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Friday Night Rally Report by Ian Holmes
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Friday, April 22nd, saw the first in a new series of road rallies put on by Land O’ Lakes SCCA (LOL) and the Twin City Rally Club (TCRC), with the Navigation Near Nowthen Road Rally. It’s a series of social rallies geared specifically to newcomers to the sport. These events are short in length, about 30 miles, taking about an hour to complete with simple instructions to give people an idea what road rally is about, and hopefully get them interested enough to want to carry on. Each rally is planned to focus on a different method of conducting a rally. Tulips, Monte Carlo, Trap, etc., and it fell to yours truly to organize the first one. Rather than use the Tulips that I have become familiar with, I decided to use the opportunity to try something new for myself too. I opted to try a simple map route plotting exercise.
Some of you may recall a recent piece I wrote bemoaning the poor standard of maps available in the US compared to the Ordnance Survey maps in the UK. I had resolved not to be beaten by this problem, and so for quite a while now I've been studying Minnesota Department of Transportation road maps as well as some instructions from course plotting rallies in the UK to see if I couldn't put together a map plotting rally using the Minnesota maps and English/European style instructions.
The only stipulation for the event was that it should start and finish in the Twin Cities metro vicinity to minimize travel time for the everyone involved. I chose Elk River, in the Northwestern suburbs as I often use the roads around there to go for a spin in my MGB, and I knew there were some nice roads to be found. Once I had the route established I had to work out how to give instructions for them to plot their way around the course. How I planned all that out is enough material for another article.
So lets fast forward past all that and go to Friday night…
Registration was to take place at the Starbucks in town and once I’d explained the situation to the manager she donated a 2 gallon Thermos of coffee for us to have during registration before we headed out. The finish point, Northwoods Bar and Grill in Nowthen, MN was just as accommodating, they were very happy to have 30 people turn up and eat and drink there on a relatively quiet Friday night. We really appreciate the help shown by the two places looking after us. We spoke some of the staff in Starbucks on the Saturday morning and they thought it that it was great to have so many people in there on an evening. I think that both places will be happy to have us back some time in the future.
Twin City Rally Club members had done a good job publicizing the event and this was rewarded by the fact that over half of the 13 cars that turned up to run hadn’t run a road rally before.
Entrants came from varying backgrounds, running very different vehicles. One newcomer, George Quinn, turned up in his 1964 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88. Paula and Scott Liptak turned up in a Minivan, because Scott was wheelchair bound. Of course, being a rally, several people turned up in Subaru’s as you’d expect. We got the interest of a varied group of people.
A lot of registration was devoted to explaining things to the newcomers, on a one to one basis and there were several experienced members of the TCRC to help with this.
Registration time passed all too quickly and five minutes before everyone set out my wife and I headed out to position the DIY controls. These were simplicity itself. Marking the location with a LOL SCCA checkpoint sign, a post was placed alongside complete with a plastic bag containing some colored stickers. Upon arriving at the control, the co-driver had to get out of the car, place a sticker on their score card, and then they could head on their way. It meant we cut down on control workers and it was, in a way, reminiscent of the European rallies of old when co-drivers would have to leave their cars to get a score card stamped by timing officials.
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Click here to download the standings from the Friday Night Road Rally.
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We had all three controls in place and headed to the final control, a timing control. As we approached the location we saw car 1 waiting a discrete distance away. “How on earth did you get here?” we asked. Their reply, “Well, we followed what we thought was the course but we seem to have missed a control, we’re a sticker short.”
Of course they were a sticker short, they’d managed to get ahead of us by taking a wrong turn and missed a control location entirely. As Rallymaster it wasn’t for me to tell them where the location of that control was, but they had a lot of time in hand and after a discussion with the final control crew decided to go and find the lost control. It wasn’t too far away and amazingly they returned to only be 1 second late at the end!
Everyone completed the course, a few people missed a control and came in with cards missing a sticker or two, and a few cars we late to the final control but everyone had a good time, and was more than happy to share stories over some beers and food at the bar afterwards. Even though we tallied up final scores, no prizes were given as it was all about having a good time.
If we must talk about the get together in the bar afterwards then it would be remiss of me not to talk about the one black spot of the evening (well it was to me, everyone else seemed to enjoy it). The bar had a singer booked for the evening, who liked to involve the crowd watching, and being as a group of 30 people like us was quite noticeable at one point he gravitated in our direction and some of our number thought it would be fun to get me involved with the onstage activities. So, I was pulled up in front of everyone to play cowbell on a couple of songs with the singer. What fun! some of you might say, but I detest cowbell, I think the Saturday Night Live sketch involving cowbell and Christopher Walken is one of the unfunniest things in the history of TV comedy. I think that’s why they got me involved. But we were all having a good time and everyone got a good laugh out of it so that was OK by me.
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The event was a huge success across the board, all the newcomers that I talked to said that they’d had a good time and that they’d come back and do another one. There were a couple of very minor points raised by the more experienced rally goers, but the map plotting concept and the DIY controls were so well received, I was told that if I wanted to run the entire Rum Runner like that I could. It would take a lot of thought to plan a near 100 mile rally like that as compare to a short 30 mile jaunt. Still, it’s something to think about.
“See you next month” said one person as they left. We have a full road rally program this summer so they will have plenty of opportunity to do so, and I hope we see them all back.
Last but not least a big thank you to Clarence and Kate Westberg and Dave and Rachel Fuss for working the controls and to my wife Lorrie Holmes for taking charge of registration.
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Thank you to Rallymaster Ian Homes for sending in his post event wrap-up to RReNews. All photos are courtesy of Clarence Westberg. Our May RReNews photo was the vintage 1964 Oldsmobile that came out.
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My First Road Rally by Jim Crittenden, MKE Region
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It was September 1968. I was a freshman at the University of Delaware when I took a seat in the classroom of EG132 – Engineering Graphics – and met the instructor, W. David Teter. It was my first semester in college and David’s first semester teaching. He had just finished his studies at West Virginia University and had moved to Newark to begin his teaching career at the University of Delaware.
Within the first month, Dave mentioned to the class that he participated in an interesting sport called car rallying. He invited everyone in our class to attend the next rally - the Halloweenie Meanie Rally, hosted by the Valley Forge Motor Club in nearby Pennsylvania. All I needed was a partner and a car. The partner was easy. My best friend from high school, Larry Eller, was also a freshman at the U of D. The car was a little harder as I didn’t own one. I had to convince my Dad to allow me to borrow his car, a 1961 blue Buick LeSabre.
I wish I could recall how I described a car rally to my Dad in order to persuade him to loan me the family car for that purpose. In any case, he always was a generous man and I’m not surprised that he agreed.
So on Thursday evening, October 31, 1968, Larry and I showed up in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania for our first car rally. In keeping with the Halloween theme, it was a nighttime rally.
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Compliments of Bruce Gezon and his rally archive, here’s the flyer for that rally:
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I have two memories of the event. One was that you had to automatically Pause at each black cat. The rally course took us through a covered bridge where they had taped dozens of construction paper cutouts of black cats on the interior walls of the covered bridge. As they were displayed in a very random pattern, counting them and keeping track of which ones you had counted was problematic. “45, 46, 47 … did we count that one? Better start over again.” Perhaps that’s why to this day I dislike counting signs for automatic Pauses on rallies. My other memory was that we got hopelessly lost in the dark and went home without finishing. That was my first rally.
It was 14 months before we tried again at the Sno-Go Rally on December 12, 1969. But when we did (again, using my Dad’s ’61 Buick), we did better. We finished the rally and had fun! I’ve been rallying ever since.
David Teter continued to teach Engineering Graphics and Surveying at the U of D for 31 years until his retirement in 1999. He remained an active rallyist until his death in 2014. I have David to thank for introducing me to this great sport that has been an important and enjoyable part of my life.
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CHECKPOINT CHAT with Rich Bireta - May 2016
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Future USRRC (US Road Rally Challenge), Sanction and Audit Forms, Waiver Changes and 2017 Rules
I’ve got several items of interest to the road rally community, mostly unrelated to each other.
Here goes...
Future United States Road Rally Challenge — USRRC News
The USRRC is designed to be the premier road rally event on the SCCA calendar each year.
Traditionally it consists of three National events (a tour rally, a course rally and a GTA rally). Over time the competitors in the USRRC has narrowed to the teams that typically compete for the SCCA Road Rally Championship and a number of local entries whose size varied on the size of the rally community in that area.
In 2013 the Road Rally Board expanded the concept of the USRRC to broaden the appeal of competing in these events. You saw that when we partnered with Coker Tire and made the USRRC part of the Coker Tire Challenge.
As previously announced, the 2016 USRRC will be held in the New England Region and will celebrate Ted Goddard and the 50th and final running of his Covered Bridge Rally. A second rally (course) will be written by SCCA Hall of Fame member John Buffum. I’ve heard from several SCCA members, rallyists and non-rallyists alike that they plan to be in New England this fall to help celebrate this anniversary.
Also as previously announced, the 2017 USRRC will be organized by Cheryl Babbe from the Arctic Alaska Region. Make your plans now to attend what will surely be a true destination event.
The RRB has received a proposal for the 2018 USRRC from a Region in the Midwest. I expect the board will finalize this selection in mid 2016.
The calendars are set! It’s time to make your travel plans!
Sanction and Audit Forms
At the 2016 SCCA convention Town Hall meeting it was suggested that the road rally sanction and audit forms be made available in “fill-able PDF” format. This document format would allow you to use the ubiquitous Adobe reader to fill out the form on your computer, saving paper and postage.
Thanks to the efforts of SCCA BOD member Terry Hanushek, SCCA staff member Deena Rowland and RRB member Jim Crittenden the documents on SCCA.com are now in this format.
New Waivers Coming for 2017
I attended a recent SCCA leadership webinar on the new waiver forms that will be used in 2017 (and can be used in 2016 when they are available). For most of us it will be as simple as using the new form. For events or waivers notorized in New York, California or Florida or those using minor waivers, the changes are more complex. Your Region management has been made aware of these changes. If you are interested in the details you can see a replay of the webinar at the SCCA web site here.
Deadline Nearing for Rule Changes for 2017
Proposals for 2017 rule changes are due June 30, 2016. To propose a rule change, please send an email with your proposal to rrb@scca.com.
One proposed change that I anticipate will generate a significant amount of discussion concerns Divisional events. Currently the RoadRally Rules lists in an appendix those Articles of the RRRs that Divisional events must adhere to. This list is fairly short and consists of mainly those related to safety.
The proposed change would require Divisional events to adhere to all Articles of the RRRs, or perhaps just require them to use the glossary and route following conventions of the RRRs. Such a change would primarily affect course rallys.
I remain to be convinced that this rule change would solve a problem that currently exists. I can see the argument of such a rule would prevent the situation of a competitor traveling out-of-Division to an event only to be inadvertently penalized due only to their ignorance of unwritten local rules or conventions.
Has this happened to you? Is this a problem the RRB needs to fix?
As always, I welcome your questions or comments to rbireta@gmail.com.
Rich Bireta, RRB Chairman
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And now? There is a Facebook Group too!
from Mike Young, msyapps.com
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I am going to place my trust that Michael Young will welcome exposure to the page for those interested in the development of Road Rally apps for our smartphones and devices. I received an invite to the newly started Road Rally TechTalk public Facebook Group! While I own a Timewise 797A and a Curta — to get more folk involved with an eye towards ease of calculation as they enjoy the fun, challenge and excitement of the course following — priceless!
Michael Young said the focus of RRTT is all things tech as it relates to Road Rallying Measurement of Time, Speed, and Distance either collectively or individually are all gathered and displayed in various ways that have changed as the technology has changed. Distance can be measured at the wheels or by GPS, for example. Clocks, watches and all their variants are ever changing. Speedometers analog and digital have been created. In other words, this group is for all those who develop or are interested in employing all manner of technology in the service of drivers and navigators.
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Lite"rally" — they are happening across America!
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Across America, road rally events are taking place. Perhaps not under the same look that many of us think of them, based on our local events?
This Spring we’ve heard about the Mini Takes the States for Mini Cooper owners, Patrick Strong and the Touge California - a Mazda marque tribute rally in California, from the American Public Gas Association we learned of the NGVAmerica’s sponsored Sea to Shining Sea Road Rally from Long Beach to Washington DC, and across America - libraries, parks, churches and schools, and charities are holding events!
RReNews was started to build a resource for road rally events across North America! Yes, to some, we realize that it may appear we are SCCA-centric. We proudly carry news for SCCA events and work in association with them to serve as a resource from the administrative side – standings, minutes, calendaring, and their RoadRally Chairman column. This loyalty is from Cheryl, who founded the Arctic Alaska Region to find a home for Road Rally in Alaska back in 1986.
Yet we have also been clear that we are here for all – The Furrin’s and Blue Mountain, Twin Cities Rally and MG Clubs, WIRE and yours too!
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Please choose to increase awareness of your events via calendaring when you have the date, to pre-event and post event articles to invite and entice folks to come rally with you.
We have invited (and continue to encourage) the National Events Committee and the Regional Development Committee to utilize RReNews and to reach out to those who have chosen to click on the link at the bottom of these RReNews to “Update Profile/Email Address.
Please, if you have not done so in the last two months, please take a moment now and scroll down — we don’t have a cost to subscribe, yet this would be a great way to show your appreciation of our efforts. It is a two-step process, yet should take you between 3-5 minutes to do. Help us with our Spring Cleaning and let us know you really want to remain on the RReNews mailing list in 2016!
Decks are being cleared of other volunteer commitments, and life changes are freeing more time to be given to the “pages” of RReNews — Come Join Us!
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Upcoming Topics for
RReNews
! Please help us with YOUR experiences?
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Online Registration – Who do you use? On our Facebook page we asked this question and not one reply out of 77 views?!?
And in last months' RReNews we ran this and not one reply? Help do a service to your fellow rallyists as we try to write this piece on the options for online registration!!
We would like to have a piece on the various online Registration options — please send an email to rrenews@comeroadrallywith.us with your clubs' preferred online service and why you find them beneficial to your program!
2017 Photo Calendar –
Would YOU purchase a calendar with a road rally theme for your home, office or garage?
RReNews is seriously considering this for 2017 and would like to read your comments and questions! We will report next month on the response, yet we are looking at months/theme idea: Rallymasters, Roads, Drivers, Navigators, Equipment, Camaraderie, Scenic Views, Scoring/Post Event, etc.! And yes, we would have a system for voting on photos to be included and have personalization for those events calendared by the printing deadline next Spring!
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Words from the Wheel
It has indeed been a busy spring here at the National Office! We have been receiving a steady flow of sanctions and we thank you for the timely payment of the sanctions and insurance post-event as well.
At the Convention, Cheryl Babbe questioned why we don’t have a fillable-pdf Sanction Application and RoadRally Audit Form. Well, I am delighted to tell you that the RRB put it on their list. Thank you to Terry Hanusheck, the RRB Liaison from the National Board of Directors! You can now fill out these forms online and send them via email. You can find them on our www.scca.com website via this path:
- About SCCA
- Downloads
- RoadRally
or click here for the Sanction Application and here for the RoadRally Audit Form. This is the first rendition and we hope you all find them useful and time savers. We welcome your feedback to rrb@scca.com.
Next month I will provide the numbers for events sanctioned and entry counts through May 31st, and a bit of news on the new Waivers that will mandatory for Florida, New York and California. Hope this finds you out laying out your RoadRally or registered to be a Driver or Navigator for an upcoming event in your area.
Questions? You can call me at the National office 800-770-2055 x331 from 7AM to 3:30PM CDT, or through eMail.
Deena Rowland
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SCCA Road Rally Minutes
by Jeanne English, RRB Secretary
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Road Rally Events in 2016
Does your Club, Region, Chamber of Commerce or a neighbor town have events planned this year?
Please send date, details and contact information to rrenews@comeroadrallywith.us for our North American Road Rally calendar. This online calendar is for all marque clubs, independent car clubs and SCCA Regions, as well as community events in your hometowns! We want to help you bring awareness to your events and the sport of Road Rally across North America. We are trying to make your initial input smoother — and we hope to share that in our June edition of RReNews!
And pre-event or post event of special events? Send a write-up and photos to RReNews sharing the event with fellow rallyists as well. Share your enthusiasm and success!
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SCCA National RoadRally Championship Standings
The RoadRally Competition Season is now a calendar year – January to December. John Emmons is the 2016 Points Keeper for the SCCA National Championship. This month we present the points for National Tour and GTA through 26 March.
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SCCA 2016 RoadRally Planning Calendar
This planning calendar can help you to plan your travels to a road rally and help organizers plan their calendar around others in their area!
Per Jeanne English, this is the latest version of the calendar — May 5, 2016.
All SCCA Regions are encouraged to Sanction their events through the National Office as soon as the date is known – it will get it out on the planning calendar, a listing in SportsCar and let fellow Rallymasters know that date is already taken.
Jeanne English
maintains this calendar, with input from
Deena Rowland of the National Office as sanctions come in from Organizers. Seek out the latest calendar off the www.scca.com website via the About SCCA and the Downloads tab!
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From the Home Office —
First the Thank Yous!
Many believe the RoadRally Board members, in being of volunteer service to the program, are to be their servants as well. That is not true! I want to thank those who have chosen to be of support to RReNews with their regular submissions - Jeanne English for Minutes and Calendars, John Emmons for Championship Standings, and Rich Bierta for three years+ of Checkpoint Chats!
Second – Be a part of the pages!
We are delighted that Rick Myers and Jake Engstrom have committed to a piece for our My First Rally column! We enjoyed reading Jim Crittenden's intro to our sport this month and I hope you did as well!
After June 26th, we hope to unveil the changes on our webpage to better help promote events and share the road rally news on North America.
For those newly posted events, head over to our work in progress at comeroadrallywith.us. You can view the listings as MAP, Photo, List or Monthly view. As always, we welcome your comments 'n kudos!
Last – It is Time for Road Rally!
Cheryl's service to the SCCA Arctic Alaska Region's Solo program and our RE Corey Munk to serve as Event Chairman has come to an end. Our April 29-May 1st Solo Weekend, went from a two-day solo to a Solo Weekend XXI — with instructors Tim Weidemann and Gretchen Everett from the SCCA Northwest Region giving a full day of instruction and a Championship event on Sunday. More than a dozen first-time autocrossers were exposed to the sport among the 40+ entrants, eight competitors down from Fairbanks (400 miles up the road), and new were friendships made. Yet it is now time for Road Rally and life!
She has, daily, done something for the USRRC 2017. Lodging has been the toughest. Some press and planning has been worked on and regulars are stepping forward to offer, "I'll run it. Yet know that if you need me...I'm there to work it!!"
Safe Travels and We'll See You Down the Road,
RReNews Team
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Road Rally eNews is produced in association with the Sports Car Club of America
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