Reading Material

Last week an advert appeared on my FaceBook feed, there was a special offer on this book. Ten dollars off the recommended price. I thought it was too good a deal to pass up.

A good read.

Mark A. Williams was one of the most sought after co-drivers in North American rallying up to his retirement, with countless rally wins and national championships under his belt. Interesting factoid, he co-drove for three different drivers in their efforts to qualify for X Games 13 in 2007. All three drivers qualified with him alongside them. He could only-drive for one in the X Games itself though. 

The book promised to be "up to date" and not based around "techniques from thirty years ago". It's current. There are many iPhone/iPad Apps listed in the book. References are made to the big names of today, Travis Pastrana, Ken Block et al. As well as US Rally legend John Buffum. 

It's a very good read. My copy arrived in the mail today, and I started reading it straight away. A little over four hours later after a break for lunch, I had finished it. 

The most important part of co-driving, that is reading the paces notes and communicating with the driver, is covered in great detail right up to writing your own notes, complete with plenty of useful advice about pacing how you read them back to the driver, and developing shorthand for when it comes to making your own notes.

I don't expect I'll ever need to know the difference between FIA, Canadian, and Rally America time cards. But if I ever do, I know where to find out. 

There's interesting discussions on tactics and your position on the road. How turning up late to a control so the stage conditions in front of you can improve, enabling you to drive faster, so that your speed more than recoups the penalty incurred for checking in late. Or the merits of making a lengthy repair in service depending on how much faster you'll be with the repair made over not making the repair. The book also advises to not stop to repair a flat tyre if you're inside 7 miles from the stage finish because the time you'd loose wouldn't be enough to warrant the time spent on the change. He then outlines a drill of duties between driver and co-driver to enable an efficient wheel change. 

The book takes the reader through four levels of being a co-driver. Capable, Competent, Contributing, and Comfortable, along with the duties associated with each. A capable co-driver should know the basics to get the car around the rally on time, and little more. Competent co-drivers need to be able to do more preparatory work and team organization. Contributing and Comfortable co-drivers should be able to make the serious decisions about timing and repairs. 

I learnt a lot. I also discovered that I've been incorporating some of what is in the book into my style already. If I was to rate myself according to the book, I think I could call myself almost competent. 

I'm glad I got the book. There aren't many instructional books I've read cover to cover. I don't even read instruction manuals all the way through. I shall now read it a second time and highlight important parts with a marker. Hopefully all this will help to make me a better co-driver.

I'd certainly recommend that beginners should buy this book.

I don't want to be kept in the dark.

Reading pace notes, that is...

Both times I've been out in the 958 on a rally I've needed to use a light to read the notes. The light we use in the 958 is on a flexible neck and has a small conventional lightbulb in it that, in theory, you adjust to where you want it, to shine on your notes to read them. 

Fine and dandy in theory. But the battering a rally car takes means that the light bounces all over the place due to the flexible neck and I end up holding the thing to keep it (relatively) still. Then it starts to get in the way of my reading the notes. Devoting your full concentration to reading is difficult when you're also trying to keep a clear view of the page of notes. Then you have to let go of the light to turn a page in said notes, it springs away from you and you have to reach for it again. 

"What a faff!" As we say back in my home county of Lincolnshire. (What a fuss.) My attention should be on holding the notes and reading them. 

There are ways around this. Like lights mounted to the roll cage for instance. There's a very nice one here, made by Don Barrow in the UK. LED's mounted in some roll cage padding. I think it's a great idea. But at over $100. That's a not inconsiderable amount of money that could go towards an entry fee or a really important car part. It seems to me a much more sensible idea to have your lighting and notes together in close proximity. To that end I came up with my own idea. An illuminated clipboard.

 Now you're all going to say.

"But I can buy an illuminated clipboard from Amazon, you've not invented anything."

But that one on Amazon is a conventional clipboard with a clip at the top. Try turning pages of pace notes on that one in a hurry. 

My concept has a rod at the side that you slide your spiral, or comb bound notes onto so that you can turn the pages freely.

Conventional clipboards are also made of rigid materials so that you can write on the papers clipped thereon. This isn't needed when you're reading notes. So I'd replace that with some kind of more flexible, lower density foam. Because if you have an incident and end up rolling down an embankment it's better to have some foam flying around the cabin rather than wood or a hard plastic.

To me it seems like a blindingly obvious idea and if someone knows of something like this that exists already, I'd be interested to know about it. But so far I haven't found anything.

The old sporting cliche rears its head.

"In order to finish first, first you have to finish".
No-one is entirely sure where the saying came from. It has been credited to US racer Rick Mears but goes back further than that, probably to the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio. But wherever it originated there's no doubt it came from motor racing.
You may well have the fastest car on the track but if it crashes or breaks down then you're not going to finish, let alone be top of the podium, and a podium finish could be very special here at the new look Headwaters Rally. Because as I turned up at registration I was told that all class winners and second place finishers would get a champagne spraying celebration! In that case, who wouldn't want to come first or second?
Dan, my wife Lorrie and I had headed up on the Friday morning to take part in the afternoon recce to check the roads out. There had been quite a bit of confusion earlier when the course notes were released by the organizers. Several lines of instructions were missing. I had been doing some video recce with the notes and at one point the two didn't agree with each other. I checked with Susi (who has sort of been my co-driving mentor) to see if I wasn't imagining things. She agreed. Then as I went on I found other sections that were awry. So one evening we sat down and reviewed stage tapes and notes to come up with correct instructions, which then found their way to the other competitors.
These are popular rally roads and had been used for the Ojibwe Forest National Rally several times before so they were known to many of the competitors, even Dan who remarked as we passed one point while reviewing stage two.
"I remember this spot! I crashed the Blue Mazda down there!" This made for a special instruction in the notes to SLOW DOWN. He was not keen for a repeat performance.
We made two passes over each stage. The first pass was a slower one, to make sure that the notes we had were OK and then a second pass at a quicker speed getting a feel for the surface and reviewing the notes to see if the extra speed necessitated any further changes. After two passes we were feeling pretty good and retired for the night to await the next days adventures.

The 958 had a surprise in store for us all on Saturday morning.

It was going to be a long day as the first car out was 2pm. So we had a lot of time to kill while other competitors went out on a morning recce session, and when I leisurely strolled over to the 958 I was greeted by Dan with the words.
"We have a problem. Watch this." He sat on the front wing of the car.
It didn't move.
At all.
The springs were rock solid. No give in them, not one inch. Pretty much the exact opposite to what you'd want in a stage rally car.
"I'll be honest with you." He said. "We'll go out there and try it. But if I don't like the way it handles, we will probably call it a day. I don't want to break the car or end up in another ditch."
Dan is the boss so it was fine by me, although I really wanted to get out there and rally. I didn't want to end up in a ditch either.
The car passed the tech inspection with no problems and I went to the second of my compulsory novice briefings before we got the car ready for the Parc expose.
Two p.m. arrived and the cars headed out towards the forests.
It was a hot day, a very hot day. Both of us had been hydrating all through the morning and we were quite comfortable in the car cruising to the start with the car windows open. Even finding time to return the (not so) cheery wave from a resident near the start of stage one who clearly was not very happy to have a stream of noisy rally cars racing near his back yard.
However, once we strapped ourselves in with crash helmets on and the windows shut, the car was very hot indeed, in fact at once point I noticed I'd sweated so much I'd sweat all the way through my race suit. It is basically like wearing an oven mitt.
We were off! Left 5 - 50,  Right 5 - 50, Left 5 very long, 70 line to Left 5... The turns were coming thick and fast, this was nothing like Nemadji where speeds had been lowered by the conditions. I kept up with reading the notes pretty well, once or twice I lost place, but that might have more to do with being bounced around due to the cars stiff suspension than anything else. In situations where I get lost Dan is always helping by calling what he sees on the road in front of him and that can help me get back on track. Good communication between driver and co-driver is key.
Then as we rounded a Right 3 we witnessed the first of the cars that had left the road. When I say witnessed, what we saw was some tyre tracks heading in a straight line out of the curve and a car sized gap in the undergrowth. The crew were showing their "OK" signs and we sped on our way. There were some important corners to get right on this first stage. One was a downhill very tight right-hander as we turned onto Steamboat trail, well known to OFR competitors. Dan was adamant on getting this right, being such a popular place, and with wife Susi recording the action, no slip ups were allowed. So of course, I flubbed the call and we went in a little hot, putting the back end out of line a bit. Hopefully it looked good to the crowd. Second time through, we nailed it.
Apart from us being bounced around rather severely because of our stiff suspension things passed off relatively smoothly and our second passes through the stages were quite a bit faster than the first. As we had started 14th on the road, the course was getting quite soft and torn up in the corners by the time we got there. So there was a lot of sideways slipping and sliding in and out of ruts in the curves, with Dan working hard to correct things. However, the forest roads were taking their toll on the competitors and by the start of stage 4 we were running 8th on the road. Not that that made the corners any easier there were still plenty of big rocks and stones to hit, and we hit many. With our super stiff, bone jarring suspension I don't know how the car survived.
After three stages I asked Dan how he felt about the cars' handling.
"Not happy but we'll stick with it". Was the reply. We had seen several cars off the road, but never at any point had I felt like we would leave the road. The car made it through stage 2 and 4 which contained the infamous curve that Dan had crashed on before and we made it back to service for a clean up and make sure everything was fine.

Back at service

We bought back a lot of forest dirt with us.

Service was long, 90 minutes. Which was, in my opinion, too long. Having come back all fired up from the stages, I think we were starting to come down a bit and I was starting to feel a little tired as we headed out again.
Four more stages to the finish to get another rally under my belt. Even if I carry on co-driving for another 10 years I doubt I'll experience conditions quite like these. The rally area had not received any rain in a week or so. Conditions were dry and as you see from the service park photo very dusty. Earlier in the day there had been a slight breeze that had helped to blow the dust away between cars. But in the service gap the breeze had dropped. The dust was hanging in the air, making visibility tough, couple this with driving into the sunset on stages 5 and 7 and things there were next to impossible. I lived in Lincolnshire, England until I was 38. I saw many a thick North Sea fog on the coast roads around my home. Visibility was as bad as that. Bouncing around on the road following my notes became difficult too. I felt like I was making a real pigs ear of things. On top of that our car hit one bump so hard as I was calling a turn that I almost broke a tooth! The minute gap between cars was not enough so by the time we arrived at stage 7 the gap between cars had been widened to two. This was better but still not perfect, as in some really sheltered areas the dust still hung around. On top of that a mist was creeping in around the trees too. The mist was white, the dust clouds tan, so it was easy to tell the difference.
Stage 8. The last stage. 11 miles from our second completed rally together. No heroics. We were off again. It was twilight and getting dark in among the trees, I struggled to read my notes and I switched the reading light on. The very same light that gets in the way of reading the notes it's supposed to be illuminating. Add to that the continual severe bouncing and hammering from the stiff suspension and I don't know how we made it through there. We went into many a sharp turn hot but Dan's driving skills got us through to the end in one piece. It was a relief when we saw the final finish board. "Saw" is a relative term as the dust was so thick around the finish line all I was aware of was a dull red blur as we zipped past it. I focused on the flashing lights of the car at the control point. That was the only concrete clue we had for the end of the stage.
Then it was back to the casino and the final MTC.
"I think we came fourth." Dan opined as we headed back. "Maybe third, realistically fourth. I'll be happy with fourth"
I wasn't so sure. I quietly thought to myself that we'd done better. I quoted the sporting cliche back at him. Our principal rivals in class G2 are Al Dantes and Brandon Snyder, Dave Grenwis and Drew Burkholder in VW's and the Mitsubishi of Mike Ericsson and Jacob Good. Ericsson and Good had succumbed to mechanical problems on the way to stage one. Dave and Drew had mechanical issues and we saw them on the roadside during stage three. Al had been driving like a man possessed and was way, way faster than our Mazda but he'd had problems too. So secretly I was hoping for second, perhaps even first. But as we had ended up as the first two wheel drive car on the road we had no idea what was happening behind us, and it was a long wait for the other G2 cars to get back for the results to be finalized.

Back at MTC waiting for results

It was a very long wait.
Al and Brandon rolled in. On three wheels. They had hit a rock and got a flat about six miles from the end of the final stage and due to an oversight of epic proportions had left the tool to undo the wheel nuts in service. So they'd done 6 stage miles and 12 transit miles on three wheels and a rim that got ever smaller and smaller. I'd wager that if final MTC had been another mile away they might not have made it. There is a saying in rally. "Press on Regardless", you carry on to the finish no matter what the problems. This will go down as one of the great examples of this.

Not much left of the wheel when car 50 reached MTC.

Eventually the results were announced. Co-chair of the event Nicky Nelson said the words I hoped I'd hear.
"First in class G2. Car 958!"
We had done it. Not by much but we had come first in class.
"Second. Car 50." A huge cheer went up. Al and Brandon came second despite finishing on three wheels!
Let that sink in for a moment.
First in class was a car that was incorrectly set up for the event and due to that was a minute off the pace in most stages.
Second in class was a car that "pressed on regardless" and finished on three wheels.
<insert that tired old sporting cliche here>
The champagne spraying celebration was savored by all involved. Champagne spraying is synonymous with big money motor sport and the fact that some of us at the lower levels got to do this provided a memory for me that will live for a long time.

Trophy and Champagne.

But the great tales of the weekend don't end there.

Our good friends Kenn Parps and Emily Burton-Weinman had driven "Renner" their Saturn up to Walker to rally it, instead of trailering it up there. 

"If we crash in the rally we'll deal with it then." Emily had told me a couple of weeks previously. I was hoping I'd be writing about a lost aspect of motorsport. Driving your car to a race, racing it, and then driving it home.

Alas, that was not to be, for they rolled their car on stage 8. The final stage. I was gutted for them but glad that they were OK.
How would they get their battered car home?
In a great gesture of true rally spirit, Nick Roberts offered space on his trailer to get the car home. Nick, as most of you know, runs in events across North America in the Rally America and Rally Canada championships. That one of the big names of rally world can help out one of the ordinary guys speaks volumes for the spirit of rally and the camaraderie in the sport. It makes you proud to be associated with everyone.
This event had everything. A win for us, great displays of the rally ethic "press on regardless" and the great community spirit of rally. So huge thanks go out to the Organizers, co-chair persons Nicky Nelson and Erica Messler. Rallymaster Greg Messler for choosing some great roads. Considering it was their first attempt at organizing a stage rally they'd done a good job.
The huge crew of volunteers (including my wife) who spent a whole day in a very hot and dusty forest so that a group of us could have some fun.
Our crew, headed by Andy Gawboy with Dans father Tim and Grandfather Norm, Susi and Paul for cheering us on. We couldn't have done it without you all.
To our fellow competitors for keeping it fun, and to Northern Lights Casino in Walker, MN for being rally HQ.
But I think an even bigger thanks needs to go to Scott Putnam of Subaru.net who sponsored the event. It was his generous support that allowed the event to go on. From the permits to run on the roads to the champagne for the winners to spray over everyone. All of that made for a memorable event. Thanks to Scott and everyone involved. I hope to see you all again next year.

Had it been a rally we would have won.

Last night, Tuesday, May 10th. Members of the TCRC met to do a pre-check for this Saturdays Intermarque social rally.
These social rallies as you know, are simple events put on for beginners to give them a taste of what road rally is like. This particular rally is put on in conjunction with the Intermarque "Spring Kick Off", the get together that informally marks the start of classic car driving season in Minnesota. So we have hopes of a good turn out of classic cars at this event.
Turn out for the pre-check was poor, (but how many cars do you need to run a pre-check anyway?) with only Clarence and Kate Westberg there with Lorrie and I to help out Rallymaster Dave Fuss and his wife Rachel.
Dave handed out the Route Instructions and a clock set to the time of the event on Saturday, so we didn't have to recalculate any of the timing instructions, and we were off. I decided to use my RallyTripMeter App, I'd used it on a recent trap rally and got on with it well then. There were too many CAST changes coming too quickly on this event to use the MSY App and with all the timings given on the instructions, it was easy enough to use this as an Odometer that I could reset just by touching the screen and read the time off the clock to get us around the course.
As we started off I was paying attention to the CASTs, calling times and counting down distances to turns, I was put in mind of a in car video I had seen from a regularity rally, with the co-driver calling speeds, distances and timings. We were not as efficient and skilled as this pair but I was working hard watching the clock, odometer and instructions.
"Half a mile to the turn, 50 seconds to get there..."
"Turn Right at Stop in 3... 2... 1..."
It was how we used to be when we first started out about 4 years ago. But a whole year and a half of not competing in any rallies had made us rusty with bad technique and this was the first time since that we had approached any level of efficiency.
Counting down to the timing control points was hard work. The only distance I'm any good at judging is 22 yards, the length of a cricket pitch.  So to see the control board a distance ahead and not know how far it away it was, only knowing the time you had left to get there, made for awkward instructions to the driver.
"See the control up there, you have 15 seconds to get there... 10... 5, 4, 3...  Faster. We're going to be late."
Twice we were three seconds late. However, we were on time once. That made us feel pretty good about ourselves. We still could get to controls on time.
The final control was different, we had no time given to get there, just a distance, 1.12 miles and a speed - 30mph. We needed to get there in...
in...
er...
Two minutes and a bit. As you know maths is not my strong point. If I had more mathematical ability then I could have worked it out. So my instructions to Lorrie were to get up to 30mph as quick as possible and hold it there, of course we needed to spend a little time over 30 mph to counteract the time we spent below 30.
Yeah, difficult to work out isn't? No surprise we turned up 9 seconds early. To be honest, I was very surprised we were that early. But as Lorrie said driving at 30mph is very difficult.
It had been great fun. I never cease to be amazed that there are good driving roads to be found in the Twin Cities suburbs. This short, hour long rally format is a lot of fun too. It's just too bad I can't compete on Saturday. It's going to be a lot of fun.
With that, we repaired to Dick's bar in Osseo for a drink and a review of the course. It was supposed to be a rally club meeting evening after all.
Later as we were leaving we were asked how we did.
'We came first in class." I joked. There was only two of us, and we're not in the same class as Clarence and Kate.
"How many points did you score?" We were pressed.
"A zero, two threes, and a nine. Fifteen." I replied.
Dave laughed. "You won!" He said.
Kate admitted that they'd been running their rally computer in hundredths of a minute and not whole seconds and had miscalculated at the last control.
Of course, It hadn't been a competitive rally. But you know what they say, "To finish first, first you have to finish". That was true tonight. So perhaps we'll win a proper rally soon.

Countdown to Headwaters

It's less than three weeks to go to the Headwaters Regional Rally out of Walker, MN. Time to start getting ready.
Now don't go thinking that we started getting ready with the event just three weeks away. There's been preparations going on for a while. Schedules to plan out to get two cars, drivers, and crews up to Northern Minnesota, (as well as a third race car to the Brainerd International Raceway for a World Racing League event). There's spare parts to order, for example. The most technical sounding thing was producing some .kml files so Dan could do some tortuosity calculations.
As co-driver I've spent a lot of time plundering Youtube for video recce footage of the stages that we will be using. The roads have been used previously on the Ojibwe Forests Rally and I found some good video from 2010 that has helped in getting the feel for the stages. I even went as far as making my own stage notes from the footage.

A page of my own stage notes.

But last weekend it was time to get the car (hereinafter referred to as "The #958") into the infamous "Third Stall" of the garage that the racing team is named for and do some work on her.
When I arrived at our "top secret facility" The #958 was sat in the driveway waiting to be cleaned and polished. However, my first task was to get my "office" sorted out. My plan is to have a good rally computer set up on my iPad mini to get us through the event. I've got ASE RallyCom by ARC a Japanese developer. I needed to get it situated on the RAM mount so I could see it and not have it obstruct my view of the road ahead. Right now, it looks like a lot of information on there for me to absorb, and probably does to the uninitiated too. There's clocks, countdowns, odometers and all kinds of stuff on there.

Lots of information.

Once I had got my situation sorted out and The #958 was cleaned, it was time to do real car work. There were the front struts to replace and the tyres to change for a start. The struts had collapsed at an autocross the weekend after Nemadji. We were lucky that they hadn't collapsed at the rally itself. We would have both been very disappointed if we hadn't finished. Anyway, replacing the struts was simplicity itself. Wheel off, remove old strut, put new one in and the wheel back on. It was when I was putting a wheel back on that I got a real shock. A wheel with a snow tyre on is quite light, however, a wheel with a gravel tyre on isn't. It's heavier. A lot heavier. I got one heck of a surprise when I tried to lift the wheel onto the lugs... Cue an explanation from Dan about the thickness of the sidewall of a snow tyre as opposed to a gravel tyre. Snow tyres have thinner sidewalls so they can flex more, that's how they get grip in the icy conditions. A gravel tyre gets its grip from the tread, and doesn't need to flex. So the sidewall is thicker. Even a regular road tyre has a thicker sidewall than a snow tyre. I'm learning something new all the time.

Working on The #958, installing new struts, changing tyres.

After having a dinner break, we headed back out to our trusty steed to finish off. Our task was to see if we could get the electric window winder to work on my door. It quit during Nemadji. It wasn't the motor as the window could be operated from the driver side. It must be the switch. There was much testing of terminals, fuses, and wires before it was decided that somehow the wrong switch was installed. How it even worked at all was a mystery to Dan. He concocted a clever wiring solution that got the window working from my seat. A quick squirt of everything with WD40 to get the old winder motor running smoothly and we were good to go.
Or were we?
As we were about to put the door panel back on, I tried the switch again.
Nothing. The window didn't move.
More puzzled expressions. Had I loosened some wires when I was fiddling around spraying the WD40? Or had the motor simply just died? An expiring motor seems the most logical choice as it was sounded like it was struggling beforehand. That's why we got the WD40 and some silicon spray out, to ease things. So that's where we left it. The window didn't work before we started and it didn't work when we finished. One possible solution suggested was something along the lines of this window opening system on this 1940's railway carriage. I don't think that it will come to that, and it's probably illegal anyway. I can easily open and close the door to get the timing sheet like I did before. Right now The #958 is on four wheels and runs we are ready to rally which is where we want to be.

A Beer run.

May 1st saw the running of the Escape to Wisconsin road rally. Starting at Point Douglas Park, just outside of Prescott, WI over the Mississippi in Minnesota, the route took in about 150 miles of Wisconsins finest driftless country roads before ending up at a nice little brewpub at Reads Landing back in Minnesota.

Fresh from our success at putting on the Nowthen Rally the previous week, we were looking forward to getting out and enjoying the roads.

This event saw the debut of TCRC member Louis Hardin as rally master, taking over the running of this event from Clarence Westberg. New blood brought a new start point and new roads for us to try.

The event was a control zone rally.  What's a Control Zone Rally? Well what happens in a control zone rally is that you are given a combination of Time, Speed, and/or Distance for a section of the rally and you have to use those factors to arrive at a control point on time.  It was something of a new format for us. Still, we thought we'd give it a go, it couldn't be any worse than doing a trap rally. I even downloaded an iPhone App specifically created for the purpose. The Control Zone App from MSYApps. The thing that appealed to me about this App was that the variables could be set by a nice clean slider display. See below.

The Slider display of the Control Zone App

 The main display is also nice and clean too. The displays are simple to read and are highlighted green if you are behind schedule, red if you are ahead. The route is traced on the map with a blue line as you proceed along the way. There's other features in there like recording splits, that I haven't used yet. We were just relying on it to get us to the end of the rally and hopefully post some low scores. We'll come to how it behaved in the rally later.

The Control Zone App main display

We arrived at Point Douglas Park nice and early to socialise but with a chill breeze blowing off the Mississippi chat was kept to a minimum.

A nice blue sky, but there was a chill breeze off the water.

The departure time came and off we went. At the first control we scored a 6! That was unheard of for us at this type of rally where scoring was to the hundredth of a minute, follow that with a 17 at the next control and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. The new App must be having an effect! Then the wheels came off the wagon a bit. But not entirely our fault as an error had crept into the NRI's. The exact form of the error was not clear, I think a CAST had been missed off the instructions which resulted in us turning up to a control zone start at least 3 minutes late. Confusion reigned in our car through the next two zones, and in the end I felt it was easier to take the max points at the controls rather than mess around trying to work out how late we were and take the appropriate allowance., maths has never been my strong point. We were supposed to be out to enjoy ourselves, not get stressed out. The instructions were the same for everyone and others were discussing the missing CAST at the first break point so we didn't feel so bad as we set out on the next leg.
It was then that I started to have "issues" with the App. It was very hot in the car and my fingers were getting very sweaty and greasy, and consequently so did my iPhone screen. This became a real problem using the sliders to set the mileage, when my fingers were dry it was quite easy to set the mileage using the slider to get close and then fine tune it with the + and - buttons. But with greasy fingers on a greasy screen all that went out the window, just pressing too hard or lifting your finger off the screen could result in a change of as much as 10 miles. This put us late a couple of times and we posted a few scores in the hundreds before I realized what had happened and tried to give the screen (and my fingers) a real good cleaning and drying before I used it again. This seemed to work when I remembered to do it and we went back to posting some low (for us) scores of 7, 12 and 25. Which meant we were finishing off on a high note.
A word about the roads. They are some of the finest road rally roads that you will encounter. Winding roads that climb up steep hills to get out of river valleys and then wind their way around an undulating landscape before plunging down another switchback into a valley not unlike the one you just left, at times you feel like you are diving through someones front yard the way things are set up. To be honest, it's tough to get too much of this scenery and with all the trees starting to get leaves it was just great to drive through. Some of these twisty windy roads found me going into some kind of Stage rally co-driver mode to alert Lorrie as to how sharp the upcoming curves could be, "Very sharp left", "Hairpin right" as I studied the GPS screen as well as reading the NRI's. It was quite natural to me, and Lorrie certainly appreciated the heads up on what was approaching.
Another thing that should be known about Wisconsin State highways is that the State Troopers have a propensity for hiding and catching people speeding and we were saddened when we watched the car on the minute in front of us get pulled over. Getting a ticket was a disqualification in the rally, and it can be quite easy to get ticketed in Wisconsin on a sunny weekend.
As we headed to the finish we were quite happy. It had been a very nice drive through some great countryside, overall we'd had a good time. That to us is the most important thing.

Finish point, Reads Landing Brewpub.

There was still one last surprise for us. We had netted enough high scores to finish last and win the coveted Dead Last But Finished (DLBF) award. Some people might be quite disappointed at finishing dead last. Maybe we would have been if we hadn't enjoyed ourselves. But overall we'd had a really good time, so it didn't matter. Besides it's a darned good beer.

Dead Guy Ale. Very tasty.

All in all it was a good rally. Congratulations and appreciations go out to Rallymaster Louis and his crew. We look forward to Escape to Wisconsin next year.