Saturday May 16th was the date of the "Spring Kick off". The unofficial start to the classic car driving season in Minnesota and is marked with a great classic car show in the city of Osseo in the NW suburbs of the Twin Cities.
The TCRC were charged with putting on a road rallye for those who attended the show to round off their day. A fun drive in the countryside, in your classic car with a modicum of competition what could be better?
There were between 70 and 100 cars at the show. I don’t know how many we expected to partake in the event. Between a dozen and 20 perhaps?
In the end we were a little disappointed that only 6 cars turned up at the start. Three classics, a Porsche, a Citroen 2CV and a 1934 Ford Coupe, (American I know, but it sure looked good on the rallye). Then we had three modern cars. All to our great surprise, (and a little amusement) were Fiat 500’s.
A couple of the entrants were new to Rallye, a couple were novices, and the last two teams were long time rallyists who hadn’t been seen out in the roads for the longest time.
Why didn’t we get more? I don’t know. Some of the folks I talked to at the show were just not interested, preferring to just have leisurely drives on their own, or with their chosen car club. To be honest though the weather forecast was not overly promising with threats of strong thunderstorms from about 2pm. Indeed, many of the car show entrants started to leave before then. I myself didn’t take my MGB along because of the forecast and the fact I am in dire need of replacing the soft top.
Still, as an advert for an allergy medication currently running on TV in the Twin Cities metro says.
“Six is better than one”.
I was looking forward to working a control on this event and was given control one with Ben Wedge. The sylvan setting belies the fact that Co. 81(a busy suburban highway) was less than 100 yards to the left in the picture below.
 |
| Control One. |
Being close to the start and only six cars running, our task was quickly done with the minimum of fuss. We did have two cars arrive out of order, which would affect the final standings as it turned out. we still had to deal with one person checking out what we were doing on a quiet country road stopping cars every minute. With only one control to work I headed over to the final control at the finish point to get pictures of the cars as they arrived.
 |
| Car 1. Erin & David Vrieze Daniels. |
 |
| Car 2. Bill Heptig and Lorrie Bjorgan. |
 |
| Car 3. Ed Solstad & Marisa Riviere. |
 |
| Car 4. Michael Barone & Lise Schmidt. |
 |
| Car 5. Scott and Kaitlyn Lebakken. |
 |
| Car 6. Cyndi and Larry Walter. |
With only six cars and 4 control points scoring was easy and quickly done. Which must've been good for the newbies as it's the scoring that I always find daunting after a long rallye.
 |
| Final results. |
So, a comfortable win for the Frieze Daniels in modern, and a win for the '34 Ford Coupe of the Lebakkens in the classic class, though you can also see that aside from one high score coming out of place at control one the 2CV of Barone and Schmidt could have done very well. That really does prove that you can road rally in any car, be it a custom car or classic French "umbrella on four wheels".
 |
| Erin & David Vrieze Daniels were pleased with their 1st place. |
A big thank you goes out to Dave Fuss, our Rallymaster for planning the event and the crew of control point workers, except me, it's rather self serving to thank myself.
In closing, lower numbers than we hoped for in entries, but everyone had a good time. We hope for more entries in next years event. After all, the Superbowl wasn't one of Americas largest television events straight away, now was it?
No comments:
Post a Comment