Glenn Inkster and Spencer Winn have won the Targa Bambina tarmac motor rally for a second year in a row.
The Auckland pair eased away in their Mitsubishi Evo 6 yesterday to claim overall and Instra.com Allcomers 4WD class victory.
Second in the two-day Auckland-Whitianga-Auckland was last year's Targa Rotorua
winner Leigh Hopper and Bambina co-driver Simon Kirkpatrick, followed by Nissan GTR pairing Harry Dodson and Glen Cupit.
With last year's Targa New Zealand event winner Tony Quinn and co-driver Naomi Tillett out early on the first day with a broken front differential in their Nissan GTR, Inkster and Winn led from start to finish, winning six of the eight stages on Saturday and six of the seven on Sunday to end the 870km event just over three-and-half minutes ahead of Hopper and Kirkpatrick.
The latter pair lost six minutes replacing a smashed sump plug after grounding their Nissan GTR-35 on Saturday, but came back strongly on Sunday, winning the third stage from Inkster and Winn and clawing back enough time over the other six to move back up the standings from seventh place to third.
Fellow first day class winners Mark Whyte and Tracey Lance in a V8 Toyota Altezza V8, and Neil Tolich and Cully Paterson in a rare Capri Perana V8, went on to claim outright class wins.
Whyte and Lance also just edged out Tolich and Paterson in the overal standings, the difference less than a minute in almost two hours of stage competition time.
Porsche GT2 pairing Ross Johnson and Mike Patching, BMW M3 duo Mike Tubbs and Michael Vincent, and husband-and-wife pair Steve and Jodie Millen in a Ford GT helped make the battle for Modern 2WD class honours the most intense with Johnson and Patching taking three stage wins to Whyte and Lance's five on Saturday and the Tubbs/Vincent and Millen/Millen pairings chiming in with a win apiece on Sunday.
However the Johnson/Patching Porsche left the road and ended up down a bank with just one and a half stages to go on Sunday, gifting the runner-up spot in class to Tubbs and Vincent and third place to the Millens.
"We're not sure whether we had an ABS failure or not," explained Johnson. We just braked and the car seemed to be very light and didn't seem to lose enough speed going into a tightening left-hander. If we had had an extra metre or so of road it would have been alright!"
Having competed in recent events in a Nissan GTR, US-based expat Steve Millen sprang something of a surprise when he turned up at the starting ramp of the Targa Bambina event on Saturday morning in the exotic mid-engined Ford GT. But there was a good reason.
"The GTR is on its way back to the States where we are going to do a bunch of work on it," explained Millen. "The GT's not a great Targa car but I love driving it and we've been working away at making it better all weekend."
Meanwhile, with Targa legend Mark Parsons and co-driver Sean Jackson in the field in their V8-engined Triumph TR7, defending Metalman Classic class trophy winners Neil Tolich and Cully Paterson knew they had a battle on their hands but they were up for it, topping the class time sheets in all eight stages on Saturday with perennial rivals Mark and Chris Kirk-Burnnand in a BMW M3 second in six of the eight.
Parsons and Jackson won the first two stages on Sunday but at the end of the second day of competition Tolich and Paterson had retained their Day 1 lead with the Kirk-Burnnands second, another BMW-dirivng pair, Rex McDonald and Daniel Prince third and Parsons and Jackson fourth.
A highlight for many of the spectators who lined the course on Saturday and Sunday was a demonstration of touge (the Japanese word for 'canyon') driving by top New Zealand Drifter Cam Vernon.
Vernon joined with Targa organiser Peter Martin in putting together the T4T (Targa 4 Touge) demonstration on selected stages each day aimed at building links between the two tarmac-based disciplines and Vernon says that the feedback he received from competitors and spectators alike was all positive.
"Obviously it's not everyday you get an opportunity like this, and it didn't come without a lot of hard work, a lot of planning and a lot of support from Targa New Zealand, but the result, honestly, it's been fantastic. To be able to go out on a closed road and show people what drifting is all about has been absolutely brilliant."
With Targa Bambina over for another year the focus of the country's tarmac specialists is now on Targa Rotorua over the June 09-10 weekend and the five-day Targa New Zealand between October 22 and 28. Glenn Inkster, for one, says he has some unfinished business at both events.
"Last year we wanted to try and win all three Targa events but we didn't quite get there. We won Bambina but had problems at Rotorua (where he and Winn eventually finished fourth) and ended up second to Tony (Quinn) at Targa NZ.
"That's the one we really want, it's like Bathurst, it's the biggie. Obviously there's a long way to go yet but in order to win all three you've got to start with one and that's exactly what we've done again today.
