‘2021’ TARGA NEW ZEALAND NEW PLYMOUTH—HAVELOCK NORTH

SUBARU PAIR ROSS AND BUER CLAIM LATEST TARGA NZ WIN; PATTERSON PAIR EARN FIRST CLASSIC HOME KUDOS FOR BMW

When the 26th running of the Targa New Zealand tarmac motor rally concluded in Hawke’s Bay on Sunday, 29 May 2022, event-long leaders Cameron Ross and Matthew Buer had won the popular local motorsport marathon while Nigel and Meighan Patterson (BMW E30 355i) were the first of the Classic 2WD class entries home, in 12th place.

Until 2020, the five-day ‘main Targa’ event, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019, was held annually in late October. For the past two years, however, it has fallen foul of the Covid-19 pandemic, being cancelled outright in 2020 then postponed — until May this year — in 2021. For this reason the event, which started in New Plymouth on the North Island’s west coast on Wednesday, 25 May 2022, and concluded in Havelock North on the island’s east coast on Sunday, 29 May 2022, has always been referred to — and will go down in the annals of Targa NZ history as — the 2021, rather than the 2022, event.

Without the likes of 2019 winner Haydn Mackenzie and co-driver Matt Sayers (Mitisubishi Evo 10 RS), and multi-time previous winners Glenn Inkster and Spencer Winn (Mitsubishi Evo 8) and Tony Quinn and Naomi Tillett (Nissan GT-R35), in the line-up this time around, the big story was definitely the win — by a healthy margin of 1 min46.9s at that — by Ross from Wellington and Buer from Tauranga in Ross’s locally prepared, late-model Subaru Impreza WRX Sti.

In saying that, there were any number of interesting side stories, including one about just how close — yet also how far — the Classic 2WD class two winners, Nelson pair Bruce Farley and co-driver Glen Warner (BMW 325i), got to beating class three, and overall first classic home (in P12), winners Nigel and Meighan Patterson.

Chief amongst these interesting side stories was the pitched late-event battle for the runner-up spot on the penultimate stage, resolved in favour of the 4WD VW Polo R of Auckland-based event veteran Jason Gill and co-driver Nicole Summerfield ahead of the event’s top 2WD vehicle, the Porsche 991GT3 RS of 2013 event winner Martin Dippie and his codriver Jona Grant from Dunedin.

The drama started from early on the first day, Wednesday, 25 May, when one of the pre-event favourites, and emphatic winners of the first special stage, the 36.5km Awakino–marokopa section — by a margin of 17.8 seconds — Leigh Hopper from

Whitianga and co-driver Michael Goudie of Auckland, were forced to stop in just the second timed stage to try and sort out a serious engine overheating issue with Hopper’s four-door, Subaru Impreza WRX. Ross and Buer found themselves under intense pressure from the virtually identical late-model Subaru Impreza WRX Sti of young gun Rory Callaway from Christchurch and his Raglan-based co-driver Samantha Gray, the time difference between the two a barely measurable 0.0.5 of a second at the end of the first day and just 3.9 seconds at the end of the second. However, in one of the most dramatic turns in the event’s 26-year history, by simply making it through to the end of the first stage on the third day Ross and Buer found themselves the last of three front-running Subaru 4WD crews standing — with a lead they would never lose.

First to stumble and fall were Callaway and Gray, their distinctive all-white Subaru Impreza leaving the road just 5km into the first stage of the day, the short — at just 20.78km — but obviously tricky Mt Egmont one.

Hopper and Goudie — who up until that point had won five of the completed stages but were no longer in the running for an overall top five, or even a spot in the top ten, after having to pull out of the other four stages thanks to that persistent engine overheating issue — made it a little further through the stage, to the 13.6km mark, before they ended their event with a carbending trip off the road.

So, just like that, the complexion of the event changed. By deftly avoiding most of the day three hubris that hit other competitors, Ross and Buer not only ended the day with their event lead intact; their lead over Dippie and Grant was now able to be measured in minutes (3:2.0 to be exact) rather than fractions of a second (0:00.5) as was the case at the end of the first day. For their part, Dippie and Grant, who had led the 2WD category from the first stage, would spend the rest of the day swapping fastest stage honours with Ross and Buer. What the Porsche pair were unable to do, however, was shake Gill and Summerfield off their tail. These Targa event veterans went into the day in P4, 32.4 seconds shy of Dippie and Grant, but came out of it in P3, just 26 seconds down on the Dippie/ Grant Porsche.

Auckland’s David Rogers and co-driver Shane Reynolds (Mitsubishi Evo 10) also moved up in the overall event ranking — from P6 to P4 — their cause aided by the 90-second time penalty levied on BMW M2 driver Mike Tubbs and co-driver Richard Scoular for exceeding the event’s pre-set maximum average speed through the thirdlast special stage of the day.

Penalty aside, Tubbs and Scoular enjoyed another spectacularly competitive day in Tubbs’ coupé, the pair even claiming their first outright win of the event, in what many will remember as the ‘bogey’ stage, the 20.78km Mt Egmont one at the very start of the day. Proving the worth of their late-model hitech 2WD, Tubbs and Scoular also topped the time sheets in the first stage of the day the following day, pipping the Gill/ Summerfield 4WD VW Polo R by 0.2 of second and the Ross/buer Subaru Impreza by 11.5 seconds, while Marcus Van Klink and his co-driver Matt Richards followed suit with their own debut stage win in the second stage of the day — the 11.75km Waiouru — in Van Klink’s new, dedicated tarmac-spec, N/A, 2WD 26B four-rotorengined Mazda RX8. Despite winning only one of the five other stages, and finishing an uncharacteristic eighth overall in another, at the end of the fourth day Ross and Buer were not only still leading the event overall, but their bonus time buffer — just over three minutes — over the second-placed Dippie/grant Porsche GT3 RS was still very much intact. If anything, it was the Porsche that looked the more vulnerable, Gill and Summerfield having

already reduced the time gap between the two podium protagonists from 26.9 secs to 17.9 secs.

So it was that on the final day of the 2021 Targa New Zealand event Ross and Buer completed the job they had started five days and some 2000km before in New Plymouth, claiming a popular victory by the impressive margin of 1:46.9 over Gill/ Summerfield and Dippie/grant. What?

That’s right. After winning the third last stage of the day, long-time runner-uppers Dippie and Grant still had a 22.6 buffer over Gill and Summerfield. By digging deep, however, Gill and Summerfield were not only able to win the last two stages of event, but were also able to turn the tables on Dippie and Grant, making up the lion’s share, and more, of the 22.6-second deficit with a winning run through the second-tolast 37.82km Raukawa stage to take over second place by a margin of 3.2 seconds then push that out to 5.9 secs with a third win for the day in the final 36.1km Tod/ Middle Road stage.

Fourth overall — and second 2WD car home — were a very satisfied Tubbs and Scoular, a minute-and-change ahead of the crowd-pleasing Van Klink and Richards but close to six minutes up on the sixthplaced event stalwarts, Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Darrington and Kiwi co-driver David Abetz in Darrington’s distinctively trimmed BMW Art Car–style E46 BMW E4 M3 2WD. Like fellow event veteran Gill, Darrington and Abetz had been playing a high-speed game of catch-up for much of the event and were able to turn what was a 1.2 deficit on Christchurch pair Andy Oakley and Steve Hutchins (Audi RS5 4WD) heading into the final stage of the event into a 12.1 second advantage — plus a place in the top six — after putting in one of the drives of the event through the 36.71km Tod/ Middle Rd stage, stopping the clocks with a time of 15:30, just one second slower than Van Klink and Richards in the raucous four-rotor Mazda RX8. They were also — importantly — a good 13.3 seconds quicker than the Oakley/hutchins Audi.

You had to feel for Oakley and Hutchins, who had made their way back into the top six after early dramas on just the second day of the event in Taranaki had seen them slip back down to P19 in the overall event classification, only to lose sixth place at the death.

Still, it could have been worse, as event newcomer Nathan Apatu and co-driver Donna Elder (2WD Porsche GT3) got quicker and quicker the closer Apatu got

to his Hawke’s Bay home. Apatu and Elder got very close to the Oakley/hutchins Audi, too — not, at 19.4 seconds adrift, close enough to deny the Mainland pair their hard-earned seventh place in the event’s top 10 pecking order, but more than enough to earn Apatu and Elder an impressive eighth place overall.

In ninth place was genuine event OG Anton Tallott and co-driver David Connell, this time in a Subaru Impreza 4WD. The pair were elevated a place on the final day of the event when Rogers and Reynolds ran off the road in the third stage and had to accept a maximum time penalty before restarting the event on the fourth stage. That immediately dropped the pair from P6 to P10 in the overall event standings, where they remained sandwiched between Tallott and Connell in the ninth-placed Subaru Impreza WRX and the Mitsubishi Evo 10 RS of their long-time running mates Brian Green and Fleur Pedersen, which finished eleventh. In twelfth was the first of the Classic 2WD cars, the re-powered ‘335i’ engine E30 BMW of the Pattersons. Despite intense, event-long competition from the second leg (day) of the event until the very last, Farley and Warner were never able to recover the six minutes lost on the Patterson E30 on only the second timed stage on the opening day of the event. That meant they ended up back in P15 overall, just a couple of places ahead of the crowd-pleasing Mk1 Ford Escort ‘rally car’ of the Blackley brothers, Steven and co-driver Sean, who finished 17th,, and the Mark Mccaughan/ Lindsay Lyons Mercedes-benz 190E, which ended up 18th. Incorporated into, and set to run concurrently over the final two days with the full five-day ‘2021’ Targa New Zealand event, was a separately entered and scored, two-day ‘2021’ Targa NZ Regional tarmac motor rally, which started in Whanganui on Saturday, 28 May. It was won by Tim Mciver and co-driver Brent Wilson in Mcivor’s recently imported ‘new build’ tarmac-spec Mk11 Ford Escort from Pat Dillon and co-driver Bruce Chisholm in a Mk2 Lotus Cortina and the Peugeot 106 Club Sport of Simon and Jane van Tuyl. Both the five-day and the two-day regional events incorporated their own concurrently run but independently organised and scored VCC Time Trials, run in conjunction with the Vintage Car Club of NZ, as well as concurrent but noncompetitive Targa Tours.

The main five-day VCC of NZ Time Trial was won by Russell Yates and Alise Inger in a 1977 MG B, beating Craig Inger and Oliver Going (1990 Mazda MX5) and Grant Ford and Kyle Lightfoot (1989 Mazda MX5). The two-day version was won by Malcolm Fleming and Gina Jones in a 1971 MG Midget, with Bill Hopkins and Frank Robinson second in a Mazda MX-3 and Michael D’alton and Ian Stewart third in the mighty 1934 Bentley 3.5 Special.