Vernon, from Ramarama south of Auckland, will drive four stages of the event, drift-style, as pioneered more than 25 years ago now by ‘the father’ of the sport, Japanese legend Keiichi Tsuchiya.
Tsuchiya (shu-she-wa) was an accomplished professional racing driver who started throwing his cars around in lurid opposite lock slides to entertain the crowds. The style caught on amongst street racers who sped up and down the many canyon (touge) roads in the hills behind the country’s major cities and towns.
So popular did it become that Tsuchiya and motoring magazine and DVD publisher Daijiro Inada started organising dedicated events. Single passes were soon joined by judged tandem ‘battles’ and the sport of drifting was born.
Vernon, who runs the family’s earth moving and contracting business, won the D1NZ Drifting Championship Pro-Am title at his first attempt two years ago but since then has stepped back from the Cody’s D1NZ series to focus on other projects.
One is to try and get other drifters to join him in running demos with the ultimate goal of creating a special ‘open/anything goes’ category at road-based events like the Targa New Zealand tarmac motor rally.
“What I’d like to see is a cross-over category where drifters can bring their skills to other motorsport events. We’ve had several guys try their hand at drifting club hillclimb courses but so far I’m the only one who has had the cheek to ask Peter Martin if I could drift whole stages of his Targa event.
As it turns out, Martin – the man behind the Targa North Island and Targa New Zealand events – is well versed in drifting ‘lore’ and welcomed Vernon’s first attempt – at the Targa Bambina event – two years ago.
“We called it T4T, Touge for Targa’ and the feedback we got from entrants and spectators could not have been better,” says Martin.
This weekend Vernon will drift four stages, one from Coromandel over the range to Te Rerenga on Friday, two – the new Pumpkin Hill and existing Whiritoa stages – on the Coromandel Peninsula on Saturday, and a final one, Hamurana which skirts the top of Lake Rotorua, on Sunday.
The first time he tried emulating Japan’s original touge warriors Vernon drove a 2.9 litre 6-cylinder Nissan Skyline and didn’t give a thought to the time it would take him to complete the stage. Keeping the car sideways and the tyres producing plenty of smoke were his main priorities.
This time he will be behind the wheel of a recently purchased 400 cu. in. 6.7-litre V8-engined Nissan S15, a car in which he believes he can cover – sideways in clouds of tyre smoke – the stages in either very close to or the same times as regular Targa competitors will using a more conventional approach to cornering.
“Before I drove this car I would have said we’d be a little bit off the mark, but now that I have I think we can be competitive, put it that way,” he said.
The new, three-day, Targa North Island event starts on Friday at the Simunovich Olive Estate high in the Bombay Hills south of Auckland at 8.35am and ends on Rotorua’s Eat Street (opposite the Village Green) on Sunday at 4.10pm on Sunday May 18.
In-between the 74 competition and 26 associated Targa Tour cars will cover 457kms of closed special stages and 840.0 kms of touring kilometres.
Vernon will get his own slot in proceedings and will use his considerable skills – as well as a ute tray full of brand new tyres, some which will produce purple smoke, and a special 35 litre water tank and automatic sprayer unit to help keep the car’s radiator cool! – to cover as many of the 61.19kms of special stage he will attempt, sideways.
The Targa North Island event has been organised with the support of sponsors Ecolight, Federal motorsport tyres, Global Security, Gull, Instra Corporation, Kids In Cars, Metalman, NZ Classic Car magazine, Race Brakes, TeamTalk, TrackIt, VTNZ and Woolrest Biomag.
For more information on the event go to www.targa.co.nz. Stage maps and road closure times are also printed in the latest issue (May 2014) of New Zealand Classic Car magazine.
