1970 Targa Florio

It was held on a 44.6 mi (71.8 km) anti-clockwise circuit made up entirely of public roads on the mountainous Italian island of Sicily.

[1] The Targa Florio was in 1970 the oldest motor race in the world, even older than the Isle of Man TT and the Indianapolis 500.

The circuit was also very dangerous- although the roads and streets were closed off to the public for the race (but not for practice and test sessions- this caused all sorts of problems) the circuit was identical to every day civilian use, so it had no safety features of any kind and a crash often meant tumbling down a mountain slope or when in a town, crashing into a stone building, trees, and even groups of spectators.

Most drivers only knew what their position was every 35–50 minutes, and that was when they reached the start-finish line in the town of Cerda; or in more organized team's cases, in another town or on some part of the isolated section of the track, where members of teams would wait for their team's car to come by and they would show pitboards showing their position and how much time their opponents are in front or behind them, which was sometimes out of date; communication in those days was very limited (compared to now).

For this event, Porsche introduced their new car, the light and nimble 908/03, which was better suited to the twisty and demanding circuit than the big and powerful 917 (although Vic Elford managed to post the fifth fastest overall time with a spare 917K on Friday practice, he was so physically exhausted after doing this he had to be removed from the car).

Rodriguez was ill on raceday, so his co-driver, ex-rally driver Kinnunen took over as #1 and, in the rally-type event, sprinted into the lead.

Once the car was handed off to Rodriguez, he lost the lead to Vaccarella in the lone works Ferrari.

This happened multiple times, and knowing Vaccarella knew the course extremely well, Redman decided to stay behind the Sicilian, cleverly deciding to wait for the next pit stop, knowing that the Wyer team was better at pitstops than Ferrari.