Lotus Cleans up at Targa Tasmania 2019

Well our first Targa Tasmania competition has been done and dusted.

By Darryl Ringuet.

Fellow LCQ members, Tony and Sandra Seymour, made the trek with Mitchell “Hollywood” Ringuet and myself from Brisbane to Tasmania towing our V6 Exiges down to compete in our first GT Sports Trophy Targa Tasmania.

All up we travelled 5300km of normal driving and recce, 1440km of touring stages, and 483 of high speed Targa stages, 7223km in total. What a fortnight! Mitchell and myself got 2nd in GT Sports Trophy, with Tony and Sandra getting a third place. Lotus locked out the podium in GT Sports Trophy with Steve Sher and Fergal Murphy taking out first place. Martin Duursma and Richard Woodhams, last year’s GT Sports Trophy winners, came in 5th place, the competition was very close with most stages having only a few seconds between 1st and 5th place, and all of the V6 Lotus guys winning a stage at one point. Lotus also took out 1st overall and 1st in GT2 by the talented Paul Stokell and Kate Catford, and 3rd in GT2 and 4th overall by Jeff Morton and Daymon Nicoli.

In TSD Peter and Tristan Taylor led TSD off and on all week and were narrowly pipped on the last day by the very experienced Marshall brothers team, they came a very well earned second place. Also in TSD were Rob Bryden and Ian Noble in their very first Targa Tasmania TSD competition, but for one stage where things went haywire they would have been on the podium in third place. Both Lotus teams in TSD had multiple zero point stages over the six days and both almost cracked the perfect day of zero points, a feat yet to be achieved at Targa Tasmania.

A huge thanks from both Tony and myself to Chris and his team at Automotion for all the prep work they did on our cars to make sure they ran faultlessly. Another huge thanks to the crew from Simply Sports Cars for looking after us and our cars for the entire six days of Targa Tasmania.

In the national Targa Championship Tony and Sandra lead our class with Mitch and myself hot on their heels in second place, Steve and Fergal in fourth place, and Martin and Richard in fifth. Paul and Kate are leading outright, with Jeff and Damon in Sixth outright, in TSD Peter and Tristan are leading with Rob and Ian in second place. Overall Lotus are the dominant brand of car at Targa this year and all the teams are doing the community proud.

As a footnote Hollywood actually drove down with me; somehow he managed to fly home from Hobart to leave me driving back alone again. At least I got to bring back his dirty washing and smelly race suit, thanks son.