Rum Runner 2016 preparations

After a summer filled with stage rally excitement it's time to get on and finish preparations for this years Rum Runner Road Rally. This years event, in October will be the fourth Rum Runner, and this time it's going to be something a little different. An Economy Run.

Economy runs used to be a big thing up until the 60's. Both in Europe and in North America.

In America the big one was the Mobil Economy Run, it ran from 1936-1968. To win the Mobil Economy run was a great honor among the American car manufacturers as these consumption figures came from proper road use, something all motorists could relate to, rather than running cars on a rolling road in a perfect environment like today.

What is interesting about the preparations is how strict they were. A manufacturer couldn't produce a special works car for the event. Instead the organizers, the United States Auto Club (USAC) went into a dealership, bought the cars, inspected them to make sure they were truly stock and then sealed the hood and chassis to prevent any manufacturer tampering. Then the fuel tank was disconnected and a special tank installed in the trunk to enable accurate, consistent refueling to take place. Only after all this had taken place could the car manufactures supply the driver, who was a specially trained individual. Even so, on the run the driver was accompanied by an official observer to make sure the rules were complied with.

There were as many as eight different classes for cars governed by weight, engine size, body style and even price, and for many years the results were calculated using a complicated theory involving the weight of the car and other factors. Rather than just a simple miles per gallon calculation. This favored the traditional old American saloon, the lumbering V8 dreadnoughts. But in the late 1940's the change was made to simple mpg calculations, and this tipped the scales in favor of the more "compact" cars. Cars like AMC Ramblers and Studebaker Larks. In 1959 an AMC Rambler recorded 25.2 mpg on that years run from Los Angeles to Kansas. AMC domination was so total that they were almost banned from the competition, so badly did they beat the big three automakers. But instead they were put into a separate class with Studebaker.

An interesting write up by an economy run driver can be found here.

During the boom years of the economy run people would line the streets to watch the cars pass through. But public interest eventually waned, less and less people turned out to watch and in 1968 the manufacturers informed the organizers that they just weren't interested anymore. The event folded just like that. 

Nowadays, the spirit of the economy run is carried on by a class of motorist called hypermilers, who even in these days of energy efficient hybrid vehicles, try to eke out every last mile per gallon out of their cars. I'll freely admit I've often tried to do that with the cars I've driven. 

Being fascinated by the economy run and its history, it seemed quite natural to want to extend this to putting on an economy run. Clarence Westberg at the Twin City Rally Club has mentioned the idea a few times over the years, and  as I'd had great success with my Navigating near Nowthen Rally earlier in the year, I felt good about presenting something new to the Twin Cities rally community.

But how to organize one? I wasn't interested in any event that involved complicated equations to get the result. So a simple mpg calculation was in order. I got in contact with Peter Baker who runs the highly successful Cotswold economy drive in the UK who was kind enough to give me some pointers about how to proceed. I presented the idea to the members at a TCRC meeting. It was met with unanimous approval. I was good to go.

I'd been planning the idea for a while and already had the rally route worked out. But doing a pre-check had been stymied for several weeks by road works and closures around the mid point of the route. So I planned an alternate route, and what do you know? The closed roads opened up! There was still road works going on so I decided that Lorrie and I would pre-check the amended course.

Some Tulips and notes. Changes are being made.

It's all very well working a route out on Google maps but you have to get out there and check every thing. Every single thing.

For example, less than half a mile from the start point, Google maps indicated a right turn on Baldwin  street, except that the sign listed the turn as 189th street. It didn't actually become Baldwin until a left turn just down the road. Then on top of that, even though the map showed the entire street as Baldwin, as we drove along the road, each time it went through a right angle turn the name changed. I'm used to that out in the boonies near Princeton. But I was surprised to see that in town. That alone made for three extra instructions in the first mile and a return to the start of the pre-check as we'd got lost... 

We started again, got out of town with no problems. Then as we were about to make a turn on a side road left I saw the road was gravel. There were to be no gravel roads on the economy run. I tried to make amendments to the route on the fly and we got lost again. So we turned around and headed back to town to start again!

Third time lucky? Not really. Sixteen miles in and I was looking for 109th street when I should have been looking for 189th. This time we backtracked to a turn, reset the odometer and carried on. This time we got through with no mistakes, all the way to the end of the rally. A few more instructions need to be added but the course is good I think. You'll experience different road conditions. You'll sit at traffic lights and stop signs. You'll be able to cruise on some main roads, as well as tackle back roads with sharp curves and some slopes. All in all it will provide a rounded driving experience.

The exact rules are still being ironed out, but the event will start and finish with supervised refueling. When you register you will predict your what your miles per gallon will be over the event. At the final refuel we will calculate your mpg and the most accurate prediction will be the winner. There may well be hidden observation controls and perhaps even speed checks along the route to keep you on your toes too. 

I'm excited by the idea and I hope road rally enthusiasts in the Twin Cities will be too. 

Trails and tours

It's heading inexorably towards winter here in Minnesota and while snow on the ground means the end of a lot of peoples activities not so here. Minnesotans make use of the outside 365 days a year. Whether you hunt, ski, or ride a snowmobile the outside is calling even if it is below freezing. Even the Road Rally community makes the most of the winter. Snow covered gravel roads are a great leveller and the winter champioship is hotly contested.

But we still find time for fun and in the coming months we will see two of the state's outstanding fun events. Both events are put on by Mark Larson.

First up is the Tombstone Trail. Coming up on October 24th. This Halloween themed event is a firm favourite and is in its 38th year of running. Competitors meet up at a different start point every year and drive around the graveyards of Eastern Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, following route instructions, stopping off at cemeteries along the way where they have to answer questions about some of the occupants. Some questions are easy, others not so. That means competitors have to roam around graveyards at night to find the answers. What mkes this event extra special is that some non rally members of the public who have followed the event for many years add to the atmosphere by "haunting" the graveyards. There is no telling what surprise you might get.
If, like me, you are of a nervous dispostion when it comes to "ghostly matters" you might want to get a team of grave inspectors to rummage around among the headstones while you remain safely ensconced in the car.

The Tombstone Trail comes highly recommended among the road rally fraternity in the area. The rally nearly always fills up its full complement of 40 spaces so if you are interested you might want to get over to the event website to sign up. 

Perhaps you don't want to be scared to death on a weekend but would still like to get out on a different type of rally, then coming up in December is the Holiday lights tour. It's a similar format to the Tombstone but this time you drive around the Twin Cities suburbs checking out the lighting displays in peoples gardens. Details on this event will be released nearer the time. But this too, is aanother good time. A chance to meet up with rally friends in an informal atmosphere. We attended our first Holiday llights tour last year and had a blast. You may well recall I wrote about it last year if not click here to be reminded of the event. We will be signing up for that one for sure when registration opens.
Both events make a pleasant change from the usual sort of Road Rally.

A Summer Solstice Rally primer

We are close to the end of May. The days are getting longer and in a few weeks we will reach the shortest night of the year. The Summer Solstice. That means it will be time for the Summer Solstice Rally. This year the solstice officially falls on Sunday June 21st. So the rally will start off Friday June 19th as the sun sets and end the next morning as the sun rises.

This is one of the great events of the Road Rally calendar in our region and I love to tell my friends all about what we doing and what the rally entails. They generally think we're crazy, driving around western Wisconsin in the dark, but I tend to take the view that stopping up all night for anything is a bit crazy.

I don't think it's the kind of event you'd want to do as your first attempt at a road rally. But I have several friends in the local rally community, novices who haven't participated in many rallies who are on the verge of entering but can't quite pluck up the courage to take the plunge yet. My advice to them is the old cliché.
"Come on in the waters lovely". So the basis for this post is a few of the questions I've been asked about this type of event  and my answers.

Don't you have trouble staying awake all night? In a word. No. The first time Lorrie and I competed in the Summer Solstice rally we were worried about that. To be nodding off at 2am down a quiet Wisconsin backroad and ending up in a ditch. So we packed a cooler full of Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew, a whole night's worth of caffeine. If memory serves me correctly, we only drank one can each over the entire event. The second year of the event I think we drank more water than anything else. The adrenaline of the event keeps you awake, we really had no problem whatsoever. Once the event is over however, that's another thing. The drive home can be hard work. A stop at Starbucks is pretty well compulsory. 

I'd be scared of hitting a deer. Yes, a deer did catch us a glancing blow last year at about 4:30am, taking our drivers door mirror off. But then again I've also hit a deer driving to work during the week. This is the Midwest countryside, there are deer all over. You will see plenty of them. But they only seem to be active in the dusk and dawn hours. Last year many of them, along with myriad other woodland creatures, lined the route to watch us go by. 

I'd be scared of getting lost. A natural worry. But for the most part the route instructions for the event are kept pretty simple. Getting through the night is challenge enough without having to throw any traps or convoluted instructions into the mix. If you do get badly off course, the G.I.s give GPS coordinates for the next meeting point. There is the slight chance that you may find yourself in an area of poor GPS coverage.

You've got an answer for everything. Aren't there any problems? Concentration can be a problem in the wee small hours. Both years so far, our concentration has lapsed for a moment around 1-2am. The first year we missed a couple of turns, and as a consequence missed a pair of timing controls. The second year, after we had passed the last control of the section we took a wrong turn, and though we were only two miles from the meet up point for the start of the next section we were some 15 minutes late getting there. How come we took so long? Well, by some slight chance we ended up in an area of poor GPS coverage... So we had to rely on some map reading and a sense of direction. 

Getting lost at night in the wilds of Wisconsin? Why would I want to do that? Because, quite honestly, it is fun. A lot of fun. We wouldn't miss it.

If I've allayed your fears over the event then you can register over at MotorsportReg here 

Coulee Classic plug

After the Spring Kick Off Rallye on Saturday a cheerful grey bearded fellow thrust some paper into my hand, uttering the phrase. "Take a flyer, take a flyer."

I was a little unsure as to what he meant. Did he want me to "go and take a running jump" (British, informal: a contemptuous expression of dismissal) or something else? 

Then I looked and saw that it was Ed Solstad. Rallymaster of the Coulee Classic, plugging his forthcoming event.

The Coulee Classic flyer. I highly recommend you go.

The Coulee Classic is a great run. Our first ever rally some three years ago was the Coulee Classic. Other commitments have meant that we haven't been able to attend the past two years, so I really do hope we can attend this time.
The scenery down in Wisconsin Coulee country is quite beautiful, the easy to follow instructions do make it a great rally for the beginner. You should probably go. You will have a great time.

Rally Club Rallye

I hope you have read the previous post on how great I think Rally Club meetings are. Well on May 12th, Rally Club went to new heights of fun and enjoyment when we actually ran a short Rallye as a part of the proceedings!
In an effort to introduce more people to road rally the TCRC have been toting their services around to possibly help local classic car clubs put on a road rallye for their members. The Intermarque organization in the Twins Cities asked if we could organize a rally for them to round off their "Spring Kick off" celebrations. (Intermarque is the organization of all the European car clubs in the Twin Cities and the Spring Kick off event is meant to signify the start of the driving season for all the classic car clubs.)
A Road Rallye for classic car clubs? What a great idea! The TCRC were very excited at the thought, and long time TCRC member Dave Fuss very quickly had a short route worked out to give people a taster for road rallye. With the date of the Spring Kick off coming up on May 16th we decided to incorporate running a pre-check with this months Rally club meeting.
We all met up near the start point in downtown Osseo, MN where Dave handed out the route instructions, generals, and scorecards. Which was a surprise to us, we weren't just going to pre check the route and mileages, we were going to get timed and scored as well. Just like a regular tour Rallye. We decided that as there was no serious competition involved we'd mix things up a bit and have Lorrie drive and I'd navigate, a reversal of our usual roles.
As we came straight from work we drove in our usual car our Ford Focus but Louis Hardin and Priya Bansal turned up in their Fiat (This was planned to be a rallye for classic cars remember).

The Fiat of Hardin and Bansal 

The Rallye route was only 35 miles or so, which meant that at times the route instructions came thick and fast which added to the fun for us. Maths has never been my strong point, so to have to quickly work out how many seconds up or down we were and read the next instruction was quite hard work. In fact at control 2 we were so far ahead of schedule due to my bad maths that we waited out of sight of the control point for some 50 seconds to try and come in on time, even then we still came in 12 seconds early!
Despite the short distance the route was a lot of fun. Rallymaster Fuss had found some great roads in this tiny quadrant of the NW Twin Cities metro, and in an all too short hour we were at the finish point for an analysis, a short Rally Club meeting, food and beer.

We all had a great time and would like to do something similar again. Our unanimous decision was that this was a great course, one that we thought beginners would have some fun with. 

Did they have fun on the day of the event? Well, you'll just have to wait until I post my Rallye report to find out.

Trans America Rallye Update

Back in the early part of last year, April as a matter of fact, I gave a mention to the Trans America Rally coming through the Midwest in June of this year.
I have an update. The latest info on the website says that the cars will overnight in Duluth, MN on June 16th, having approached the city by running along the south shore of Lake Superior. In the morning the entrants will set off for Grand Forks passing through Park Rapids and the Itasca state forest. The Itasca state forest has some wonderful rally roads that I'm sure the participants will enjoy.
I'm hoping that my work schedule will allow me the time to nip up there and see the cars.
No exact route is available as yet but the latest details on the route and the schedule can be found on the event web page.

Prepping

Tschhhk, Tschhhk. Tschhhk, Tchhhk...
That's the sound of the printer down in the basement running off instructions for the Rum Runner Rallye in a few days.
All the hard work has been done. Plotting on the maps, going out for the leisurely drives  and checking the roads out. Then the route finalizing and measurement and then the pre-check.
It's been quite hectic.
The original plan was to have the event on the 4th, the Saturday but then the pressures of work took over and my employers instigated a mandatory overtime policy which not only moved the event to the Sunday but also curtailed any other road rally competition on our part as well.
(It also put me in the emergency room with a overwork related stress issue which wasn't very nice and caused me to miss the final pre-check but that's another story.)
Lets not forget that in the intervening we've also had a trip back to the UK and attended the Goodwood Revival.
Things have been so overwhelming that I'd even forgotten when I'd set the registration for the event to open. So imagine my surprise when I received an email notification telling me of the first entry for the event while we were on holiday in England!
So we're getting quite excited now. Right now I'm surrounded by delay forms, Tulips, waivers, General Instructions, and the event speciality. Fridge Magnets.
I think it's nice that everybody who runs gets something from the event. I'd like to get everyone T-shirts but not enough competitors get their entries in in time for me to get an order in to the printers. Fridge Magnets I can cope with at home. Though printing magnetic stock on a home inkjet printer can be fraught with "issues"...
Still, the fridge magnets are popular and I like to think that contestants take them home, stick them on their fridges and when a fellow rally competitor comes around for a beer to watch the game he sees the magnet and says.
"Rum Runner? Where's that one then?" He will then be told by his friend about the good time to be had on the Rum Runner and there you go, another potential entrant for next year.

The soon to be legendary Rum Runner 2014 Fridge Magnet.

That's how it should work anyway.

Now if you'll excuse me the printer has stopped running. There's some more papers to collate.

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.  

Forthcoming Event. Chippewa Trail Rally.

A new Rallye for the region will take place on August 16th out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The Chippewa Trail.

When I say "new" this is really an attempt to revive road rallies in the area. The Chippewa Valley Sports Car Club (CVSCC) used to put on rallies in the area and in the 1970's The Chippewa Trail National Rally (put on by the Land O' Lakes region of the SCCA) was noted for its great roads and brisk speeds. The Chippewa Trail National moved to Menomonie and ran until 2006. It came back for 2010 in Durand.

There was also, in the words of one who competed in this event many times, some "epic" hospitality, this included throwing the Rallymaster into a swimming pool at the end of the event.

The Rallye is being put on by Rallymaster Clarence Westberg of the Twin City Rally club for the CVSCC  as it appears that putting on a road rally may be a lost art among the club members since the demise of the Chippewa Trail National Rally in the 1980's. The hope is that this new Chippewa Trail Rally will renew interest in road rally. 

The day promises much with all entrants invited to partake in "Cars and Coffee", the Saturday morning social gathering of the CVSCC before the car zero time of noon. Beginners will be able to partake in a Road Rally 101 course to learn all they need to know to get them through the event.

The CVSCC have promised to lay on catering after the event. This looks like it could be quite the day, and Team Holmes Rallye hope to be there in FG the MGB.

Registration is now open at Motorsportsreg 

Post Script: I've added some extra information as previous entrants get in touch with me because their memories have been jogged and they remember the good times of the old Rally. If you've got any memories of the old Chippewa Trail Rally pop them in the comments below.

Forthcoming event. The Coulee Classic

It has come to my attention that The Coulee Classic Road Rallye is next weekend, Saturday June 28th. Short notice I know, but it has only just come to my attention. Sadly I won't be able to be there due to work commitments.
The event covers some wonderfully scenic roads in the Coulee Country of Wisconsin. It is the event that got my wife and I interested in Road Rally. It's where we met many of our fellow competitors that we now call friends.
If you own a classic/collector car it is the event for you. Modern cars are welcomed too. It's a drive that you will enjoy.
Details can be found here.

On through the night.

Coming up on Friday June 20th is one of the most unique events on the Midwest Road Rally calendar. The Summer Solstice Road Rally out of Baldwin, WI. What makes this so unique is it takes place in the hours of darkness on the shortest night of the year (or as near as the Rallymaster can get). An all night rally.
Speaking from last years experience I can tell you that this is an event not to be missed. The Rally is a mix of Tulip instructions and map based course plotting with route checks along the way to prove that you followed the correct course. In the event that you get lost there are pick up points along the way to get you back on course. You will find it advantageous to use a GPS of some description.
Some of you less experienced and beginner road rally crews may well be concerned about staying awake all night. Last year my wife and I felt the same and we carried a cooler with us containing several cans of caffeinated beverages in it. But really they weren't needed. For during the event we were concentrating so hard that we didn't notice any tiredness. However, we did miss a couple of turns that may well have been down to a lack of concentration due to being awake in the "wee small hours".
This is a very unique event and one you should do.
You can enter over at MotorportReg using the link here
I hope we'll see you there.