Wednesday, September 17, 2008

It's a good thing the locals like us

Whoa!

On a quiet residential street in Gander, Newfoundland, people sit out on their porches in the early evening light. The smell of late summer barbecue is in the air. Somewhere a radio plays soft music. Crickets chirp.

Then they stop.

And then two high-spec modern racecars come slewing through the corner at the end of the block, side by side and fighting for position. As the cars pass the house, it's our Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution that gets the better of the Lexus GS450h, passing on the outside, overtaking before the next corner and flying out of sight.

For a moment the smell of hot exhaust and burning brakes hangs in the air. Then it's gone, and the crickets start chirping again.

And then in another 30 seconds the next car flies by...

Such is the incongruity of Targa Newfoundland. A tranquil, beautiful place, populated for one week each fall by snarling, beautiful racecars.

Fortunately the people like it – the hundreds of kids and families at the nightly car shows, the thousands of fans lining the route, and the hundreds of local volunteers attest to that. It brings business and colour to the region in an otherwise quiet season. And you can't beat Newfoundlanders for engaging in something a little bit crazy.

Not all passing in this event is as orderly as described above, though.

On a long stage of the race yesterday, the 30 km stretch from the bluff at Leading Tickles, we came upon a lonely soul on the side of the road holding up a red cross which indicates a medical emergency.

We couldn't see a crashed car, but right away we pulled off the road to figure out what to do. As we did, Brian Bourbonniere, co-driver to Jim Kenzie in the modern Mini Cooper S, came walking up from a river looking ashen, saying, "someone has to get Jim out of the car."

Andrew ran down to the river while I flagged down the next cars and told them to go to the next radio point to send assistance. Just as he was getting ready to jump into the water to find a car underwater, Andrew caught a glimpse of red in the bushes and saw that the Mini had, in fact, flipped end-over-end a number of times and landed so deep in the foliage that it couldn't be seen from the road.

Once out of the car Jim, one of the top auto journalists in Canada, was fine but shocked, and Brian his co-driver almost equally so. We saw them this evening back in the arena car show at Gander and they're making light of the crash, but it was obviously a big one.

We know something of front flips – Andrew and I flipped his Mitsubishi Evo 9 end over end at X Games barely over a month ago.

We all crash sometimes. It's how we recover from it that matters.

And that leads me to some good news: our own journalist team-mates on the Mitsubishi team, Mark Hacking and John LeBlanc, went off the road (that's bad news, actually) and bent the nose of the car. But after a very sympathetic extraction and some demon work by our crew, the car was able to continue and finish the day driving just as well as it started it (which is great news!). We had a spare control arm, but didn't have an inner tie rod, which was bent like a banana.

But in no time a local had come along and asked "whaddaya need, boy?" and opened the back of his truck to reveal and torch and some tubing. Our crack service crew grabbed it out of his hands and set to bending the tie rod straight again, getting it so close to perfect that the car even aligns properly.

Thanking him, he set off, saying "no problem there boy" as he drove off into the sunset.

I hope he's one of the ones sitting on his porch, watching his own handiwork fly by.

Posted by Jen Horsey on 17/09/2008 at 12:08 PM EDT
Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/HardRock

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