Prologue blues and Leg One miracles

Sorry for not updating or adding much to this blog in the past two days. I was frankly not in the shape or spirit to do so. We effectively went off the road quite hard on the very first Prologue run on the Flatrock stage on Sunday. There is a dip inside one of the left-hand corners that had a strange effect on our car when traversed at a great rate of speed. This Targa Subaru STI is soooooo fast with the boost turned fully up.

In the aftermath, I had a glimpse of our car very briefly before getting a ride back to St-John’s in another type of vehicle. I frankly believed that this would be the last ride I would have at this year’s Targa, but that was counting without the remarkable strength of this team. I was told a bit later that chief mechanic Stewart Hoo and the guys – Andrew, Lewis and Nick – had the STI rolling on its own before taking it to Capital Subaru where John Howard immediately opened the doors to his shop.

• Also: Subaru Rally Team Canada at Targa Newfoundland 2009
• Also: Pre-Targa hoopla, registration and last-minute fixes

Much later, in the wee hours of the morning, the Targa STI was ready for action. It looked a bit worse for wear on the right side, but we were back in the rally. And since Prologue ‘doesn’t count’ (yeah, right: tell that to the guys who worked on the car through the night) we would start the ‘official rally’ with a clean slate.

That said, we had another big challenge ahead of us. On Monday morning, co-driver Keith Townsend woke up with ‘stabbing pain’ in his upper body whenever he tried to lift anything. His suitcase, for instance, since we were checking out of our hotel for a trek across the peninsula in the coming days. Keith was in no shape to ride or even twist himself into our race car. He was later found to have cracked ribs, and if you have never had such an injury, you simply cannot imagine how much it hurts. I have and I do.

The search was thus on to find a co-driver, at least for Leg One we thought at that moment. Trust us, it’s not easy to find one of these on the morning of the first competition day at Targa. Since there was no way Stewart Hoo and his team had done all this work on the car only to see the team get a DNS (did not start, in race lingo), our chief mechanic slipped Keith’s new racing suit over his full clothes (they are not the same size) and decided he would co-drive for the first time of his life, at Targa. Knowing Stewart, if anybody could pull it off, it was him.

The age-old motto of rallymen (and women) ‘Press On Regardless’ is not taken lightly at Subaru Rally Team Canada.

To make a long story short – and a long story can be written for each and every team at Targa Newfoundland – Stewart and I completed Leg One, the first official competition day of Targa 2009 without a single penalty, along with twelve other teams. Among them, most of the usual suspects and a few newcomers such as Steve Millen and Mike Monticello in their fiery orange Nissan GT-R.

Stewart and his guys had already performed a few miracles in the shop but Stewart himself pulled another one out of his hat as a co-driver. Adding to the challenge is the fact that we had to nurse the STI’s racing clutch from the second special stage of Leg One at Placentia to the seventh and last at Eastport, avoiding hard launches at the start and minimizing shifts thereafter.

This morning, I trust that Stewart and the crew have solved the clutch problem and that they have made the adjustments my co-driver and I have discussed to make the car less nervous in high-speed corners. Which other driver has the luxury of also having his (or her) chief mechanic in the ‘right seat’ to discuss car setup during the long transits?

Leg Two of Targa starts this morning and we will stick to the same, simple strategy: taking it one stage at a time and then one day at a time. With the invaluable help of the crystal-clear instructions Keith has prepared, we’ll be ready yet never underestimating the many challenges of Targa Newfoudland.