Chilly day, warm welcome at Targa Tasmania

It's a case of rock 'n' roll for ROB SHAW aboard The Examiner's Targa entry. IF they had lips, the seagulls at St Helens would have been licking them yesterday. When a multi-million dollar fleet of gleaming paintwork rolled into town, nature's resident painters and decorators were squawking among themselves as to who could deposit on the most expensive. Seagulls aside, there was another warm reception on another chilly day for the Targa Tasmania competitors. Day two treated Ben Lomond as a giant snow-capped roundabout as the cars headed over the Sideling and Weldborough Pass to the East Coast and back via Avoca before penning another chapter in that lengthy motor-sport tome that is Longford. It was another opportunity to witness the happiness of countless spectators and I can report that the children of St Marys District High School may need to be excused from PE this week, such was the effort they put into some ferocious waving. It was also another chance to wallow in the unique pleasure of navigating to Launceston's Dave Hannan on board The Examiner and National Automobile Museum of Tasmania's Targa entry. I say unique because, while there may be other people on the planet who share Dave's joint passions for vintage motor-sport and geology, there surely can be nobody who combines them so majestically. A marvellous example came on stage 16 over the Elephant Saddle, 11km which took several hundred million years to form but just several minutes to drive. As Dave was accelerating his Porsche 356 SC up the sequence of blind hairpins with accompanying certain-death plunges from Chain of Lagoons, he suddenly decided the experience may not have been entertaining enough for me. "You might like to notice how the rock formations change through here," he began as we dropped down to second and flew past the granite quarry. "There is a time gap of several hundred million years between the steeply dipping Mathinna Beds and the horizontal permian sedimentary rocks." Apologies to other geologists if that information is not totally correct. I am not doubting Dave's knowledge, more my ability to report it. I tried to write down his exact words but this is not easy in a violently swerving race car with a passenger door prone to swinging open on right-handers. I think we're still getting on okay in a compact and sometimes testing environment. Numerous amusing quips like "These bloomin' Ferraris keep holding us up" help to lighten the mood while my feeble attempts to call one section prompted the tactful response: "It's all right, I know this road. But keep telling me anyway because I'm getting old and a bit forgetful."