Sometimes, good things take time. Like Haydn Mackenzie’s two Targa event wins this year, the first in the three-day Targa Hawke’s Bay in May, and the second in the just-completed Targa New Zealand marathon over the last week of October and first two days of November.
For most of you Haydn’s will be very much a ‘new-name;’ a driver who – or so it would appear – has ‘burst onto’ the local Targa tarmac motor rally scene and achieved in just over a calendar year what others have only ever been able to dream of, wins in both Targa events in the same calendar year.
Except he isn’t (a ‘new-name’ who has ‘burst onto’ the Targa scene). Checking back through my files, I found, in fact, that it was way back in 2003 when I first met a then 19-year-old Haydn Mackenzie.
I had taken over a role promoting the then new SuperGT class and had got a call from Haydn’s Dad Andrew Mackenzie, asking if I wanted to ‘pop over’ to the family business, Albany Toyota, to check out progress on the car his son Haydn, was building to run in the class that year.
The car wasn’t exactly a GT, but in the spirit of inclusion (OK, we needed numbers!!) Haydn’s entry had been accepted and I ended up running a decent sort of feature on the car – a faithful Walkinshaw era VL Commodore V8 replica – and its youthful driver, in the next Association newsletter.
Typical old-skool journo that I was trained to be I remember asked Haydn how to spell his name (no e!) and what if any racing background and track record (you, know, first in the Midget Kart GP at Mt Wellie in 1969 etc etc) he had.
“Motorbikes,” said Haydn. “I ride a dirt bike (from memory a YZ250 Yamaha) at Woodhill.”
Not, quite the sort of answer I could do much with. But suffice to say Haydn enjoyed a seamless car racing debut in the big ‘ole ‘Walky V8’ and – if I am not mistaken – actually won his class in a heady first year.
Which just goes to show that you don’t have to start in karts at age 6 and win every age group title on offer on the way up the ladder, to ‘do well’ on your move to cars.
Haydn’s more recent success ‘on Targa’ reminds me, in fact, of something Mike Pero told me when he was competing in the NZV8 Touring Car Championship.
Though I did not get to meet him until he was racing cars, I was very much aware of the success Mike had enjoyed on two wheels in his late teens and early 20s.
When he was racing cars, Mike’s name, face and both the logo and snappy ‘Mike Pero, Mortgages’ jingle were everywhere. But when I asked him one day about what it was like going from ‘everyman anonymity’ to ‘a face every man, woman and probably dog recognises’ he laughed and said that if his own experience was anything to go by if you wanted to be an ‘overnight success’ you’d better be prepared to put in 15 or 16 years of hard slog before-hand!
After his initial
success in the SuperGT class in the Walkinshaw Commodore, Mackenzie went
on to compete in the NZV8 Touring Car championship, but after five
years of ups and downs he gave it all away and
returned to his first love, riding dirt bikes off-road.
“I was doing it and doing alright but I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore. It wasn’t fun,” he says. “So, I stopped.”
That is, he stopped racing an NZV8. Like the rest of us, Haydn has to work – both for a living and to afford to go racing. So, he immersed himself in the family Toyota dealership, where he is now the Dealer Principal.
Along the way he kept at his dirt bike riding, getting to the point where he joined a group of some of the country’s best off-road motorcycle riders in training for the world’s toughest extreme enduro, the annual Red Bull Romaniacs event in 2017.
He got there too, only to fall heavily in the days leading up to the big Romanian event, and be forced to pull out at the end of the second day when the pain from the shoulder be separated in the crash got too much to bear!
He still has an EXC 300 KTM at home. But on his return, with further riding vetoed until his shoulder was strong enough, he bought one of the new-generation Polaris 4WD UTVs (purpose-built 4-wheel/ off-road recreational race ‘vehicles’) and – inevitably you would have to say – started racing that, and the similar Can-Am model that followed.
The common denominator across two and four wheels, of course, was that Mackenzie was always at or near the front of the pack. So, it was only a matter of time, really before he found his way back into a car and running at a national level.
Which was in a Toyota 86 in May last year in the three-day Targa Hawke’s Bay event.
“Dad had bought two to do the 86 racing series. And after the series they were just sitting here. Dad wanted to do the Targa Tour with Mum so Matt (good friend Matthew Sayers) and I pretty much decided to do the event itself in one of the 86s,” Haydn explains.
Driving quickly on closed public roads, particularly roads you have never seen before and without the benefit of pace notes, requires a very particular skill set, one which many a driver raised on a strict diet of circuit racing initially struggles with.
Not Mackenzie. Though he does admit it took him a day-or-so to get up to speed.
“Yes,” he laughs. “After the first day we were like 30th overall or something and I thought I was doing alright…until I looked up the list and saw the other guy with an 86, I think it was Jerry Rowley, was about 10 places ahead of me…”
Challenge set and accepted Mackenzie upped the ante on the second and third days and – though they had to replace the car’s gearbox after blowing both front and rear seals – ended up catching and eventually passing Rowley to win their class and finish an impressive 7th overall.
More important – in terms of what you could call the ‘Big Picture’ was that Mackenzie and Sayers both thoroughly enjoyed themselves and resolved – again pretty much straight away – to enter the five-day Targa New Zealand event later in the year.
In what was really the only sticking point?
While the 86 was ‘a great little car for someone like me to see what a Targa is all about,” Mackenzie decided that if he was going to commit to doing the Main Targa event – which last year started in Invercargill and finished in Queenstown – he wanted to do it in a car capable of overall event, rather than just class honours.
That meant seeking out a late-model 4WD and when Mackenzie found a suitable candidate, a late-model Mitsubishi Evo 10 formerly used by – amongst others – rally and Targa event all-rounder Brian Green, he snapped it up.
“As a Toyota dealer it would have been nice to keep it ‘in the family’ but for the type of event Targa is here you really have to be in a 4WD and – at that stage anyway – there was nothing in the line-up that suited,” he explains.
Once purchased and in his hands, Mackenzie was then fortunate to meet, and shortly after do a deal to run the car, with Dustin Ng of Mitsubishi 4WD preparation specialist DNG.
“Dustin was already running David Rogers’ Evo 10, but I only found that out when I had a set of wheels shipped up from down the line which were left at his workshop. I went around there to collect them, Dustin and I got talking, and pretty soon the car was over there, and he was getting it ready for Targa NZ 2018.”
The rest, as they say, is recent history.
After finishing just 1.2 seconds behind defending event champion Glenn Inkster in the first stage of the 2018 Targa NZ event in the Deep South, Mackenzie won the second outright by 1.8 seconds from the Porsche 991 GT3 RS of Martin Dippie with five-time former event winner Tony Quinn third, a further 6.1 seconds back.
He and co-driver Sayers then completed a dream first day for a rookie pair to return to Invercargill that evening with a 20.4 second overall event lead from the Subaru Impreza WRXs of Leigh Hopper and Nic de Waal.
If anything, the pair did even better at the start of the second day, winning the epic run through the 42.67m Catlins stage from Fortrose in the south to near Owaka in the north by a margin of just over half a minute from Nic de Waal.
As it turned out that was as good as it was going to get in last year’s event, however, Mackenzie losing his 1m 29.6s lead when he crashed heavily at the end of the day’s third stage just south of Dunedin……
Damage to the car was extensive (“it pulled the whole rear sub-frame out of its mountings and there was only one wheel left attached”) but If anything the incident left Mackenzie humbled by the support he, Sayers and members of the DNG team received in the wake of it.
“It didn’t look that good when we were recovering it, but when we got the car back to a workshop someone offered us Dustin reckoned we could at least get it back on the road and once that decision was made it was amazing who turned up to help. We had guys from other teams working alongside Dustin’s guys and by early the next morning the car was back on its wheels and ready to be re-scrutineered so we could get back in the event.”
Because he had earned maximum stage times on the last three stages on the second day of the event Mackenzie lost way too much time to be able to catch back up in the overall classification.
But after setting the fifth quickest time through the first stage on his return the next morning he was second quickest through both the third and fourth, and fourth overall for the day.
Incredibly, he was back winning stages outright the next day (Friday), beating the driver who had taken over the event lead, Glenn Inkster by just over 12 seconds through the 12.91km Mt Cargill stage, then again, through the last two, to top the day and make it back up to 20th in the overall event standings.
Not surprisingly circuit owner Tony Quinn won both stages at Highlands Motorsport Park on the final day of the 2018 event, but Mackenzie won the premier one – the 23.69km dash across the Crown Range – and won the day for the third time out of five.
Glenn Inkster and Spencer Winn still won their fifth consecutive Targa NZ event on the trot. However – second day crash aside – Haydn Mackenzie had had an absolute ball. And was itching to get his car back to Auckland to be stripped, rebuilt and repainted ready for his 2019 Targa event return, which came in May again, in this year’s 3-day Targa Hawkes’ Bay event.
Having learned, first-hand, the October before, that ‘to finish first, first you have to finish,’ Mackenzie didn’t panic when Leigh Hopper went out like a bull at a gate, instead staying close enough to take advantage should Hopper falter.
The Subaru ace was indeed wickedly quick and won seven of the opening day’s eight stages. However, a mechanical issue slowed him in the 20.37km Maungatautari stage, handing the overall day lead to Mackenzie.
Hopper was again quickest thorough three of Saturday’s five stages, (with Mackenzie’s DNG teammate David Rogers stepping up in his Evo 10 to win the other two) but Mackenzie retained the overall event lead, albeit by just 17 seconds over Rogers with Hopper back in 12th.
Come the final day, though, Mackenzie cranked up the pace a couple of notches to win the first two stages and stretch that lead – over Rogers – to just under a minute before stroking home to claim his first Targa event win outright just a year after doing his first Targa event period!
Fast forward to his second win in as many events, in this year’s full five-day Targa NZ marathon from Taupo to Palmerston North, saw him use a mix of both previous event strategies.
Early on Inkster used his Class 10 car to the absolute maximum effect, setting an absolutely punishing pace, and – in doing so – putting almost two-minutes (1:57.5) on Hopper and close to two-and-a-half (2:21.2) on Mackenzie by the end of the first day alone.
Mackenzie claimed his first stage win of the event on the run back to Stratford from Whangamomona at the end of the second day, though by this stage (literally!!) Inkster had further extended his event lead to over three-and-a-half minutes over both Hopper (3:34.5) and Mackenzie (3:53.1).
With Hopper again slowed by a mechanical issue (overheating) by the end of the third day Mackenzie had inherited second place, though Inkster’s lead was now four-and-a-half (4:33.8 to be exact) minutes.
Which all became academic, however, when on the first stage of the penultimate day (Fields Track, Friday Nov 01) Inkster’s dreams of a record-making sixth consecutive win in a Targa NZ event – literally – went up in smoke. His car’s power steering pump blew, spraying hot oil which ignited, the resulting engine bay fire stopping the Evo 8 dead in its tracks.
With Leigh Hopper also out that left Mackenzie in a lead of over 10 minutes (such had been the pace Inkster has set and only Hopper and Mackenzie had been able to stay in touch with) over the Porsche 991 GT3 RS of 2013 Targa NZ event winner Martin Dippie, and fellow Mitsubishi Evo 10 ace David Rogers.
Rather than immediately backing off and letting the others claim back a second here or a second there Mackenzie then did the exact opposite, winning four of the next five stages to actually increase the lead he had on Dippie to 11:49.1 at the end of the second-to-last day back in Palmerston North.
As if that was not enough, to underline the fact that his arrival on the NZ Targa scene, was virtually complete Mackenzie won four of the seven stages on the last day of the 2019 event, including the final 23.95km run back through the fast, open Mangatainoka stage. Sure he margin was just 0.4 of a second at the end of the stage but his event-winning margin was still a frankly amazing 11m:47.9.sec.
The Monday after his epic week ‘out of the office’ Mackenzie was back at work at Albany Toyota. His phone, he admitted, was still running hot with calls from friends, family and clients, congratulating him on his achievement.
He was making calls, as well, because – if you didn’t already know – Mackenzie he is already quite a long way into his next project – to see if his freshly-minted tarmac skills translate to gravel.
Not just at club level either. Buoyed by how well he has gone in the four Targa events he has done so far Mackenzie plans on supplementing the defence of his two 2019 Targa event crowns with a full season of (Rally) New Zealand gravel events in 2020.
“Yes,” he admits, almost guiltily. “When I first went looking for a Targa car I found this Evo 6 rally car which was going for a really good price so I bought it and sort of tucked it away thinking I’d see how I went in it once I’d got the hang of 4WD on tarmac.”
Which he obviously has. So, all I can really add, is ‘watch this space’ because if he is as quick on loose surfaces as he is on tarmac, you’re going to be hearing the name ‘Haydn Mackenzie’ a lot more in the next 12-24 months!
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