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.