Targa Newfoundland Leg 4 Update

NEWFOUNDLAND - If it’s Thursday it must be Marystown — and Garnish and Fortune and the sweeping stages of Harbour Mille.

Competitors rose to frosty windshields in the morning, but it was a bright day of long straights and tight town stages that started with a competitor favourite, a bracing run through Little Bay East to a hearty breakfast at Harbour Mille, then back out for the first of the town stages.

The long beach of Frenchman’s Cove gave lots of people a chance the make up time lost in the tighter bits, but in the end, only three Targa teams finished the day without adding penalty points. A change in Leg 3 scoring gave Glen Clarke and Andy Proudfoot a four-second penalty, but they do hold on to the overall lead.

“We’ve been on the Burin of seven years,” said Robert Giannou, president and CEO of Newfoundland International Motorsports Ltd., “and this has been one of the best years every recorded from Targa both from a safety and a competition point of view.”

That holds true for the Grand Touring competition as well, where the BMW 325i-driving team of Ferdinand and Chrisoph Trauttmansdorff can claim the only clean slate.

Leg 5 starts bright and early at Boat Harbour Friday with a brand new stage into Petit Forte, and puts another Targa Newfoundland into the books back in St. John’s.

Owned by Newfoundland International Motorsports Limited, and operated by Targa Newfoundland Motorsport Club, Targa Newfoundland is one of three internationally recognized Targa motorsports events in the world. The 8th annual Targa Newfoundland will start and end in St. John's and will cover more than 2,000 kilometres of the challenging, twisty roads of the central and eastern portion of the island of Newfoundland over six days, including up to 400 kilometres of closed-road, flat-out Targa stages. Competitors have come from the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany, Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas and the U.K.

For daily updates, results and images see www.targanewfoundland.com

From Melissa Crummey // Administrative & Marketing Coordinator