As many of you will know, especially those who follow AUSmotive on twitter and Facebook, I have been away for Targa Tasmania this past week. I was working as service crew for some friends of mine who were going really well. Indeed, they were flying, setting personal best times stage after stage.
Alas, as the photo above shows, seeing the team’s MINI John Cooper Works on a trailer rather than at the finish line in Hobart would tend to indicate that all didn’t end well.
So, while we were basking in the glow that Robbo and Tom were heading for a best ever finish—leading their category and racing towards a top 10 placing in the Modern outright classifications—fate dealt a cruel blow, with only two stages to go.
Robbo’s MINI broke a belt which meant a number of things went wrong, chief among them being no more alternator and the car was overheating. It couldn’t be driven through the final stages without causing terminal engine failure and there was no time to fix the car before the next stage.
And that, as they say, is motor racing.
9 replies on “To finish first, first you have to finish”
There must have been an Ausmotive sticker somewhere…
No, they have been banned, haha.
Bad luck guys. Will just have to have another crack next year 🙂
It’s a horrible feeling to be waiting in Hobart for a lovely little red MINI to arrive on the back of a trailer/flatbed 😞
At least this year it was only mechanical. And was something that could happen to anyone. Let’s face it, those cars are being driven to the max for 5 days and are under a lot of stress which is why so many cars don’t make it.
And the last two years Targa added an additional 120kms of competition stages, because they felt too many cars were making it to the end.
For Robbo, it would seem those additional kms are keeping a finish, frustratingly, just out of reach…
Having said that – imagine how sweet it will be when he finally gets to cross the line in Hobart. And he will!!!
Saw Robbo at SMSP Burrows day last month.
He was running his old Mini and it had just come in after breaking the belt…..
Yeah, he mentioned this. It’s not uncommon to break a belt on the supercharged R53s, but the turbocharged R56s aren’t really known for doing the same.
It was still an awesome Targa for Robbo, me and the team. We proved that we are fast enough to mix it with the podium finishers in the showroom category which is where the MINI could have entered. We also gelled really well this year as a driver/nav combo and also as a team with our outstanding service crew. In the end we did nothing wrong, we made no mistakes and we were only stopped by a minor mechanical issue, and apart from that, the car was amazing. I’m still grinning from the week.
– Tommy (Navigator)
Love that car.
Bad luck guys.
Yep, we had a great event, apart from a little bad luck at the end. Thanks to Tom for being an amazing navvie, we did really gel together well, and we were fast. Service crew were awesome as well. Liam now knows the ins and outs of mini diagnostic software and codes!
We had a stage with a section with an enormous amount of recently laid loose coarse chip gravel. This did a whole lot of damage to the car, it has trashed all the plastic trim panels under and behind the front wheels, damaged rims etc. In retrospect it was probably this gravel that damaged the belt, which let go several stages later. Just one of those unpredictable things,
We’ll be back next year in a new car!
Robbo