The day started with bits of snow that actually stuck to the ground for a while. It was a great beginning for a Northwest Adventure, and a sign that it really is November already. Thirteen hardy souls came out to run the rally and four came to work it. I cleverly convinced Russ and Mike that they should take my place in working Jon’s rally in the afternoon instead of working mine. This made one more car to run my rally and gave me the opportunity to participate in the afternoon one. The down side was that Greg and I then had to run all four checkpoints. This kept us very very busy as the checkpoints were several miles apart and we had to get to all of them sequentially instead of leapfrogging checkpoints with another crew. We survived but had to hold the rally up a couple of times in order to give ourselves time to get to each checkpoint ahead of the rally cars.
One car ran in the Adventure Class where the goal was to answer 36 questions as they traveled the rally route. Questions as devious as “How many ‘Champaign County 1’ signs did you see between instructions 20 and 23. If contestants were sharp they could have seen three ‘Champaign 1 County’ signs facing them, including one that was to their right as they turned left onto Champaign County 1. There was even one that they might have been able to recognize from the back due to its pentagonal shape. Unfortunately spotting and counting the signs wasn’t the trick. The trick was realizing that the signs literally said ‘Champaign 1 County’ instead of having the question’s ‘Champaign County 1’ wording. The correct answer was therefore zero (0).
After seeing that they had 6 incorrect answers (for the 9 questions) for the first leg of the rally Basil and Johanna quickly realized they needed to pay way more attention and only missed 7 total on the following three legs. That 7 they got on leg 3 is the result of a side trip to Rantoul that made them late enough to the third checkpoint that they picked up the maximum Adventure Class timing penalty of 5 points. All in all a very good showing for Johanna’s first rally and for Basil’s first one without an experienced rallyist as a partner. They had a great time and want to try more adventure rallies where the emphasis is on course following, observation, and cleverness. You’ll see more of them next year.
In the Time/Speed/Distance (TSD) classes there were two navigational cars, four Seat of Pants (SOP) cars and one Novice team. Baily and Clark, the novice team, did an outstanding job for their first rally. They beat all of the SOP cars and one of the Navigational cars. That blank space where there should have been a score for their last leg is my fault (partly). The checkpoint was in the back of a parking lot adjacent to the Prospect Avenue exit off of I-74 in Champaign. Contestants were instructed on the prior checkpoint’s out slip that they were to wave, honk and flash their lights as they exited the interstate in order to distinguish themselves from among all the other Saturday traffic and to catch the checkpoint crew’s attention. Unfortunately Baily and Clark missed seeing that instruction. Fortunately the fact that the checkpoint crew missed seeing them didn’t affect their class position so we’re both off the hook. Whew!
I should also mention that Baily and Clark followed the course correctly to the letter and thus were the first to finish the rally. The first four cars all made mistakes at one place or another and therefore moved back in the pack since cars are usually sent out of the checkpoints in the order they arrive. Being “in the lead” is still pretty heady stuff for novices (and is certainly justified in this case by their excellent scores). Unfortunately on rallies your on course position doesn’t mean anything in terms of your actual finishing place.
One of the mistakes that helped move the experienced rallyists back in the pack was an assumption that rallies are like regular life. The navigator read a “right at stop” instruction to the driver then was busy twiddling with her rally computer and didn’t notice that the driver turned at a traffic light set as a stop blinker instead of at a stop sign. What you see and take for granted day by day isn’t necessarily the way a rally works. To keep everyone on the same page every rally has its own set of general instructions. It is standard for most generals to define a stop as an official octagonal sign. That was the case for the Northwest Adventure. Fortunately the driver’s error nagged at the back of his mind. When he also realized that the next sign he was supposed to see was probably one he had passed earlier but was in the opposite direction from where he was going everything clicked. He than ran his suspicion by his navigator and they decided to go back and try again to follow the course, this time successfully.
One of the funnest incidents (but not really funny, at least to those involved) was car 6 turning in a delay request for the last leg but putting the wrong car number on it. What’s the rallymaster to do? Use the delay allowance to change the wrong car’s score? Disallow the delay allowance? Give the unfortunate rallyist a hard time then allow the request? Well we certainly can’t have rallyists creating fraudulent delay allowance requests that will increase other rallyists scores so I went with that last option. Interestingly had the delay been awarded to the wrong car it would have helped their score and given them second place instead of last place. As you can see from the results, allowing the legitimate request (with the boo boo on it) ultimately ended up moving car 6 up from last place to second in their class. Ah yes, rallies are a whole bunch of details, one ofter another after another. You can never let your guard down if you want to do well.
Speaking of details, one thing a good navigator does is to look ahead in the instructions so that they can be on top of things when finishing an instruction. Unfortunately you best not bring that knowledge of the future back and apply it to the present where it doesn’t belong. One navigator saw a transit zone coming up and then started it one instruction too soon costing their team 38 points. Two others saw a right turn onto Interstate 57 coming up and convinced their teammate that they must have missed the sign they had been looking for. Had they just kept looking for the sign they would have crossed over the interstate going west on Olympian Drive and found the sign just before Mattis Avenue. Instead they both ended up heading north on the interstate, and just a bit off course. One team called the rallymaster while headed for Rantoul. The other got called by the rallymaster. Both teams were talked back on course but it took 20 minutes for them to both get back there. Meanwhile all the on course participants were being held up at checkpoint 3.
Well, here I am still writing this even though I sat down to write a real short article so I could get it posted ASAP. That’s the thing about rallies. So much interesting stuff goes on that it can’t really be told in a short article. And the amazing thing is that it’s all different from rally to rally. In any case I’ll start wrapping it up here even though I’ve described only about half of what I heard about and even less of what I saw. (Stuff like a questionable turn across another lane, or like a driver not being able to hold his average speed down to 20 MPH while going around Parkland’s winding perimeter road). I’m sure you can find out more of this neat stuff from the participants. Even stuff that I don’t know about so don’t hesitate to ask them how the rally went.
Anyhow, the 5 minute delay of the rally for the confusion between a “stop” and “stop blinker” along with the 20 minute delay for the folks who decided to doubt themselves and assume they had missed an “ONLY ONLY ONLY” sign made the contestants 25 minutes late in getting to Dos Reales Mexican Restaurant. Fortunately the service was fast and the food was outstanding. The delays also almost threatened to hold up the start of the Yellow Line Rally but that’s another story and I’ll let Jon tell it.
Thanks to all who came and to Brian Ford for the cold run and Greg Lukach for all the assistance with the checkpoints. Great fun! The scores are below.
Jerry White, Rallymaster
