It started out as a very warm and humid afternoon in Gibson City for the Junebug Jam-a-Lam Rally. I had planned a 90 mile rally in North Central Illinois featuring Ford and Iroquois counties. It was my hope to include some routes that no one had seen before, or at least for quite some time. While planning the rally I realized that there weren’t too many interesting roads in this area and it was a challenge to come up with anything particularly exciting. I came across an idea that I had noticed for trap rallies and that’s when I decided to add my trap.
It was fairly simple really; the general instructions state that instructions must be executed in numerical order, so I decided to mix up the numbering in a couple spots, one during leg 2 and the other in leg 4. I thought for sure everyone would catch it, but I was wrong; almost everyone fell for it. No harm done, since all the rally teams make it to the checkpoint safely, albeit a little late.
We stopped at Dairy Queen for a break and had some treats and chatted before starting out for the rest of the rally. During leg 5, we encountered a pop-up thunderstorm with quite the torrential downpour, forcing the rallyists to slow down. Mike and Jim actually had to just decide to come to a complete stop for a few minutes because visibility was so bad. They did turn in a time delay, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite enough
| Name/Class | Leg 1 | Leg 2 | Leg 3 | Leg 4 | Leg 5 | Leg 6 | Total |
| Bob & Karen Townsend
Navigational 1st place Navigational |
3 | 153 | 48 | 3 | 79 | 14 | 300 |
| John Li & Jonathan Flora
SOP 1st place SOP and 1st Overall |
30 | 78 | 16 | 41 | 75 | 22 | 262 |
| Mike Blackwelder & Jim Hamilton
SOP 2nd place SOP |
11 | 60 | 40 | 59 | 120 | 0 | 290 |
| Emanuel Martin & Stuart Ford
SOP 3rd place SOP |
6 | 200 | 55 | 27 | 103 | 1 | 392 |
We had four teams, one in navigational and three in seat of the pants. Emanuel Martin teamed up with novice Stuart Ford with Emanuel navigating. This was Stuart’s very first rally with the club. He is fairly new to CCSCC, autocrossing with us since the beginning of this year. He had an outstanding performance for his first event, and kudos to Emanuel who navigated for the first time as well (he usually drives). Congratulations to SOP team John Li and Jonathan Flora who took 1st overall in today’s rally. Thanks to everyone who participated and helped in the event. I hope you had a great time. It certainly, as always was good company with some friendly competition.
Sandy Grable, Rallymaster