It had been 12 months since I navigated last and was good to receive an email from Steve Spada a SSCC Member asking me to become his navigator for a few Tarmac rallies. It was going to be good to be back in something modern as I am more use to the faster pace…
I organised to meet Steve at 5am for the big drive down to Mt Buller. We were towing the Mitsubishi Evo 6 down there which is a good 10 hour drive. I was excited and got up at 3:30am. I got to Steves place early and he wasn’t even up yet! Great Start! I gave him a wake up call! We threw all my gear into the race car and we were off. We had an appointed time of 2:30pm to be at the scrutineering bay and documenting by. We only just made it to the top of Mt Buller by 2pm. Steve Said” See your worrying about nothing” I said “ahuh!” It was good to be back at the top of the mountain. We took the car off the trailer and went straight to scrutineering. We went thru the fundamentals and we were all set for the next day. I was hoping to have my new race suit to show off but it wasn’t ready in time. I had brought myself some new race boots and socks as Targa is now back running under CAMS. So you need all the up to date fire retardant gear. We went off to our cabin to unpack and meet up with some other Sydneysiders. Anthony & Toni Rizzo are newlyweds and a lovely couple that were running in an early modern Subaru and are members of the WRX club. They had a big accident the year before sending the car end over end a couple of times and landing upside down in a river. They made it out with only a few bruises! This THC was there come back. They had rebuilt the car and were ready to run again.

In rally there are a few types of pace notes. You can use the road book given to you at documentation and a trip meter or you can use pace notes. With pace notes there are two main types 1-10 and 1-6 notes. The number means the grade of the corner. Spada uses 1-6 notes which I was a bit apprehensive in using. I had only used them once before at Targa Tasmania in 2010 in the Zero car. They are completely different to what I was used too and comfortable with. I have always used the 1-10 system which gives you the grade of the corner first and then which way the road goes. For example 8R into 6L into 2L into Kink followed by 10L. Where the 1-6 notes have ½ in them as well as reading like this R3 into L5 ½ into Immediate R2 and then R4 ½ . It doesn’t seem like a big change but the corner that used to be a 10 has now turned into a 6 and there are ½ in the 1-6 notes which can be hard to get out in one mouthful at times as I found out.
We decided to head down the mountain on Friday morning to get some supplies for the house. We started to head down the twisty Mt Buller Road when one of Spada ears wouldn’t become unblocked. He was trying everything! Holding his nose and blowing, Yawning, Sticking his finger in his year and yanking it out. But nothing was working and it was becoming painful! I was starting to think that Steve liked to cut everything really fine. We eventually got to the chemist and I stocked up on Kewell’s (I will tell you what they are later) and tissues and stuff and Spada got Hay fever spray and ear cleaning stuffys. We went back out to the car to try and unblock the ear. I was starting to get worried as this would hinder my driver through out the whole event! I decided as the female always does that it was starting to get serious and we were running out of time! We had to go to the doctors to get it checked and worse case scenario to the hospital! We headed off to the local surgery where they said the next appointment would be in an hour and that the doctor wouldn’t be able to do anything unless Steve had been taking ear drops for the past three days! I was like look lady we are here to Rally we need a solution. Steve asked me “Why didn’t you tell her who you were!” I was like” This is no time for jokes Steven! LOL I wasn’t happy with the answer the receptionist said to us. That’s it we are off to Emergency!” We walked in to the hospital and being a country town it wasn’t big. A lovely lady came to help us and I was a bit shocked when she asked me “Don’t I know you?” I was like “Umm don’t think so, I’m here for the Rally and I come from Sydney” The Nurse said “I’m sure I know you!” I said “Well in that case could you please help us. My Driver has a blocked ear and we are here to WIN!” The nurse said” Oh well I would love to help you but all the doctors are on call and you will need to go to the surgery” I was shattered that my story hadn’t worked. I had told the nurse of the ordeal that we had over in the surgery just a moment ago. She obliged and said the receptionist didn’t know what she was talking about and that she would ring them and get us in with the appointment and try and get Steve’s ear fixed! We said Thank you to the Nurse and asked her to come and watch us in the afternoon. It was so good to see the locals backing the event and getting involved and happy for us to be there. We went back over to the surgery and sat in the waiting room for about 30 minutes. I was starting to stress as we need to get back up the mountain and get ready for our leave time for the prologue stage. Steve was finally seen by the doctor and his ear was ok! No infection and told Steve to chew lollies or gum to unblock the ear from now on when going up or down the mountain. It’s funny how the altitude affects some people and I was hoping that was the worst thing to happen to us this weekend. Wishful thinking!

THC is made up of one Prologue stage on the Friday afternoon and then 8 stages each day on Saturday & Sunday. The prologue stage was basically the same as last year about 2.5kms long and running through the small streets of Mansfield the main town at the bottom of Mt Buller. The streets were lined with people and the hay bales were in place. Spada has a fast Evo so we were at the back of the pack with the likes of Scott Miller in his Evo 10, Tony Quinn in his other R35 GTR cause the one he normal uses is still on the boat coming back from NZ Tarmac Rally and of course the White Hot Lamborghini. The prologue stage is qualifying for the event. This gives you the line up and your start time. We raced through the prologue stage with minimal fuss. Spada was taking it easy as he hadn’t had much seat time leading up to the event so was taking his time to find his groove again. I was ok with this as it would give me time to get up to speed with the 1-6 notes. We did a pretty good time and were going to be staying up the back of the pack. Our biggest competition is Tim Hendy in his new R34 GTR and Sammy Stevens in her Evo 6. Tim usually runs a Daytona and has done very well in the past few years but he wanted to change category and class and it was going to be a battle till the end between us all.
The weather was particularly warm for Melbourne being in the high 20’s and keeping hydrated was going to be the key. The first day was only little stages with Mirimbah stage being only 6.76km long. This was the stage nearly at the bottom of Mt Buller road. We call the start of the stage “Fin’s corner” as the stage starts 50m before a R3. It’s a twisty little stage and good wake up call to what was in front of us. Then the next stage was Barwite only being 7.5kms long and I was feeling ok up to this point and thought I had the 1-6 notes under control. Boy was I wrong! The next two stages Tolmie 16.55 km and Whitfield 8.68kms I was completely lost as Spada would tell you. Half way through the Tolmie stage I lost my notes! This means that I didn’t know where I was in the book of pace notes and had to tell Spada “I was off the notes”. This was quite scary for me as it had been a long time since I had fallen off my notes. The next stage Whitfield I was no better. I start off in the first 2 minutes doing ok and then lost my notes again. I was having trouble seeing the corners as I was reading them and recognising and trying to decipher what a 3 ½ corner looked like and when you have a series of 4, 5 and even 6 corners you can loose where you are up to in the book. I was kicking myself by the end of the stage and it was time for lunch. If you didn’t already know I don’t eat much while rallying after an awful experience I had at a Dirt Rally a few years ago with Vomiting twice in a rally car. So my solution is to not eat! I have lots of water instead and use motion sickness tablets called Kewell’s. Now this system has worked for me for last few rallies I have done. But being in Spadas car was going to be a whole new challenge with the warm weather, the quick car and not eating until dinner time. All the food looked awesome at Lunch but I wasn’t game to have any. Spada sat there quite pleasantly munching away on all the great food. He said he needed it to stay focus which I can understand. We caught up with a few of our rivals to see how there were going. Spadas competition in the past has been Dowie & Bryan in an Evo 7 and Father & Son Team Perni & Perni in a Porsche. Both of these teams were sounding strong when we spoke to them at lunch I consoled in Nicole Bryan that I had come off my notes. She had told me she had done the same. I felt a little bit better after that as she is a very good navigator and has been doing it for a long time. Nicole also told me that the car was playing up and was losing power. So the only two cars we had to worry about on Day 1 was Perni and Hendy. We were about to do all the stages again on the same road backwards. The first stage was King Valley, Powers Lookout, Bridge Creek and then the best stage of the day Mt Buller!

I had told myself at lunch that I had to harden up and get a grip. Spada was also encouraging me to do better and wasn’t going to let me forget that I had fallen off my notes not only once but TWICE! The teasing went on for the rest of the day which I needed to reinforce that I could do better! Powers Lookout stage had oil on it in two different places and the bitumen surface was starting to break up. There was so much gravel and it was quite slippery that we didn’t want to risk an “Off” for the sake of a few seconds. A R35 GTR came flying up behind and I didn’t know at the time. I said Spada “Is there was something wrong?” and then I saw the R35 GTR along side and then in front of us and was gone out of sight around a corner in half a second. I was so happy to be nearly at the end of the Day 1 stages. We started transported back to the Mt Buller stage. I could hear a helicopter and ignored it for about 10 minutes as it wasn’t unusual to have that noise around as the helicopter often flies in and out of stages filming the cars! But it was a constant noise I asked Spada “Can you hear the helicopter?” Spada said “Yes I can” and we both started looking in our mirrors and over our shoulder to find it. Well this went on for about 5 minutes. I looked to my right and could see above the driver’s rear window the weather shield was flapping madly and I said to Spada. “I can see something flapping lets pull over and race tape it down and hope it’s that! Cause if it’s not then its going to be something mechanical!” Which we both didn’t want! We taped it down and started driving again… Guess what! It wasn’t the weather shield flapping! We knew it was more serious. We got to the start of the Mt Buller stage and pulled over to the left out of the way to check the car. Yep sure enough we had cracked the driver’s side rear rotor. Right on one of the slots and it wasn’t just a facial crack it went through the whole disc. Spada solution to this was to get up the mountain as quick as he could before it got worse, I laughed. But do you think he was kidding!!!! NO!!! We did the fastest time up the mountain than anyone else in our category. We did it in 2:02 we even beat the Porsche that was leading our category up the mountain by 4 seconds! I was blown away and Spada said to me at the end “Told you it was my mountain!” We went off to replace the two rear rotors for the next day!

I awoke on Sunday morning with a clearer head of what I was tackling and a more focused approach. It was going to be bigger stages and more challenging roads. The field of Targa cars was still looking strong with hardly any crashes or mechanical failures on Day 1. We headed off to Parc Ferme to prep the car and fill our water bottles. We were greeted by Paul Dowie to hear that his car was not going to be competing he had a diff issue and he was out of the rally. We lined up and slowly started making our way down to the Time Control to be released to head off for the first stage Mirimbah. We were greeted near the Time Control by Perni to tell us they were probably out of the Rally due to the Porsche’s central locking system going berserk on the passenger door and not unlocking .This is unsafe and a risk for the navigator if there is a fire or a crash and he couldn’t get out of the car. So it was down to us, Hendy and Stevens to battle it out to see who would get Second and Third Place. We knew First place was out of reach as a Harbord Porsche’s had been flying through the stages. It was hard to believe as we hadn’t seen the car once on Day 1 or even in the initial line up. It’s as if he came out of no where. But the driver has a circuit racing background so he knows how to drive.
Day 2 stages were Mirimbah, Jamison which is about 13kms then the Big River stage which is 31kms long and the longest stage in THC! After that is the Skyline stage which was only about 8kms long and then lunch. I was dreading the Big River Stage and Sunday was proving to be the hottest day out of the whole competition. We flew through Mirimbah and Jamison Stages but Stevens was gaining on us and Spada wanted to make up some time. Then it was time for the Big River stage. I was absolutely delighted to see the officials had made another sign at the Time Control to greet me! I gave them all a big smile and wave to say Thank you!

I had managed to stay on my notes through out the whole day even with the way I was feeling. I think the heat and lack of food was starting to take a toll. Plus I was putting immense pressure on myself not to mess up again! By the end of skyline I was feeling very light head and glad to see it was the Lunch Break. We parked the car and I went for a walk to get some air and stretch my legs. I was pumping the water in to me and had half a sandwich to see if that would help. I even took some more Kewell’s to settle my stomach. I started to feel better after about 10 minutes and went to sit down on the table with Jim Richards, Barry Oliver, A mustang driver and Spada. Me being my up front self I asked the drivers including Jim if they had seen the sign at the start of the Big River Stage?? They had all said Yes, We were wondering who that was! I then went on to tell them that it was me they were referring to. Jim Richard piped up and said have you just had Twins? I politely told him “No, I haven’t Jim they are ref erring too”…..and I looked down at my chest! The boys started to laugh and said “Oh the Puppies “I smiled and started to laugh with them. I said the officials are very funny and are friends of mine from when I was in the Zero Car at Targa Tasmania. It was a bit of highlight for us to have a laugh with Jim. One of the THC officials started to walk over to us all sitting on the table and told us there was no rush to leave as the first two stages after lunch have had problems and we would be leaving later than the time they first gave us initially. We all got up and started to walk over to our cars to prep them for the final stages of the event. It was 5 minutes later that we were giving the ok to leave. We discovered that were starting to have a fuel pump issue as they were getting extremely noisy and started to cut out intermittently on left hand corners. We needed the Evo to last to the end. Spada started to nurse the car a little to try and help it make it to the end. The Skyline2 stage had a massive line up to start. Even with the break and the extra time we waited. The helicopter was flying over head and we gave them a wave. A driver and navigator in a WRX a few cars back from us started break dancing on the road for the Helicopter film crew! We went to stand in the shade and talk to the locals that had come out of there houses to see the rally cars. The Vanderbergs are Targa veterans and have traded there Evo 9 in for a sponsored Mazda Rx8. Spada thought it would be funny to stir me up by getting there attention. These are the guys that wrote the notes I was using and didn’t like very much. So I called Spada bluff and when Simon came over to us I told him I didn’t like the 1-6 notes very much! Spada wasn’t that impressed and was a bit shocked I had said it….I was like you dared me! The Vanderberg’s had been having issue the whole two days with boost leaks and intercooler pipes blowing off. We let them in front of us as Spada doesn’t like the pressure and it can be a bit hard on some stages with cars coming up so fast behind you and you not seeing them and then they whizz past you as if you are standing still.

The line was starting to move and we were creeping up to our turn. We started and it was fast and the surface was starting to break up on these stages as well the gravel didn’t seem to matter to much on Day 2. We flew through it and started the count down. We had 3 stages to go and both of us were not looking forward to Eildon which is Big River Backwards. We found that there was a massive line up again but all the cars were quiet. A serious accident must have happened. I heard cars coming from behind us and was a bit baffled as all the competitors were in the line. It was FIV vehicles and ambulance that were heading to Time Control. We were one of the last cars in the line and only half of the competitors had done the Eildon stage so far. We had been standing there for at least 5 minutes when we got the call that they were making the stage a drive through as it was going to take to long to clear the accident. Spada and I jumped into the car and were a little relieved that we didn’t have to do the big stage. It was a parade of cars all going about 50kms an hour until we got to the wreak. A R34 GTR had come in to hot into a corner and lost control and speared into an embankment and ended up landing on its side. The Navigator and Driver where both taken to hospital with non life threatening injuries. The Car was a write off nearly every panel on it was damaged and was covered in fire extinguisher dust as it had caught on fire also. There were only two stages to go Mount Terrible and Mount Buller. The Fuel pumps where getting noisier as we transported to the second to last stage. We breezed through the stage even passing the Vanderbergs on it as they had problems again with boost leaks. It always gives you a little bit of a thrill passing someone on a stage. It means your fast haha!

So it was time to transport to the last stage. The transport was at least 50kms and the fuels pumps where whinging like two mosquitoes trying to wrestle in a tin can. We were nearly there, nearly at the bottom of the stage and we had the fast guys just behind us and the sweep car! We stopped just before the Time Control and turned the car off to get suited up and helmets on and to give the fuel pumps a rest. The officials were pushing us to line up but we weren’t ready! Spada went to turn on the car. He has two switches that he has to switch up and then push the button to start. This is all because a service crew member once took off with a driver’s keys to the rally car and he lost the rally because he couldn’t get in to his car let alone start it. But what do you think happened next. We were so close to the end, the times were in seconds of one another!The switch that turns the fuel pumps on Broke! Spada was flicking it like a mad man but it was limp, there was nothing! We still had the officials calling us to the line! Spada yells to me to open the glove box and get the race tape out. He wrestled with the switch panel to try and get it off to check out what has happened with the wiring behind and if we could hot wire it. The officials said the cars are leaving in one minute intervals instead of 30 seconds but you have to hurry! We madly scrambled to hot wire the fuel pumps. Spada gets the two wires and touches them together we have Mosquitoes!!!!! Yay!!! I madly rip off pieces of duct tape to tape the wires together and out of the way. We get strapped in and line up with only moments to spare. We only had 3 cars behind us plus the sweep! We started and the first part of the Mt Buller stage is very high speed. Spada was on a mission to make up time and to get to the top before anything else can go wrong! I was calling a 5R and I panicked that Spada didn’t hear me I said it again 5R but he wasn’t slowing. I then call “Woah!” Spada told me off for saying “Whoa” and he was right I get a bit nervous with the high speed stuff as the 5R isnt that anymore if you don’t slow down enough. We pushed on up the mountain. I stayed on my notes and we even passed a car on the way up. We came in to the last corner a TL3 so hot that the EVO was understeering the whole way around the corner. I was crossing my fingers that it would finally grip and take us to the flying finish and we wouldn’t be side swiping the stone wall on the driver’s side. The crowd loved it thought we were spectacular drifting on the last corner. We made it through to the flying finish and to control to be told immediately to follow the official and line up in the Scrutineering Bay. Of course after the massive push we made up the hill and turning the car off instantly. The temperature went through the roof and spewed out half of its coolant. The thermo fans suddenly decided they didn’t want to work either and Spada had to plead with them to come on. Steve had lost an engine before like this and didn’t want it to happen again! It was such a relief to finish! I had done much better on Day 2 but the funniest news was yet to come! Who placed where?? Did Hendy beat us? It took the officials at least 20 minutes to sort out the times. While we were waiting the last few cars that were behind us where coming in. The White Hot Lamborghini was on Fire! They had an oil leak that day but thought it was fixed. It sparked on the last bit of the Mt Buller Stage and came up the mountain to the TL3 in a blaze of fire out the back end! By the time it reaches the Scrutineering Bay it was a smouldering mess. The driver and navigator where in high spirits despite the face they just had one of the most expensive BBQs around and laughing about the experience to the TV Crew interviewing them.

The Times were announced the Porsche was in First Place!
Tim Hendy was in Second Place!
Spada and Nicholson were in Third Place!

What was the difference in time you ask…….1 SECOND! We were off SECOND PLACE BY 1 SECOND!
Tim couldn’t believe it and either could we! We all shook hands and congratulated each other. It was time for the podium and a big first for me! I finally have a Targa Plate and a Medal to say I finished!!

Stay Tuned for more Adventures from Spada and me as we will be taking the Evo to Targa Wrest Point in Late January!