With the arrival of Geoff and Scott on Friday evening, the 2007 Longest Drive Targa Team were assembled in St. John's. Work continued on the car until dark tying up the last loose ends to get the car ready to pass tech inspection. Most of the team headed off to a BBQ hosted by Scott and Judy Giannou’s. A fun, perhaps too fun, time was had by all.
Saturday morning at the tech inspection, the months of preparation paid off. The car passed with flying colours.
Fast forward to the Sunday prologue. This leg does not count in the Targa scoring. It is intended to help determine a starting order for the first rally day on Monday and as a dry run for all the participants, and rally organizers. Geoff and Scott decided ahead of time to take it easy and use the leg as a warm up for Monday. During the prologue, the car developed a problem with the brakes. Under heavy sustained braking, the pedal sunk to the floor Even so, Geoff and Scott placed 6th overall out of a field of 70 plus cars.
Back at the hotel parking lot, a few tests, and consults led us to the inescapable conclusion that the Tilton master cylinder for the front brakes had developed a problem. In spite of the fact that the cylinder was brand new and Tilton is reknown for its reliability, it failed. So, unfortunately, this part is one of the few not in our cache of spares. We swapped the lines between the front master and the back, thereby moving the problem from the front to the back brakes. Then we adjusted the brake bias to strongly favour the front brakes. In effect, we minimized the effect of the problem but did so by virtually eliminating the back brakes.
A call to Raven Performance, found John Dimoff in the shop. Although he didn’t have any Tilton master cylinder spares on hand, he offered to borrow a pair from Steve Gailit’s race car. Angela at TDI arranged for overnight shipping to Gander. If all goes according to plan, the car will have brakes on all four corners again by late Tuesday night.
Monday was the first day of real racing. We were up by 5:30 AM, packed and on our way by 6:30 AM to the St. John’s curling arena where the cars were on display. Andy Proudfoot and Bruce Terris, friends from previous Targa’s rode with Gary, Bryan, Scott, and Geoff to the arena. Six full size guys in a pickup truck. But where there is a will, and a cab fare at stake, there is a way.
It was a mixed bag of weather, conditions, roads, and performance. Geoff and Scott turned in a couple of blazingly fast stages, one being the trip into Placentia for breakfast.
As the day worn on, it became colder and quite wet. They were not happy with their performance during the 30 km stage running into Gooseberry Bay. This stage is very demanding. The weather was so poor that alternate scoring was used to correct for it and a portion of the stage was even cancelled. Weather coupled with the defective brakes, slowed down considerably Geoff and Scott considerably. Scott is off checking the official results at the Gander Community Centre as this is being written at 1:00 AM but overall, we are pleased with the day.
Tomorrow, instead of 500 km, there is only 300 km in the leg. Only a single refuelling midday will be required. Bryan and Gary will be driving the service vehicle into Leading Tickles so they can fuel up the car around noon. Since the there is only one road in, they have to be in there well before the road is closed for the race. So, off to bed, tomorrow will be here very soon!
