Rally Report – Ides of March Rally 2015

Date: Sunday, March 15, 2015
Rallymaster: Bill Wagner
Cold run:
Workers: Austin Grant

Since I disappointed myself last year by not getting the rally done, I was determined that it would go off this year. We had really good weather and a great turnout with seven teams appearing to test their skills. Some folks already had a couple of rallies in the bag this year because of the 2 Winter Rallies in January and February.

Gary Patrick held one of his rally schools just before the event. It was well attended and appeared to have assisted the novices who had some pretty good scores. The novices made all the checkpoints and the winning team of Williams/Peterson even used a time delay slip to keep 4 of 5 leg scores below 100. That is a great accomplishment for their first rally. I expect we’ll see them at future rallies and even some autocrosses. The team of Burkholder/Burkholder made a good showing as well. If they could have brought their high score down close to their best legs they would have made it really close.

The SOP class had some tight competition. After 2 legs the Miner/Miner team was in control with a 23 point lead over Martin/Lichtenberger. Their scores of 4 and 2 were excellent but they weren’t able to maintain that over the last 3 legs. Martin/Lichtenberger kept the pressure on finishing the rally with 2 single digit scores on the last 3 legs. At the end, the 2 teams were separated by only 23 points with Martin/Lichtenberger finishing in first place. Third place was taken by White/Hamilton and fourth by Bedford/Blackwelder who didn’t score as well as I expected.

The Nav class only had one team, Townsend/Flora, who put on a really good show with ones on all legs except the last. We determined after the rally that I must have mis-measured one tiny section that caused them to score 12 on leg 6. Somehow my measurement was about 0.1 miles off from what they showed in their computer.

I must thank Gary Patrick for letting us use the Subaru of Champaign County showroom for the rally school and registration and for putting on the school before the rally. Hopefully we can have one or two more schools this year. I also want to thank Austin Grant who came over from the Peoria area to attend the school and see how rallies are run. He spent the afternoon in the car with me at checkpoints and made the day go by quickly.