in cash and credit card payments later, we walk out and see our concerned Targa-designated local, Wanda, who had been waiting for the duration. With a healthy case of whiplash, I'm done for the rest of the event. Ron carries on in touring class in a stock MINI Cooper S JCW competition package.
I tag along for the rest of the event with Kyle and Telmo and Mark, the MINI technicians flown in to mind the cars, and whose workload was just cut in half. While other teams spend their evenings rebuilding engines, ghetto-fabbing strut mounts and fixing whatever else blew up, Mark and Telmo simply take off the wheels, run a wrench over the suspension and brake bolts, check the tires for wayward nails (which R-compound tires collect like postage stamps), and call it a night. Prevention is a whole lot easier than repair.
Ours is the first of many crashes in the next four days, some fixable, some not. The occupants of one Porsche 944 S2 live the Newfie metaphor of 'shivering like a dog shitting a herring bone' after surplus momentum lands them in a charitably shallow stretch of the frigid Atlantic.
At the end of a very, very long week of Targa, there's a solid two nights given to partying in St. John's. Jim and Brian win open class in the other MINI for a second year, beating cars whose horsepower numbers are counted in multiples of two and three. The little MINI that could, did, winning for one team and keeping the other safe.
For more information on Targa Newfoundland, go to www.targanewfoundland.com