Rockin' ride at Targa

Automotive journalist gets baptism of fire as rookie co-driver at Newfoundland event that puts even the most experienced to the test

JOHN LEBLANC, CanWest News Service

Published: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 -
Like an eight-year old counting down the number of sleeps until the arrival of Saint Nick, the anticipation of this year's Targa Newfoundland road rally was starting to, well, get to me.

Much more comfortable in my regular role as a journalist, prepping for Targa was like cramming for a university final exam. Except this exam would last five days and almost 2,200 kilometres, from back-alley Newfoundland town lanes to oceanside cliff switchbacks.

I had naively thought that by talking to other journalists who had received their own Targa baptisms-of-fire as co-drivers that I would suss out their tricks and tips to try to keep my driver, Dan Knott, Chrysler Group's vice-president of Global Services, from throwing me out the window of our 2006 Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8 no earlier than at least the second leg on the Tuesday.

The anticipation to get going was hand-wringing. Saturday was the worst. It started with an early-morning call to Royal Garage Dodge in St. John's, where our vehicles were being stored. Our big, black Jeep and our team's other entry, an electric-blue Dodge Caliber (that's not the production SRT4) driven by Ralph Gilles, DaimlerChrysler's vice-president of Jeep and Truck Design, and co-driven by California-based Karen Wagner, a real Sports Car Club of America stage rally navigator, both needed to be registered and scrutineered by the end of the day.

What wasn't on Saturday's agenda was Yours Truly getting us lost on our suburban St. John's route to check the accuracy of the rally computer's odometer. Not the recommended way to instill confidence in your driver who you've only met once before, or a method to get a good night's sleep on one's own part.

Targa organizers call Sunday's events a Prologue. It's a fraction of the amount of driving compared with a competitive day. Targa veterans view this as a way to freshen up on their driving or navigating skills and to see how their cars are behaving.

I spent the evenings leading up to Monday's real deal dog-earing route book pages, calculating our Targa stage time targets based on various weather conditions, highlighting transit stages because when I'm stressed, my brain doesn't recognize left from right, adding directions at the bottom of each page so that there are no surprises, combining instructions that are less than 100 metres apart and, finally, inserting Transit stage exit

directions so that after the euphoria of completing a hotly contested Targa stage, I don't get Knott and myself lost in Placentia, Muddy Hole, Conception Bay or Dildo.

With Knott and I quietly chanting, "It's only Leg One, it's only Leg One," we headed out from the St. John's Curling Club, our home for the first two prep days.

The combination of Knott's experience at Targa last year, excellent driving abilities, high level of self-preservation and the gracious acceptance that a rookie co-driver will make mistakes, we survived Leg One, finishing up in Gander. In fact, the first leg claimed three former class winners. One car, the blue 2006 Mini Cooper S JCW of Americans Ron Kiino and Jared Holstein, went off course on the second turn of the very first stage, both taken to hospital for observation and later released.

Our strategy of going like hell on the straight bits to build up time before the tight stuff slowed us down was working until the organizers adjusted the 130-kilometres-per-hour average rule.

As of Leg Two Tuesday, any times faster than a 135-km/h average would receive a 10-second penalty. In a week-long event where the overall winner will incur a couple of minutes of penalties, 10 seconds is a bunch. So, just drive under the average speed, right?

That's all well and good if your rookie co-driver has a handle on the rally computer's ability to dynamically display average. Somehow, that line item got buried in my daily 1,000-item to-do list. This meant Knott was driving blind (time-wise) all of Tuesday morning. We were racking up needless penalties, and I was looking like a goat.

But then, something really cool happened.

Over lunch, we gathered the DaimlerChrysler troops. With the combined efforts of Wagner, Don Jonikowsky of Dodge Motorsports Road Racing and Ethan Bayer, Powertrain Systems engineer - SRT, we managed to get the Jeep's rally computer to display our average speed. We could now drive and navigate knowing how over or under we would be during a Targa stage.

It was the final piece of the puzzle.

Everything inside the Jeep was now working. Computer, driver and co-driver. Instead of just surviving, the big-ass, black Jeep - unofficially dubbed the Black Rhino - could now compete.

Relatively light for a mid-sized sport-utility vehicle, the stock Grand Cherokee SRT8 is the most powerful Jeep ever. It burbled to each start line with its SRT-tuned, 420-horsepower, 6.1-litre V8 (yes, it's a Hemi), sway bars, spring rates, suspension bushings, new front suspension knuckles featuring a revised camber angle and a one-inch lower ride height slammed over 20-inch Pirelli Scorpion rubber. And it's all stock.

"Because the all-wheel-drive system is rear-wheel biased, you can drive it like a rally car," Knott said. "It pivots remarkably well, and the torque and traction means we can fly over the hills where others are struggling."

We took full advantage of the Jeep's foul-weather assets during Leg Three.

Scheduled to run through six communities in the Kittiwake area, the remnants of Hurricane Florence resulted in the running of only four stages. But the Jeep's torque and traction meant that when I finally poked my head up from the tulip diagrams I had been digesting since Saturday, I realized that Knott had driven the wheels off the Black Rhino. We had jumped to 16th overall, gained a spot in our class and some well-deserved credibility for those who thought the idea of running an SUV competitively in Targa was a joke.

Screw just finishing, we were racing.

Except for a moment in a decreasing radii left-hander, where Knott remembered just at the right time that lifting off the throttle would pivot the Jeep enough to save his co-driver from being intimately introduced to a guardrail, Thursday was a just-keep-on-truckin' kind of day.

Despite Gilles' heroic efforts in taming the hand-built Caliber development car and Wagner navigating the entire event without a proper-running rally computer or odometer, going into Friday's final leg, we were tied for 15th overall with our DaimlerChrysler teammates leading their Modern Modified class.

If not for some heated brake fluid on one of Friday's more challenging stages, the Black Rhino was running flawlessly, and driver and co-driver were knocking any piece of wood we could find in hopes of hanging on to third position in the Modern Division, Standard Large Displacement class.

After a week of automotive abuse, some of the cars - and competitors - were feeling a few creaks and groans (in the end, only 48 of the 59 original Targa entrants would be running). For Friday's final leg, Targa organizers turned up the heat.

Friday's week high of nine back-to-back stages pounding over some of the roughest roads yet encountered totally played into the Jeep's robust nature. Where others in low-riding sports cars crept in fear, we blasted the Black Rhino over potholed craters and bombed-out back roads.

By 6 o'clock on Friday, after five legs, 2,197.56 kilometres, 36 stages and three smoky burnouts, the Black Rhino had a third-place podium class finish, a Targa Plate for completing all the stages and finished 14th overall.

National Post