First EVto racethe rock

Targa Newfoundland closes public roads across the island and runs cars flat out between them. It has done so for twenty-five years. Every entry in that time has burned fuel.

John Gordon and Doug Ottenheimer ran a 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E as car 4-04 in the Targa Tour division — the event's first electric entry. Both registered to drive, swapping seats between legs. Four days, from the Southern Shore to the Cape Shore to Clarenville, on closed roads, with no charging infrastructure built for any of it.

We finished. Not without incident — the front drive unit dropped out under load on the Cape Shore stages, and a failing 12 volt battery threw half the car's electronics into fault on day two. We diagnosed both at the roadside and kept going.

That is the interesting part. Anyone can put a fast car on a closed road. Running an EV across rural Newfoundland for four days, to a schedule, on a charging network that was never designed for it, is a different problem — and we now have the only real data that exists on solving it.

Every leg was planned as an energy budget before it was driven as a route. We measured what the car used on transit and what it used on a closed stage — two very different numbers — built a model from them, and then ran the model against reality for four days.

It held. On the longest leg we predicted where we would be, to within a couple of percent, hours before we got there. That is the whole job: no heroics, no hoping, just knowing.

We are not publishing the numbers. They took four days and a car full of faults to earn, no one else has them, and we intend to use them.

The Point Lance Community Centre took us in at a lunch halt and let car 4-04 plug in. It worked because people there went out of their way for a car they had never seen before.

We left them a charger. An Autel MaxiCharger wall box, handed over before we drove out, so the next electric car through Point Lance — Targa or otherwise — finds a charger instead of a favour.

That is the pattern, and it carries into 2027. Work out where the energy has to come from, then leave the place better supplied than we found it. There is another install going in on the route this year.

Everything before 2028 is preparation. 2026 proved an electric car can finish Targa Newfoundland. 2027 proves it can hold a competition schedule for six consecutive days. 2028 is the first year we go after a result, in a caged car, against the clock, in a class where nobody has ever seen an EV before.

Partners who come in for 2027 get first refusal on 2028 — same position, before it is offered to anyone else. The car that crosses the line first will carry the names of the people who backed it when it was still a development year.

This is advertising, not sponsorship in the charitable sense. Targa Newfoundland went out live for the first time in 2026 — free on YouTube, produced remotely over satellite, and screened at IBC in Amsterdam. Your name travels with a story people actually want to follow: the first electric car to race the Rock.

And we will be straight with you about what 2027 is. It is the Tour division. We are not being timed. What you are backing is a team running the full competitive route a year early to get the car and the crew ready — and a standing offer on the same position in 2028, when the cage is in and we are racing for a result.

There are no fixed amounts. Pick the position that fits what you want out of it, tell us what it is worth to you, and we will tell you honestly whether we can deliver it at that number.