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Nationwide events: Targa Hawke’s Bay 2019 (17-19 May)

29 April, 2019

 


 

Welcome to another Targa Hawke’s Bay event. This year, we have combined the best roads from the Rotorua, Matamata, and Waikato areas with those from the Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay regions to create an awesome route made up of more than 440kms of special stages and around 700kms of touring crammed into an action-packed three-day course.

This event is brought to you in association with the Piako Group, and we welcome Darrell and his team into the Targa family of event partners. The Piako Group is a well-established vehicle and rural machinery sales and service business with branches around the Waikato region.

We have also made a few changes to the running order of vehicles during the event, with the competition vehicles now leading the Tour group, so, when spectating, please get into a safe place early and wait for the announcement that the road is open before leaving your position.

As always, we appreciate the support from the local communities we travel through and the numerous groups that help along the way. From timing crews to safety marshals, service parks to car washes, we thank you all for your time.

The event will start from Rotorua, and teams will gather on Thursday afternoon on the Village Green to prepare for the official start on Friday morning. They will head north towards Matamata for a morning service before lunch at Lake Karapiro, returning to Rotorua that afternoon. On Saturday, the teams will head south towards Turangi for lunch and then over the Gentle Annie before arriving in Havelock North. Sunday will be around Hawke’s Bay, with lunch in Waipawa and finishing outside the Porters Boutique Hotel in Havelock North. Full event details and maps are listed below. Please check the Targa website for updates on the day: targa.nz.

Peter Martin
Managing Director
Ultimate Rally Group

Almost mythical pony

The Shelby came to our shores in 2003. It went from the original New Zealand owner to an owner in Auckland. Malcolm just happened to be in the right place with the right amount of money in 2018 and a deal was done. Since then, plenty of people have tried to buy it off him. The odometer reads 92,300 miles. From the condition of the car that seems to be correct and only the first time around.
Malcolm’s car is an automatic. It has the 1966 dashboard, the back seat, the rear quarter windows and the scoops funnelling air to the rear brakes.
He even has the original bill of sale from October 1965 in California.

Becoming fond of Fords part two – happy times with Escorts

In part one of this Ford-flavoured trip down memory lane I recalled a sad and instructive episode when I learned my shortcomings as a car tuner, something that tainted my appreciation of Mk2 Ford Escort vans in particular. Prior to that I had a couple of other Ford entanglements of slightly more redeeming merit. There were two Mk1 Escorts I had got my hands on: a 1972 1300 XL belonging to my father and a later, end-of-line, English-assembled 1974 1100, which my partner and I bought from Panmure Motors Ford in Auckland in 1980. Both those cars were the high water mark of my relationship with the Ford Motor Co. I liked the Mk1 Escorts. They were nice, nippy, small cars, particularly the 1300, which handled really well, and had a very precise gearbox for the time.
Images of Jim Richards in the Carney Racing Williment-built Twin Cam Escort and Paul Fahey in the Alan Mann–built Escort FVA often loomed in my imagination when I was driving these Mk1 Escorts — not that I was under any illusion of comparable driving skills, but they had to be having just as much fun as I was steering the basic versions of these projectiles.