Big Road Rallye Weekend

Labor Day weekend is coming up fast. The end of summer.

End of Summer Already? It can't be.

Though it may be thought of as the "unofficial" end of summer, it's going to be a great weekend in the Road Rallye calendar, for down in LaCrosse Wisconsin there's a weekend of double road rallye fun taking place on the Tarmac roads of the Coulee country of Wisconsin.

On the Saturday August 30th is the Oktober Rally. This is a National Rally. But regional and novice contestants shouldn't be put off by this fact, for there will be a separate class for Regional runners. 

The Oktober Rally is a trap Rally with tricky clues to solve to help you navigate the course. For the regional contestants there will be help with solving these instructions.

On the Sunday, August 30th is the Badger Trails a tour rally with no complicated instructions to solve.  

The Roads in Coulee country are some of the best road rally roads around. It should be a real treat. We hope to be there one day, but we're also packing for a vacation back home in England starting the following Friday. So for us, it just depends how the packing goes.

Here then are the details for the event.  

Counting to one hundred

Confession time.

Do you know what the thing is I struggle most with in road rally? 

It's counting to 100.

To be more specific, it's counting in hundredths of a minute that's the problem. After a lifetime of knowing that there are sixty seconds in a minute, having to think that there is another way to count a minute is very difficult, especially at the end of a rally after a five or six hours of hard concentration on driving. 

So, for those who read this blog but don't road rally, here's my latest acquisition. A hundredths reading stopwatch. 

If you're anything like me it looks weird the first time. A one hundredth of a minute is six tenths of a second. If you're counting in hundredths and the time to a checkpoint reads 2.33 minutes that's not two minutes 33 seconds that's really two minutes 20 seconds, a whole 13 seconds difference! That piles on the penalty points for sure. So you can see the need to be accurate and totally unconfused by your timekeeping. 

The stopwatch in the picture is reading 0.84 minutes, which in normal time is 50.4 seconds. 

My stopwatch acquired from a member of the Minnesota Road Rally fraternity is a Galco.  It was made in Switzerland by the Gallet company. Although Gallet are unknown to most, they are the worlds oldest watchmaker, their history can be traced back to Humberto Gallet who became a citizen of Geneva 1466, and began making timepieces there. From the 20th century onwards they have become noted for military chronographs and timepieces. President Harry S. Truman even wore a Gallet watch during his presidency. Gallet chronographs were supplied to members of the US Military in Operation Desert Storm. The Galco name on my timepiece indicates the watch was assembled in the USA, probably by the Excelsior Park company, a subsidiary of Gallet, who themselves had the highest reputation as a producer of sports related chronographs. Mechanisms for the watches were made at the home factory in Switzerland and shipped to the factory in Chicago to be placed in the cases that were specially tailored for the American market. The Excelsior Park company went out of business when the sports timekeeping world went digital. Gallet however goes from strength to strength. It's a fascinating history that I have only skimmed in researching this blog entry.

In these days of digital timepieces it's refreshing to listen to the relaxing tikka-tikka-tikka of a quality clockwork timepiece.

An interesting find.

In Steve McKelvies blog the other week he gave mention to an old Rallye book. "Sports Car Rallies, Trials and Gymkhanas" by David Hebb and Arthur Peck.  It's a book that was first published back in 1956 and outlines the motor sports mentioned in the title for those interested in getting started in them. Of course the language used in the text in the book is from a different time and reflects some social attitudes from then. Some might say that some bits might seem to be just be a tad sexist looking at them with a 21st Century eye. But that's not what I'm writing about.

I was impressed enough with Steve's write up to seek out the book from an online used book retailer for myself. 

When it arrived I was treated to a surprise, for when I opened the book up some pieces of paper fell out from inside the dust jacket. 

This particular one I thought I'd share with you. Dated from 1959, and nicely typed on some vellum is the first owner of the books critique of his performance in the Bristol Rally. There are some very interesting comments on there. Many of which are quite relevant to the beginner even today. 

I particularly like number 8. "After each rally, take the time to run it again theoretically... Try to see what we could have done better... Where we goofed." I did this after the Summer Solstice Rally and found a turn that we missed that tacked on perhaps half a dozen miles to our driving and caused us to arrive at a control from the wrong direction, thus scoring some penalty points.

Of the other comments number 4 resonates with me as a plea for clear concise instructions. Keep it simple. Sometimes it's hard enough just to keep going on the route at the prescribed average speed, without having the navigator perform complex calculations, wading through baffling instructions. I recently saw some rally instructions that were presented as a flow chart. Right now I can't conceive that we would be able to run a rally like that.

From what I can gather many (not all) Rallyists are Rocket scientists, Computer Programmers, Engineers and Biochemists all with incredible abilities with numbers without thinking. Alas, Team Holmes Rallye is not so gifted. But we cope and we bear in mind point 7. "Ask the stupid questions". Sound advice for anything.

Finally, comment number 6 is worth a mention of. "Learn Rally definitions." A comprehensive list of rally terms and definitions for instructions wasn't published by the SCCA until 1963 or thereabouts. Before then you were very much at the mercy of the Rallymaster and his use of the English language in instructions. So this seems to be an appeal for consistency in terminology. A point that is borne out in some of the other letters that fell out of the dust jacket covering this very issue.

This piece of paper was a delight to find and along with the other letters, has provoked some interesting discussions among some of my Road Rallying friends. I hope you all get something out of it too.