Every September for the past twenty-four years, Targa Newfoundland has run one of the toughest tarmac rallies in the world across 2,000 kilometers of Canada’s most remote coastline, and almost no one outside the province has ever been able to watch it happen. This September, that changes. Dejero is among the event’s presenting sponsors for its 25th anniversary, and for the first time in the rally’s history, it will stream live and free on YouTube.
“We chose Targa Newfoundland because it’s the hardest possible test. Two thousand kilometers of remote terrain, six days of rallying, zero tolerance for failure,” said Kevin Fernandes, Chief Revenue Officer at Dejero. “If it works here, and it will, it works anywhere. That’s not a marketing claim. It’s a proof point.”
The broadcast is powered by Dejero Smart Blending Technology™, which intelligently combines cellular, satellite, Wi-Fi and broadband connections in real time. It’s the same technology that keeps news crews live from disaster zones and first responders connected in the field. Where a single network drops out across Newfoundland’s outport roads and coastal cliffs, the system blends in whatever connection is available, so the signal never does.
But a livestream is only as compelling as what’s happening in front of the camera, and behind the decision to build it in the first place. To find out what the world is about to see, and why Dejero is the one making it possible, we talked to the Dejero executive whose own question started the whole partnership, a three-time Targa veteran who has raced professionally his entire life, and a pair of brothers running their third rally in a Subaru with a family connection to Newfoundland neither of them saw coming.
Team “Cross-Threaded Motorsports”
This September, Dejero’s own Chief Revenue Officer, Kevin Fernandes, will be lining up at the start line himself, behind the wheel of a car he’s building with childhood friend and co-driver Devin Jones, a decorated former RCMP officer. It’s the fulfillment of what Fernandes calls a ten-year dream. “If you’ve been around cars and modifying cars, Targa Newfoundland over the last 25 years has been that goal of, wouldn’t it be cool if we could go there,” he said. “We’d always had this dream of, let’s go to Targa, let’s go build a car and go to Targa. We never had the chance, or never made the time for it, until we did.”
That “until we did” carries more weight than it sounds. A couple of years ago, Fernandes went through a serious health scare, major surgery and a long recovery that, in his words, put his own identity in question. “It made me focus on what I want to do every day, who do I want to do it with. And making sure you have these dreams or these goals, and that you’ve put effort behind them, because they’re important,” he said. Two years later, fully recovered, he decided there wasn’t anything more meaningful to spend that effort on than finally building the car and racing Targa.
The Dejero partnership almost didn’t start as a partnership at all, it started as an offhand question. While working through the rules for building his race car, Kevin asked Targa founder Robert Giannou whether the rally had connectivity problems in Newfoundland. “Fully expecting to hear the answer is yes, somewhat,” Fernandes said. Instead, Giannou told him it was one of the event’s biggest ongoing challenges, tied directly to the safety of closed public roads and race crews, not just to filming the race. “It just so happens that my day job is figuring out that type of stuff,” Fernandes said. His first offer was modest: light up the island so everyone stays safe during the event. Dejero’s marketing team saw a bigger opportunity. “Why don’t we do something that no one has ever done before,” he recalled them saying, “which is to live stream this thing from Newfoundland, around the world, and really show what connectivity, when people have it in the field, what’s possible.”
For all his confidence in the technology, what actually makes Fernandes nervous isn’t the broadcast. “I’m the most nervous about racing in general. I’m more confident about the car and the build, that’s my background,” he said. “If I put on my Dejero hat, we are going to rock this event. But me personally, sitting in a car with a guy that I’ve known for 15 years, having all the stories of what we’ve done and how I’ve seen him drive in university and beyond, is a little bit harrowing.”
The Pro: Randy Pobst
Randy Pobst has driven for Porsche, Audi, Mazda, and Volvo, won close to a hundred professional races, and taken the Rolex 24 at Daytona twice. He’s also run Targa Newfoundland three years running, and won all three. For a driver with nearly 700 races behind him, that’s not nothing.
“I was attracted to the thrills of racing legally on the open road,” Randy said of his first exposure to Targa, which he compares to the Pikes Peak Hill Climb he’s run nine times. “But Targa is like Pikes Peak, magnified. Two thousand kilometers of curves I never saw before. Hills I can’t see over. So many unknowns. It makes it a unique driving challenge and draws me and a lot of other competitors back to it like a moth to a flame.”
Unlike circuit racing, Targa runs on closed public highways, one car at a time, with a co-driver reading a road book aloud through an intercom in real time. Drivers call the open, uncalled stretches “yo-yo,” you’re on your own. It’s a format that rewards restraint as much as speed. “In road racing, keep your speed high and your risk low,” Randy said. “In Targa, double that. It’s like a space shot to the moon. Failure is not an option. If you go off anywhere, you could hit a tree, a church, a parked car, you can go off a cliff.”
What surprised him most, after decades of professional racing, was how much restraint actually paid off. “I might be being too careful,” he thought going in. “What I learned was no, it’s a good strategy. I got the trophies to prove it.” At Targa, the medal isn’t for winning, it’s for finishing. “It’s kind of like when Michelangelo was making David and he put the last polish on it and stood back,” Pobst said, describing what it feels like to cross the final line after a week and 2,000-plus kilometers. “That huge feeling of accomplishment and relief and elation.”
The Brothers: Sam and Rick Marshall
Sam and Rick Marshall aren’t professionals. They’re brothers from South Florida, Sam in Fort Myers, Rick in Pembroke Pines, running their third Targa in a Subaru STI. Their route into the sport wasn’t racing at all. It was family history.
Their grandfather was born in St. John’s and left Newfoundland at nineteen. Decades later, after a family reunion retracing his roots, Rick stumbled across rally footage online and recognized the towns. “I’m just thinking that would be really cool,” Rick recalled, “and call him and say, hey, watch this, look at these towns these cars are just zipping through.” Sam’s response: “why don’t we.” Neither of them had a car, a crew, or any racing experience. Within a year, they had all three.
The connection to the province kept finding them. After the brothers damaged their suspension on Newfoundland’s roads, a stranger in a Clarenville garage helped get their car, and their race, back on track. Partway through the repair, the conversation turned to family. “Did you say Ireland’s Eye?” the mechanic asked. His relatives were from there too. So were a coworker’s. “It’s not a big island,” Sam said, “but it was pretty densely populated 120 years ago. It was pretty amazing to him that it drew people from Florida.”
“The racing is an 11 out of 10,” Sam said. “The people are better.” Rick put it another way: “The car is like the ticket that gets you into the event. But the event is so much more than the race.”
Why This Year Is Different
For competitors like the Marshalls, whose extended family can’t make the trip to Newfoundland, this year’s livestream means something personal. For the first time, people scattered across the diaspora will be able to watch the race live from the roads that have always called them back. For Pobst, who has spent the last two years filming stages for his own YouTube channel, it’s a chance to finally share the ride in real time.
“I think any automotive enthusiast is going to love this show,” Pobst said. “You can ride along in a car and see where we’re going, right by the waterways, through a church parking lot, through the woods. It’s a way to live the adventure vicariously.” Asked how he’d convince someone who’s never heard of Targa to tune in, his answer was simple: “Targa is a way to ride along in one of the most unusual, risky, adventurous, enjoyable racing adventures there is on the whole planet.”
Watch Targa live this September
Subscribe to @TargaNewfoundlandOfficial and follow along. And if you’re curious how we’re keeping a signal alive across 2,000 kilometers of Canada’s toughest terrain to make that possible, that story’s at dejero.com/targa-ibc.
September 11–17, 2026 | Watch live: youtube.com/@TargaNewfoundlandOfficial
