By David MacDonald R obert, the Targa events in New Zealand and Tasmania are definitely big bucket list items for motorsports enthusiasts around the world. When did it click for you that Newfoundland was a logical home for this world-famous, world-class racing event? The first Targa Newfoundland event took place in 2002, and it all came together because of a friend of mine, Doug Mepham, who went off to Targa Tasmania in 2001. He went over there with a Volvo, which had the unlikely name of Margaret after his mother, and he took Jim Kenzie of the Toronto Star, an automobile reporter and one of the co-founders of Targa Newfoundland alongside myself and Doug, with him as a navigator. He came back and he phoned me and said that he had sent me a package and that I had to go read it. It was an article by Kenzie in the Toronto Star about their adventures at Targa Tasmania. I read the story and called Doug back and said, ‘What the hell is going on, anyway?’ Then he described the event himself and what he had in mind. Now I’ve been racing cars a long time; I started racing cars before the beginning of time, but suffice it to say it was about 1960 when I first started racing cars – actually it was ’59. I raced cars until the 80s, until I decided I had to make a living for myself. I took-up sailboat racing for a while, but I got tired freezing to death and dealing with too much wind or not enough wind or too much rain. I was reluctant to go back to racing cars because honestly what made me lose interest was how puerile racing was getting. You know: the perfect tracks and the perfect cars. Good racing is the old Trans Am days.
the event, was simple: It was about real roads, and real cars; it was people fulfilling a dream.
Anyway, long story short, I got myself together and went off to Tasmania because it woke something up in me. I spent about three weeks there and basically came back with the event. I purchased the rights, brought it back here, and the next year we had our first event. What was that first year like for Targa Newfoundland, Robert? How we ever ran it I don’t know and I haven’t a clue because of all the rules. There are literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rules and regulations and they’re written only in a way that Australians can write – and I say this with a light heart: If we can’t say it in 100 words, we’ll say it in a thousand. It was a lot to learn in a short time to say the least – but we knew it was worth it in every way. In Tasmania, they’e built the event into a 20 million dollar industry annually. It’s now the biggest sporting event in Tasmania and one of the biggest in all of Australia. The Australian federal and state and municipal governments really get it. They sit down together and they say, ‘OK, we like this, how can we get together and make this better?’ They’ve really grown the event. Did the provincial government in Newfoundland see the same potential in the event? When I got back here fromTasmania in 2001, I went to Premier Roger Grimes and spoke to him about the whole thing. He looked at it and more or less said, ‘Everyone needs an income; maybe this can bring some money in and generate some general revenue for the people of Newfoundland.’ I
What drew me to Tasmania, what made me fall in love with
“We use about six or seven hundred volunteers for Targa.”
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • AUGUST 2017
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