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Leading up to Targa Hawke’s Bay’s new two day format

11 May, 2017

The Hawke’s Bay leg has proved a popular staging post and end point for Targa New Zealand events over the last several years; so when Event Director Peter Martin was casting around for a second two day event to slot in between Targa Rotorua in March, and Targa New Zealand in October, his first preference was of course the ‘Bay (May 20-21)
 
“For a start there are the roads,” Martin said, “The roads in the ‘Bay are fantastic. You couldn’t ask for better for an event like ours. There’s also a strong and very active motorsport fraternity and some very supportive councils with which we have an excellent working relationship with.”

Things will kick off, and wrap up, in in Havelock North (at the Village Green) and the event incorporates 15 closed special stages covering 378.5 km and a total of 585.2km of touring stages across Hawke’s Bay.

Over 90 entries have been spread over the main competition field (50), concurrent but non-competitive Targa Tour (30), and Hawke’s Bay Car Club Rally of Hawke’s Bay (10).

Sharing joint favourite status after impressing at the Targa Rotorua event in May are Leigh Hopper and co-driver Michael Goudie from Orewa, north of Auckland, and Jason Gill and Mark Robinson from Auckland. Hopper and Goudie led the field on the first day of the Rotorua event in Hopper’s newly-built Subaru WRX Impreza, only to crash out of the event on the first stage on Sunday morning.
 
Gill and Robinson, in the Mitsubishi Evo 9, were never far behind on the first day — the gap overnight was just 36 seconds — and took over a lead they would never lose when Hopper went off the road. With work rebuilding the Subaru still going on, Hopper and Goudie will contest the Hawke’s Bay event in a leased Mitsubishi Evo 10.
 

The Rotorua event also saw the Targa debut of a second new Porsche GT3 RS in the hands of five-time Targa NZ winner Tony Quinn and co-driver Naomi Tillett. The pair spent most of that event in a pitched battles for third, then second, place with former Targa NZ winners, Martin Dippie and co-driver Jona Grant from Dunedin, in Dippie’s own Porsche GT3 RS.
 
Circuit-owning entrepreneur Quinn won a stage on Sunday but Dippie and Grant were ultimately quicker over the two days, setting the scene for a return match in the Hawke’s Bay this month.

Quinn and Tillett, and Dippie and Grant, are expected to set the pace in the Global Security Production 2WD class; while the new Global Securities Allcomers 2WD class is set to be a battle between the BMW M3 of Perth-based expat Robert Darrington and co-driver Dave Abetz, the Holden Torana A9X of New Plymouth husband and wife Ross and Carmel Graham, and the giant-killing Toyota Starlet of Auckland brothers Tom and Ben Grooten.

 The Hopper and Goudie and Gill and Robinson pairings are also, obviously, joint favourites to take class honours in the AndrewSimms.co.nz Allcomers 4WD class; while Aucklanders Joe Kouwenhoven and Carl Hannaford have the car — in the Nissan GT-R (R35) — to make the new AndrewSimms.co.nz Production 4WD class their own.
 
The Metalman Classic 2WD class remains a cornerstone of any Targa event, with Mark and father Chris Kirk-Burnnand from Wellington in a BMW M3; Bevan Claridge and Campbell Tannock from the Horowhenua in a Holden Commodore V8; and Nelson duos, Bruce Farley and Glen Warner in a BMW 325i, and Peter Jones and Mike Lea in a Ford Escort; all pairings to look out for.

Janspeed recreates the Jaguar sports car

29 September, 2026

Thankfully, a few of these cars made it to New Zealand, the odd one being imported from the UK over the years. However, the 1988 British Racing Green example owned by Bill Slater in Upper Hutt was originally sold as a standard car but converted using the full Janspeed kit by the first owner within a couple of years of buying it.
Bill has owned a few other Jaguars. In fact, after he sold his Jaguar XJ12 in 2018, he found himself pining for another and, when the XJ-S came up for sale, he could not resist it. Having just sold the V12, he was not expecting much from the six-cylinder car other than more reliability and it being cheaper to keep on the road. Naturally, he had heard of the influence Janspeed had on the marque, but it was not until he took the car for a test drive that he became aware of just how superior it was to the car he had just sold. The price of a second-hand Janspeed XJ-S and that of a standard 3.6 XJ-S is quite comparable, making the Janspeed version an incredible bargain, even more so in comparison with other performance classic cars — or even modern cars, for that matter — which cost far more bucks for the bang.

The writing on the wall

25 September, 2026

Deven, a digital content producer in his 20s, says it was the rear-drive Nissan and Toyota drift cars that fired his imagination in his not-so-distant youth and soon had him wanting one of his own. However, like most of us, he had to start in something less glamorous – in his case, a 1997 Mitsubishi Galant. After that, he bought a four-litre V8 1991 Toyota Soarer, a big change from the Mitsubishi.
“It was my daily driver, and it wasn’t that bad to run back when petrol was affordable,” he says.
When he got fed up with filling it up, Deven bought a 1989 Ford Laser sedan, a 1.3-litre five-speed manual, to be his daily driver. It’s in very good condition, bought from a careful older driver, and he still runs it – although he will occasionally also drive the latest in a series of Nissan Laurel sedans. His current one, from 1993, has done the lowest number of kilometres yet, at 183,000. It has the single-cam version of the engine in his Skyline.
“I’ve had four different versions of that car. It was just a car I always liked. It’s really comfortable, quite luxurious. I bought it from a 90-year-old in Hamilton. It’s in mint condition, and everything is standard.”