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Weekly Motor Fix: Mike Lowe’s new Targa Abarth

20 October, 2015

When veteran Targa driver Mike Lowe — and his co-driver Philip Sutton — line up to start the 21st annual Targa NZ next Monday (Labour Day, October 26) once again they will be in a small Enzed-backed Abarth sports coupé. However it will not be the same classic model in which Mike started and finished all 20 previous week-long Targa New Zealand events.

Now that Mike’s 1964 model Abarth Berlina Corsa — ‘Barty’ — has been retired from active duty, ‘Barty 2’ will take over as his Targa car. Despite its near-identical Enzed livery, the new car couldn’t be more different from its predecessor — and that’s because Barty 2 is a modern-day front-wheel-drive Abarth Assetto Corse works race car that has been converted to R3T tarmac rally specification. It is powered by a turbocharged, front-mounted 1400cc engine that produces 140kWs of peak power for a top speed of 225km/h — giving the Mike a big performance advantage over his older Fiat.

“In the 20 years of Targa we have seen the event get faster and with less older cars running,” Mike said. “In that time we had to push Barty way beyond its design brief just to keep up and it became clear that we needed to keep him for special or smaller events, and find something else to use for the next 20 years. When I saw the new Abarths (on a visit to the factory in 2012) I knew then we had to have one.”

This year’s six-day Targa NZ event starts in Auckland on (Labour Day) Monday October 26 and finishes in Palmerston North on Saturday October 31 — check out the current edition of New Zealand Classic Car for full details and route maps.

Photo credits: Fast Company / Mike Lowe and ProShotz

Racing Mazdas

12 June, 2026

Both Rod Millen and Ron Kendall were rotary racing kings, emanating from the North Shore of Auckland, where I grew up. And the ultimate rotary techno guru was Bill Shiells, who developed the engine into a rocket ship while working out of Gulf Mazda in Takapuna from 1969, and later in his own business, Rotorsport. He began to extract some phenomenal horsepower from the enigmatic rotary engine. Bill was one of the first to race the Mazda RX-2 Coupe in 1971 and achieved immediate success, causing others to sit up and take notice, particularly the North Shore’s racing elite. They included Robbie Francevic, Rod Millen, Ron Kendall, John Woolf, John Le Feuvre, and Rex Findlay.

Range Rover CSK — the original SUV

5 June, 2026

The Range Rover, thanks to Charles Spencer King, went into production in 1970 boasting an iconic shape that would last until 1996. The vehicle that would create the SUV moniker came about because Rover decided it was time to add a bigger four-wheel-drive vehicle, one with a 100-inch wheelbase, to the model range. Land Rover made a 109-inch wheelbase model but the standard vehicle had a 88-inch wheelbase.
The new model would be more suitable for road use than the existing Land Rover, which was considered to be predominantly for rural use. To make sure it could cope on any road it came standard with the Rover 3.5-litre V8 engine. The body design was originally sketched by King and went into production with only a few minor touch-ups by the Rover styling team.
According to King, “The idea was to combine the comfort and on-road ability of a Rover saloon with the off-road ability of a Land Rover. Nobody was doing it.”