My Race Car is on Display at Nissan Canada HQ

Mar 17 2015

Rememeber that time I was a factory driver for Nissan, and competed in Targa Newfoundland Rally 2014?

My car is on display in front of Nissan’s Canadian headquarters.

Blog tag = Targa, updated daily during the race

Wrote a column about it – “Screaming through Newfoundland’s Suburbs” – here

The suburbs looked like this.

It’s a 2015 Nissan Micra, blog tag here.

It performed great nothing broke, it was manual, even coined a term to describe the Micra, “it’s a Car-Car.”

My co-driver and a favourite human, Michel Crepault.

Rally math.

In the zone.

All this was typed with a massive grin.

Screaming through Newfoundland’s Suburbs

Oct 8 2014

That time I was a factory driver for Nissan in the week-long
2014 Targa Newfoundland Rally.

I blogged everyday while competing, here’s the blog tag – Targa

Read it online at Autonet.

Favourite line:

Imagine a historic town is shut down and roped off into a complex driving course. You drive through it as fast as you can, the police don’t care, and you do this 10 times a day. That’s Targa Newfoundland.

Total video-game courses.

Thank you sincerely, to the people of Newfoundland, for opening your province and allowing me to almost smash into your homes.

I had the best co-driver, Michel Crepault; we were an excellent match.

See, math camp:

The Micra was stock; I kicked the crap out of it and it was fine.

Enter the lowest class.. there’s no competition, you just get to take advantage of the closed roads in your own car.

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Back to ‘Keri on Driving’ – Index

Targa Rally Day 9 – Complete!

Sep 19 2014

Done! I finished!

Sounds kinda weak I know, but it’s not. Plus I didn’t crash the car, imagine relaying that news to Nissan.

Like a veteran competitor said to me, “no one will understand what you’ve done and their eyes will glaze over when you try to explain”, and I’ve already experienced that… so I’ll sum it up as: how often have I ever said something’s hard? Exactly. And I’d do it again (in the Targa category though, that’s enough math.)

This is being typed from the celebration dinner, here come some photos, including my finishers medal! I drove 85% of the 2,200 km race and we finished with a perfect score: a 0 on Brigus.

Flying home tomorrow, bet I sleep till Monday, and I’ll back-date and beef up the past few posts soon.

Targa Rally Day 8 – Dream Driving Day No Dramatics

Sep 18 2014

A rare clear blue sky for 9 unreal stages, one of which I can’t wait to show you the video… a 300 year old town, all roped off, real narrow streets and turns every tenth of a kilometre.

I accumulated so many points because I floored it the whole time instead of trying to maintain the average speed. I crossed the finish line laughing so hard my head was in the steering wheel.

We are holding down a fun last place and that’s okay, genuinely. In school they said, “none of you will win, just try to finish”, and it’s me so I was all PHFT. But they were right and that’s what we’ll do tomorrow, so I have to go finish the math for that and will leave you with a bunch of pics from today until I can get home and properly fill you in.

Targa is really hard and really worth worth it.

TTYT

Targa Rally Day 8 – What a Rally Really Looks Like

Sep 17 2014

The first photo – doing math. There’s so. much. math.

We bounced back today, zero-d many stages, still in 5th place though, Targa is tough. And a very mental game.

Back to the hotel by 6pm, combed my hair then we had a special event at a local Nissan dealer: Come meet the Nissan team and enjoy a BBQ.

Then what you see below. That’s Michel and I doing the timing calculations for tomorrow’s 10 races, and that’s why I’m saying good night and will update you properly soon.

Oh and one of the today’s races was right through a town that looked like a movie set (got video), and tried a handbrake on a hairpin and almost pulled it off. Almost. Still tried!

TTYT