Ah. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking of one of these savage beasts.
Alas, my rally experiences have been limited to far more pedestrian vehicles, such as my first rally car, shown below:
With 1200 cc's of storming power pulling around about 1600 lbs and a four speed tranny, it offered entertaining if somewhat leisurely transportation. My rallying days began one Sunday while perusing the local newspaper. In the Things To Do section was a brief notice of a rally the following weekend. I recruited a friend who owned an MGB and we set off to find out what this was all about.
A TSD (timexspeedxdistance) rally is pretty straightforward. First of all, it is driven on public streets, so powersliding over blind crests is a no no. And it has a very simple premise. The Rally Master issues each contestant a set of route instructions together with the speeds prescribed for each segment. Let's say you are told to travel at 30 mph. By lightning like deduction, that is half a mile a minute. Ergo, after 10 minutes, you should have traveled 5 miles. If there is a checkpoint at that precise point and you arrive precisely 10 minutes after you left the last checkpoint, you are "on time" and receive no penalty points for that segment. You are, however, assessed one penalty point for each 1/100th of a minute you are early OR late.
Hmmm.....sounds simple enough, no? Well, it is. Except that the Rally Master is encouraged to use the rules to either send you off course or make you travel at the wrong speed. Let me give you an example. In one rally, we were told to change our average speed (CAS) at "bear". We were traveling through a state forest when I spied Smokey the Bear off to my right. I promptly adjusted my speed accordingly, only to arrive 30 seconds late at the next checkpoint. In the rally rules, "bear" is defined as a turn of substantially less than 90 degrees. Hence, I should have ignored Smokey and maintained my current speed.
Oh...... :oops:
One of the favorite tricks of Rally Masters is the "confidence trap", in which contestants encounter other contestants turning one way at an intersection when they think they should be turning the opposite way. It's hard to ignore the other cars and do what you think the instructions tell you to do. I once ran a rally that was set out in three large loops, all of which started and ended at the same point. The cars were given random numbers so people couldn't assume "Oh, all even numbered cars go this way and all odd numbered cars go that way. Depending on which part of the rally cars were on, they entered and departed the checkpoint from different directions. I sat in the same spot all afternoon and watched with glee as the contestants fussed and fumed at each other and at me. Being a Rally Master requires a devious and often obnoxious personality! :lol:
About this time, my wife and I separated. Desperate for something enjoyable to do with my daughter on my "on" weekends, I made her my navigator. We rallied together for 4 years, until her mother decided we were bonding too well and moved to Alabama. During that time, we had a great time and won fairly consistently. One of the things that afflicts most rally teams is conflict between driver and navigator. It's hard to get too upset with a 9 year old, so we made an agreement. Any errors were JOINT errors and we would go back and retrace our steps until we found out what we did wrong. On one rally, we arrived at the end point 2 hours after everyone else. And won. After that, the club changed the rules.
One day we were driving along, looking to turn right on Village Road. I saw the sign and was in the middle of my turn when my daughter said "Dad, that sign is spelled wrong!" I looked and indeed it was. It had only one "L". So we continued on straight, came into a checkpoint about a half mile further on more or less on time and got to see everyone else on the rally enter the checkpoint backwards!
Some of my co-competitors got their noses out of joint when my pre-teen daughter and I won, especially since I did all the time calculations in my head while they were using sophisticated rally computers, calculators and such like.
Every year, my club had a 12 hour rally in the summer that ran from 6 pm on Saturday to 6 am on Sunday. I volunteered to be the Rally Master for that event one year. I spent weeks putting it together, arranging everything so the correct time for the completed rally was precisely 12 hours and taking everyone across the bridge from Jamestown to Newport RI precisely at sunrise. :bigsmile: It was a Hurculean task. On the Sunday before the event, I opened the paper to read that the Ocean State Marathon would take place the following Sunday, using many of the same roads included in my rally. (Newport IS on an island, after all.) :cry:
All my preparation was for naught. I called in sick for a week (I was a state employee at the time, thank heavens) and re-did the whole event in 5 days. There are times when staging one of these things is just a huge PIA. :evil:
One day, I was driving on a rural road in eastern Connecticut, laying out a route for a future rally. I had a pad of paper in my lap and was making notes as I went. As I came to a blind crest, a fuel tanked appeared going the opposite way. Man, those diesels have so LOUD horns! :shock: I had wandered into the middle of the road and just missed getting squashed by the truck, which passed so close to me that some part of it jostled my side view mirror. That was REALLY close! :
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Once I went on a rally with a friend who had a old Mustang convertible - 68, I think. The odometer didn't work, so we ran in Class D, which is taped odometer, no calculators, no tables, no nuthin' but a pencil and paper. Sometimes called the "Seat of the Pants" class, we cruised around all afternoon while I kept saying things like "This feels like 28.5 mph, doesn't it?" When the day was done, we finished first overall. Let me tell you, there were some pissed off people THAT day. :rant:
SCCA runs some pretty intense rallies in New England, usually in winter. For those, the rules are enormously complex and the competition is daunting. Contestants tend to have 4 wd Audis and Subarus with license plates like "ONTIME", "RALLY1" and "TSD". In the top classes, total error after 4 hours of competition usually amounts to less than 2 seconds. That's a bit over the top for me. I think of rallying like I do golf. In golf, I refuse to keep score so I can just enjoy the surroundings. In rallying, the roads are typically rural, seldom traveled paths that wend through beautiful scenery. It would be a shame to take things too seriously and miss all that. :bigsmile:
All the local sports car clubs in southern New England seem to have gone defunct in the past 30 years. It's hard to find a good TSD rally any more. But if you get the chance, DO IT! It's just about the most fun you can have in a car with your clothes on!
