Jim Kenzie's The Driver's Seat: April 2011

What an incredible collection of cars they have for this event!

Under just ONE set of trees today, was my first-ever car, a Fiat 600 (actually, it's the light blue 850 Abarth, above, but it has the same body shell as mine ); my second-ever car, a Volvo PV544 (the dark blue car above ahead of the Fiat); my third-ever car, a Volvo 122 (this one, again, light blue right, a sedan; I had a wagon); and my fourth-ever car, a yellow-with-red-and-blue-stripes BMW 2002 right beside the Volvo 122 (well, my fourth-ever car if you don't count a bunch of Minis, all of which were either race cars or thinly-disguised parts cars for race cars).

We say in our business that you know you're getting old when you go to a vintage car meet and see a car whose press preview you attended. This was pretty close to Old Home Week for me.

Our Mazda RX-7 seemed to be running OK on the transit up to George Town where the Prologue stage was to take place.

But in the run itself - a tight, twisty town stage - every time Doug revved past 5,500 r.p.m., there was a huge BANG!! and a backfire, which was not only very disconcerting, but slowed us considerably.

We limped through the stage, and back to Launceston, where the service crew fell about the car.

It is typical of today's cars - even, or maybe especially, race cars - that one chap, a rotary engine tuning specialist, hooked the car up to a laptop computer to diagnose the problem.

The collective conclusion was that somehow, a rev limiting function had been programmed in at a very low (for a rotary engine) r.p.m. limit.

The crew think they've got it sussed - we'll see tomorrow when we start the rally for real.

To those lucky enough to have witnessed Targa Newfoundland first-hand, this photo might look familiar.

Only bigger.

That's because this is The Silverdome - not the one in Pontiac Michigan, but a velodrome in Launceston Tasmania, the day before the Prologue (practice) stage of the 20th Anniversary Targa Tasmania car rally.

Belleville-based PR executive Doug Mepham and I did the 10th running of the five-day Tasmanian rally, the Granddaddy of all vintage-car tarmac rallies, back in 2001.

We had so much fun the germ of the idea for Targa Newfoundland popped into our diseased little brains.

Eighteen months later, thanks to the efforts of Bob Giannou from St. John's and literally thousands of volunteers - and we cannot forget the tolerance and hospitality of thousands more Newfoundlanders - we had our first Targa Newfoundland.

2011 marks the 10th Anniversary of the Newfoundland event, and Doug thought it would be a nice sort of squaring-of-the-circle if we went back and did Tasmania again.

So here we are.

Rather than ship a car down here - it is horrendously expensive - he decided to rent one. It's a 1995 Mazda RX-7 Twin-Turbo, a Japanese-spec lightweight edition of a car that we already knew was plenty fast.

Did I mention Tas is like Newfoundland only bigger? There are some 340-plus entries here (compared to 70 - 90 for a typical Targa Newfoundland) of which maybe 280 are entered in the high-speed competition. The rest - typically older vehicles - do what is called "The Tour"; they run the same course but not at speed.

The machinery here is truly amazing. While the organizers make special efforts to attract vintage cars, there are plenty of modern cars here too. Tons of Porsche 911s, in various forms. Nissan GT-Rs. A surprisingly large smattering of American muscle - Corvettes, a new Camaro, a new Dodge Challenger, boatloads of Mustangs, including one built and run by Australia's Len and Gayle Cattlin who brought another Mustang to the first Targa Newfoundland - and won it!

All sorts of Aussie cars of course - Holdens, Australian Fords, even at least one 'ute'.

Some true exotics, like a brace of Lamborghini Gallardos, several Ferraris, and the Jensen CV8 belonging to now-retired but still world-renowned racing yacht builder Peter Ullrich.

Porsche often sends a few special cars - and drivers - to this event. The last time I saw former World Rally Champion Walter Rohrl, he was giving me rides in a Cayman R and a 904 GTS at a race track in Mallorca Spain. This week, he's here running a 911 SC which he drove in the San Remo (Italy) Rally in 1981, accompanied as he was then by co-driver Christian Geistdorfer.

Porsche has also dusted off a fabulous 908/2 roadster for Klaus Bischoff, the curator of their museum, and the 718 RS 60 Spyder which won the true original "Targa" event, the Targa Florio road race in Sicily. Here, it will be helmed by Bernd Ostmann, editor-in-chief of Germany's top auto magazine, Auto Motor und Sport.

I've barely scraped the surface.

I hope to be able to post semi-regularly on our progress during this event.

For more details, visit the Targa Tasmania web site.