I don't like trap rallies. I think I made that fairly clear last year. So, why on earth were were going out on another one?
It is a road rally and we have done precious few lately. The last one, a couple of weeks ago had an ignominious ending, and we were both keen to get out on the road again.
The Weather forecast for the day was to be glorious. It would have been a glorious day any time of year, but for March, it was outstanding. Bright sunshine and 70 degrees. A perfect day for a drive. So we decided to go rallying no matter what the format. It was just too bad that the MGB was tucked away in the corner of our garage, otherwise I would have been tempted to get it out to begin convertible driving for the year.
I also had a new App to use, following the demise of favourite RallyTracks App. RallyTripTimer is really made for stage rally, but does have a Recce mode that is basically an easy to read twin tripmeter which was what I needed for this event. I also had it bluetoothed to my Garmin GLO GPS receiver for greater accuracy.
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| My set up. Garmin and iPhone running RallyTripMeter app. |
Despite my dislike of the format this event had some instructions I'd not encountered before and was looking forward to working through. The instruction to execute a pause at a point middle of a control zone. Pause 20 and .20 were a couple that were specified. We aren't entirely sure how to handle these. It's like a formula 1 tyre change. It might only take 2 seconds to change the tyres but slowing down to stop and speeding up again means you loose 30+ seconds. So a 12 second pause on a road rally also nets you a greater time loss, and if you haven't got up to speed already in the control zone... Well, for us, lets just say it was just plain guesswork, even more so when there were several pauses in a control zone. Of course the effect can be minimized by braking harder into and accelerating away from the pause, which is what I expect the more experienced drivers do. That did make me wonder about one pause location that ended up being outside one persons house. I wonder what they might have thought if they'd seen all the cars stopping outside their house for 12 seconds before speeding away.
So, to Rene Magrittes pipe, or to be more accurate. A bridge, or what is not a bridge. On a trap rally you can only be 100% sure a bridge is actually a bridge if it has a sign on it telling you it's a bridge. Case in point, on one control zone the instruction was to "Pause 20 at each curve arrow after Bridge". We drove along the road and encountered a sturdy concrete built bridge over a stream.
"Great" I thought, and I started looking for curve arrows.
But wait! This wasn't the bridge.
It didn't have a sign telling you it was a bridge. Further up the road was a glorified culvert that had a sign "Narrow Bridge" on it, so this was the "bridge" to start counting from. The confusion was added to when at the start of the control zone we were given amended instructions (that we had to sign to indicate that we'd read and understood), that were supposed to make it clearer which bridge to start counting from.
Sneaky.
Such is the stuff that trap rallies are made of.
We also had the infamous "blackjack" trap again. Luckily, I was alerted to it from our previous experiences. I saw four right turns in a row on the route instructions, that would mean we drove around a big square somewhere. So I was primed to expect something in that vicinity, and sure enough, there it was. As we approached a side road T, we saw the control marker.
Like a moth drawn towards a light Lorrie started to turn the steering wheel to the left.
"NO!" I shouted. "Not yet! We've still got to pause at that bridge and drive a few miles more before we get back here." We paused at the bridge and headed out to do a few more miles before returning to that point and turning left into the control. Quite a few cars behind us didn't.
We were actually progressing really well. Ten of the eleven legs completed and we hadn't posted a maximum.
Yet.
There are certain rules of trap rallies that the novice needs to know. The most important one is that you can't enact two instructions at the same time. The new instruction over-rides the previous one. Which makes perfect logical sense when you read it. But this also means a seemingly innocuous instruction like a pause cancels out an important instruction like which road to stay on.
The instructions for the start of the final control zone read.
BCZ at stop. Turn left onto G.
Pause 20 at stop.
The Instruction 'ONTO" means you follow G until you are told to turn off if.
The "Pause 20" instruction at the next stop sign overrides that previous instruction. So even though the road G went left at the stop sign we should have ignored that and gone straight on. You don't stop and Pause 20 before turing left and carrying on on G as we did.
When we have encountered a pause instruction at a Stop on other rally formats, the pause was there to even things out for the field if you were crossing a busy road. Making everyone wait the same amount of time. That was how I based my decision. This incorrect choice netted us a maximum score on that leg that might well have cost us first place in class.
When we have encountered a pause instruction at a Stop on other rally formats, the pause was there to even things out for the field if you were crossing a busy road. Making everyone wait the same amount of time. That was how I based my decision. This incorrect choice netted us a maximum score on that leg that might well have cost us first place in class.
I'm still a novice at this trap rally malarkey and with my dislike of the format anyway, I should have written that rule in big letters on a post it note, highlighted it and stuck it on the car dashboard where I could see it.
Our consolation was that many crews fell foul of this trap. Witness all the scores in the hundreds on the final leg. What gets lost in this though, is an appreciation of the skills of our Rallymaster Clarence Westberg, who was able to devise a set of instructions that despite people making that mistake would still result in you getting to the control, albeit having done maybe three or four extra miles. With that we made our way to the Bar in El Paso.
El Paso, Wisconsin. It does't quite have the same ring to it as El Paso Texas. But it was a good place to meet up with everyone to have a chat, compare experiences, complain about the traps, and have the prize giving. The food was some of the best we've had in a middle of nowhere bar at the end of a rally.
A big thanks goes out to Clarence Westberg for putting this event on with only 2 weeks notice with his crew of wife Kate, daughter Liz, and Kerry and Katherine Freund working the controls. The event couldn't have been run without them.
On reflection, we did much, much better than I thought we would, but I still don't like trap rallies.
El Paso, Wisconsin. It does't quite have the same ring to it as El Paso Texas. But it was a good place to meet up with everyone to have a chat, compare experiences, complain about the traps, and have the prize giving. The food was some of the best we've had in a middle of nowhere bar at the end of a rally.
A big thanks goes out to Clarence Westberg for putting this event on with only 2 weeks notice with his crew of wife Kate, daughter Liz, and Kerry and Katherine Freund working the controls. The event couldn't have been run without them.
On reflection, we did much, much better than I thought we would, but I still don't like trap rallies.
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| Final scores |
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