Motorsport: Rally fever reaches Rotorua

The GTR-35 of Tony Quinn and Adam Tillet is a top contender for the rally held on Queen's Birthday weekend. Photo / Fast Company / Ground Sky

The GTR-35 of Tony Quinn and Adam Tillet is a top contender for the rally held on Queen's Birthday weekend. Fast Company / GroundSky Quinn and Tillet's GTR-35 Skyline are heading a 101-strong entry for next month's Targa

This year's Targa Rotorua is nearly upon us. It hits the tarmac from June 3 to 5 and starts and finishes at Rotorua's Novotel Hotel.

The event will cover a total of 382km of special stages - 222km on Saturday and 160km on Sunday. A special feature of this year's race is the marathon stage six which, at 67km, is the longest - by a good 15km - stage ever run in a Targa event.

The word Targa means plate in Italian and is derived from the prize that was awarded in 1906 to the winner of the first Targa, known as the Targa Florio.

This event was held in Sicily and ran from 1906 until 1973 through some of the most spectacular mountain roads and villages on the island.

The French marque Bugatti reigned supreme during the 1920s, then the Italians - Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari - took control until the Porsches arrived in Sicily.

The indestructible German cars won 10 events from 1959 to 1973. Almost every Grand Prix driver of those years competed in the race.

The New Zealand version began in 1995 and has grown from a single event to a series and has evolved to be the largest closed motorsport event in Australasia. It is based around 10 categories broken into two competitions: classic and modern.

Current Targa hotshot Tony Quinn and co-driver Adam Tillet (Nissan Skyline GTR-35) head a 101-strong entry for this year's rally over Queen's Birthday weekend.

Queensland's Quinn won the six-day Dunlop Targa here in October last year. Earlier this year he won Targa Tasmania for a second time.

He and then co-driver Sue O'Neill also won Targa Rotorua outright in 2009, but finished second to local rally ace Richard Mason and co-driver Simon Kirkpatrick a year later.

Quinn and Tillet's Skyline will be one of five of the high-tech, high-performance GTR-35 models to start at this year's Rotorua event.

Two of the other four, the cars of Auckland pairings Harry Dodson/Glen Cupit, and Clark Proctor/Tony Callaghan, will be turning on the heat for Quinn and Tillet in the modern competition category.

The other two are driven by Ron Stroeven and Patsy Poirier, and Nigel and Roger Parr.

Dodson and Cupit are the dark horse GTR-35 pairing heading into the event, with Dodson having just won the inaugural Ohakune Giant 1000 hillclimb up the Turoa skifield access road.

He and Cupit finishing second to nationally ranked young Auckland rally driver Glenn Inkster and his co-driver Spencer Winn in this year's Targa Bambina event in the north-eastern Waikato and Coromandel in March.

In the absence of 2010 Dunlop Targa and 2011 Targa Bambina class winners Neil Tolich and Cully Paterson, the classic category looks set to be a battle between the BMW M3 combination of Mark and Chris Kirk-Burnnand, and the Mitsubishi GSR pair of Cameron Young and Steven Fisher.

The foursome shared the podium with Tolich and Paterson at the Targa Bambina meeting earlier this year and the Kirk-Burnnands finished second to Tolich and Paterson in the Dunlop Targa event of 2010.

This year's Rotorua event will also see all competing cars equipped with Auckland company Trackit's GPS-enabled transponders.

These transponders will streamline the results and provide competitors and their crew with valuable information about where their car is in a stage and how well it is doing in real-time.

There have been a couple of withdrawals this week which means there is room for a few more entrants.

So if you have been working towards joining the fray, now is the time to contact the organisers as the final cut off date is May 27.