September 18, 2011 - Brandon and Zach took home some hardware as well.
They finished 5th in the fairly well populated Grand Touring class. But they placed better than any other novice team, and that combined with their great attitude won them the Grace Cup Novice Award. It was a real surprise - they didn't even know it existed - and there were a lot of big grins at our table.
There have been some questions about what happened with the scoring in our division. We were initially listed as fourth, behind the Subaru STi of Mike Davenport. Well, Mike's Modern-class car broke on the first day. He got lucky - thanks to that cancelled stage, he didn't miss any stages. But the car wasn't going to come back. Richard Burton had a spare car on hand, so he loaned it to Mike. Yes, Mike managed to borrow an Open-class car from another competitor - how cool is that? He rejoined at the beginning of day 2 and ran with our class.
Targa Newfoundland looks for ways to let people drive. It's one of the refreshing aspects about the event, they look for solutions instead of looking for problems. But you can't just swap over to a new car with a fresh engine, fresh tires and fresh suspension without penalties.
Effectively, if you do this, your car is penalized as if it did not start competing until it hit the stage. So Mike's scoring should have reflected a complete day of missed stages (5 minute penalty) plus the maximum time attained by anyone in his division for each of those stages. It's basically as if Mike never drove that first day - although he did get to keep his times towards his Targa plate.
During the rally, these penalties were not being applied due to a miscommunication between the scoring team and the event organizers. Once that was cleared up, those extra penalties (approximately 13 minutes worth) dropped him from 4th to 6th.
There was also a lot going on with the Modern class results. I don't know the details and I won't speculate, but the second-place car was disqualified. At the banquet, the final results were still up in the air. Matt Oldford took home the first place award again, and rightfully so.
tags: targa, 2011 race, exotics, tuning |
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