Whatever happened to...Targa Rusticana?

[TorontoTim]

Back in the early 90's, there used to be a number of Day/Night/Sunday morning rallies every year - the greatest of which was probably the Targa Rusticana (although there were others: Welsh Rally Retro, Bristowe, Illuminations to name three).

 

These used to get huge entry lists - I have an entry list from 1993 with 120 cars in the Targa - and they ran all day Saturday with a mixture of tests and regularities; for several hours overnight at a constant 30mph average; and finish on Sunday morning with more tests.

 

Did they run out of organisers? Become too expensive? Fall foul of bad PR? Or what?

 

Just curious, really. MAN they were good events!!

[Dazzer]

Hi Tim

 

I don't know but looks like a hell of an event. Just done a quick search and Tony (TR4Tony) has done the event previously he might have a better idea what happened to it when he returns from the Rally of the Tests. Lots of names on the later Targa Rusticana's 2005 who now participate in the HRCR series.

 

Cheers

Darren

[Nigel 628]

Many of these famous old rallies went back much further than the 90's, Tim; I was doing events like the Illuminations and the Oslo Trophy, Y Rali Gogledd Cymru and the Cambrian Rally in North Wales in the seventies, some were rounds of the famous Motoring News Championship. They all had huge entries and seemed to get away with almost anything! Often it was a challenge just to complete the route and get to the finish without going OTL or worse going off the road, especially when you were novices.

 

My first all night road rally after cutting my teeth on 12-cars (themselves hard and fast in those days!) was as an impoverished student in a near-standard MG1100 on the 1972 Rallye Escafeld in Derbyshire, a well-known rallying county almost equaling the famous Welsh lanes and long before the current killjoys slapped 50 limits on almost every open road. Well known but not one of the biggest rallies, it nevertheless had an entry of nearly 200 cars (yes! I was car 144, I still have the fading B&W photos!!) and the route was 240 miles of the toughest lanes, including just about every 'white' in the county. I was very thankful my car at least had a sumpguard, you just couldn't compete in a road rally in those days without one. There were lots of 'selectives', long sections of country lanes timed to the second and to faster average speeds than the normal navigational sections and all having a 'bogey' time which even the fastest cars could rarely beat. Being summer, we naturally drove on well into daylight and finished with three 'special tests' on private forest tracks which were special stages in all but name.

 

I always had concerns over competing on public roads (I still do) so eventually moved on to stages in 1974 with a Mini; the Shunpiker Rally was another famous road rally of the era which made the change to the stages. After 1976 I had stopped doing road rallies but did go back to a 1978 event in my stage prepared Vauxhall Magnum for old times' sake with an old rallying mate - we retired at half-way when he threw up and was too unwell to continue, but by then I was so scared at the speeds we were doing on public roads it became the only time ever that I was actually relieved to retire from a rally! I never did another road rally until starting historic events in the TR4 in 2010. The problem was that escalation in the competitive nature of road rallies had led to the events, and the top crews getting ever faster, and by the eighties we had fully-signwritten ex-works Escort BDA's, Chevette HS's, and even 300bhp TR7V8's blasting round the lanes at breakneck speeds. Let's be honest; if you came to a cross roads in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night, and slowed down for the Give Way, you immediately lost a huge chunk of time to the other crew who took a chance, crossed fingers and flew across flat out without lifting. Don't ask how I know, it wasn't talked about but you can bet it happened regularly. Especially if there were spectators there waving them on. The RAC had to do something and they did, it all got banned, the regulations were changed to place the emphasis on navigation instead of speed before the inevitable tragedy happened. Motoring News pulled out, probably not wanting to be associated with impending disaster but I think unwilling to continue with a championship which would be a shadow of it's former self. I have to admit, watching the top crews in the lanes at 3am on Motoring News rallies in the eighties made for an exciting night's spectating, and brought people out in droves - you'd have to arrive early to get a good spot at any of the well-known hairpins! But this is where the MSA's apparent PR obsession with the general public's perception of rally cars on public roads originates from, and their current attitude to road rally cars' appearance.

 

Many of the big rallies made the change to stages (I did the Cambrian three years in succession, 1976 as a Motoring News road rally, '77 and '78 on the Welsh forest stages) or they stayed on the roads and conformed to the new rules. Some are still around nowadays but have embraced the rise in popularity of historic regularity rallies. I can't comment on the progress of the road rally scene over the nineties as I'd by then made the swap over to offroad racing. (Road rallies became too dangerous for me followed by too boring, and stages had moved away from the cheap events and started to get too pricey!) In fact, if I hadn't written off my Bowler Wildcat and taken too long to rebuild it I probably wouldn't have bought the TR4 to keep me entertained until it was ready and gone back into rallying.....and no, the Wildcat still isn't finished!

 

Ah, memories; the older I get the faster I was as they say, but dangerous or not, those seventies road rallies were something else!!!

 

Nigel

Edited November 12, 2012 by Nigel 628

[TorontoTim]

Nigel,

 

Fantastic memories and insight - many thanks!!! I was aware of the history of all this, but having an account from someone who was there back in the 70's is completely different from the, understandably, sanitised versions that only hint at dark happenings ;-)

 

Even though I only competed on some of these events in the late 80's and early-mid 90's when they were historic rallies, those night sections were pretty tough and I know I was driving as fast as I dared down the Welsh, West Country and other lanes. We were all warned that there would be "judges of fact" at select give-ways etc. so at least we stopped for those...! I only ever managed a single "clean" on a night leg and they were pretty rare - but we didn't have the full-on stage rally escorts etc. competing then (far too new ).

 

Maybe the historic versions of the Targa, Bristowe etc. just morphed into the Rally of the Tests and Le Jog to keep everything interesting and moving forward...

 

Happy days...

[Nigel 628]

You're probably right, Tim. I knew a lot of drivers who lost interest when the events became navigational, and either moved on to stages or gave up competing altogether. Many had no choice as their expensive cars were suddenly no longer legal for road rallies. This would have contributed to reduced entries and probably some degree of amalgamation of events in order to avoid extinction. However a lot of navigators continued competing on the roads as their role became more crucial to the crew's success, especially on regularity rallies, whereas they became little more than a 'sack of spuds' on stage rallies - at least until pace notes came into common use. I think it's still true to say that whilst a good navigator can win a road rally for his driver, it's the driver who wins a stage rally - although the navigator can still lose it for his driver!

 

Interestingly, we are seeing a bit of a repetition of history as modern non-regularity road rallies have crept up in power and speed as car technology improves; the Welsh lanes are in the thick of it again as the MSA is striving to reduce the speeds and PR problems of the predominant lightening fast Escorts with special 2.4 engines by introducing more rules effectively banning their use.

 

We have also seen the regular cancelling of events this year from lack of entries - although this time it's the recession to blame!!

 

Nigel

Edited November 12, 2012 by Nigel 628

[TR24178]

I competed on Targa, Bristowe, Lummies, Welsh Retro, Tour of Wales and Leukemia when it had a night leg (which we won, the only car clean) and a few pure night events like Gremlin and Peak Revs. But the HRCR series gradually moved away from events with night sections, to rallies with tricky tests and long boring regularity, we found the stages more to our liking, but I miss those historic night events, Welsh Retro and Leukemia in particular, a long night section thru Crychan and Halfway Forest the blind brows of the Epynt ranges, these private roads felt safer than the lanes. On the Targa I remember folks watching from their gardens having a midnight BBQ and cheering us on, but the PR was hard work for the organizers and with so many bloody nimbies who would not relent for 1 rally every 3 years, my neighbor is one, making routes difficult except in the remotest parts of Wales.

Now my back can't take the perpetual hammering of the gravel stages anymore, I quite fancy doing a few historic night events if they were out there!!

[MichaelH]

There are lots of night rallies that are quite fast and rough enough for a TR in the derbyshire dales - we spent a year starting at midnight and finishing at 6 am with a mid distance petrol stop on Saturday night Sunday morning. It was not good for the car and we gave up because it totalled a weekend. If you go on to the EMAMC site and look up night road rallies. I am sure we never managed to complete a rally without cutting somwhere. I don't come from the group of people that rallied through the 80s and 90s and may be our skills were not good enough but we recently repeated it- doing the Mercian from Daventry to Warwick overnight. Again we ran OTL and it was not for lack of trying. So the answer is that there are lots of events to go and do and I am sure that a good navigator and good driver will do well even in a TR. Good Luck

Regards

Michael

]

[DavidBee]

I'm joining a long defunct conversation. What? Seven years later. But still, very interesting to hear from people who rallied in the 1970s and 1980s. I was just wondering today what happened to the Targa Rusticana event. I took part in 1990 in my Triumph TR2 OGB 800, formerly sprinted by Stuart Jenkins who ran a restoration shop somewhere in the north of England, from whom I bought it in 1986. The car was dodgy. Once at a roundabout the gearstick came off. It had been spot welded, I think. Another time, when I was going to Le Mans with other TR members, while we were on a motorway in France doing a ton, the headlights went out. The South African co-driver was cool as a cucumber: he wiggled the wiring under the dash, the lights came back on and we were fine.

The Targa was brilliant. Loads of tests, night driving and what an atmosphere. It was great fun, exhilarating, actually. My navigator was John Lehane, who rebuilt his father's long door TR2 which had burnt out in a fire in the 1970s. I loved the dark Welsh lanes, tiny crossroads, but I must say I think my driving improved because of the self-discipline I learned from rallying. I was a member of the Oxford Group of the TR Register and Simon egged me on to compete in the Circuit of Ireland Retrospective, which he'd done in his TR 4 the previous year. So I went on to compete in that, but alas, had to retire, owing to a crash two thirds the way round. I found a little solace in the Oxford Car Club after that, in a Standard 8 with only 60,000 miles on the clock and its, I think, original, 1955 tyres.