The 14th Make Smoking History Targa South West has been run and won with the event’s new format proving a success over the weekend.
 
A strong field of 30 crews were entered in the popular event, which was run as two separate rallysprints in and around the picturesque town of Pemberton.
 
Proving a dominant force for the whole day were Mark Cates and Bernie Webb, with the duo steering their Porsche 911 GT2 RS to a clean sweep of wins in all 16 runs.
 
With the event split in two, Cates and Webb ended up winning the morning’s rallysprint by 31 seconds over Will White and Steph Esterbauer in their Nissan GTR Nismo, before repeating the result in the afternoon.


While the top two for each rallysprint were the same, the crew making up the top three changed in each session, with Bill and Glenys Stagoll third overall in the morning and Subaru Impreza WRX STI Spec C pilots Doug Tostevin and Dan Adam third in the afternoon.
 
Although it was Competition Modern cars who occupied the top three in each rallysprint, a number of other competition leaders posted times in the outright top five.
 
Winning the Shannons Classic Component for both the morning and afternoon rallysprints were Paul Moltoni and Lisa Read White with the duo also steering their Porsche 911 RS to fourth outright in the morning.


Targa 165 competition winners Ben Pang and Brandon Chin were also highly competitive from an outright point of view as they ended up fifth in both the morning and the afternoon.
 
It was a similar story in the Targa 130 competition with Tesla 3 drivers Nigel Ball and Morgan Ward on top of the time sheets in both rallysprints.


Click here to view the full results.
 
The next Targa West event will be the fourth round of the Shannons Targa Rallysprint on 30 March.