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. 

Larking about.

Ever since I bought FG the MGB, my 1976 MGB roadster (the most beautiful rubber bumpered MGB in Minnesota) I've been after a collector car from 1963, the year I was born. It's been a long search. For British sports cars, the early sixties are prime years. The E-type Jag was introduced in 1962, the MG Midget in 1961 and the MGB itself in 1963. Add to that British Classics like the Bug Eye Sprite the Austin Healey and great Triumphs like the TR3 and TR4. It doesn't take a genius to realize that prices on these cars are at a premium and as a consequence out of my budget.

So I looked around for anything from 1963. Saab, Citroen, Renault, Volvo. Nothing. Well nothing that fit the budgetary requirements. After a while, a few 1963 American cars started to appear. Fords, Chevys, Caddys. All huge dreadnoughts of a car that would struggle to fit in our garage. So they were  out. Then a few vehicles I wasn't really aware of. An AMC Rambler caught my eye for a while until I took a closer look. It wasn't as good as the pictures made out. Then I saw this...

A 1963 Studebaker Cruiser. I knew the name Studebaker of course. Some of the most exciting and striking automotive designs of the 50's and 60's came out of South Bend, Indiana. The 1950 Champion Starlight Coupe being the most obvious example. I didn't know what a Cruiser was though. It was the top of the range of the Lark models. So much so that it didn't even carry the Lark name. It was just the "Cruiser". It was marketed as a more compact rival to the bigger limousines of the "big three" makers. Studebaker even coined the term "Limousette" to describe it.
I was captivated by the design, that Mercedes-esque grille and all those curves around the grille, headlights and chrome bumpers. So, my wife Lorrie and I decided to go and take a look at it. It didn't disappoint. The car is a stalled restoration project that hadn't run in some 20 years. But that body is sound, very sound. The paintwork is a joy to behold.
One word. Patina. The colour is known in Studebaker circles as Rosemist. It's officially a Purple. A Brownish Purple. But research seems to suggest that back in the day finishing a cars paint job with a clear lacquer was not done, so the shiny grayish purple has faded to a satin lavender grey. It's a brilliant looking finish that I love. It has to be kept like this. 

Needless to say we both fell in love with the car. So the price was agreed on and a few days later a friend and I made the trip from Princeton to Le Sueur, MN with a trailer to collect it.

The car hadn't been run in some 20 years and the fuel tank smelled like paint thinners so it was a good idea not to drive it. Right now, the car resides in a workshop, being cleaned up to get the motor running after 20 years of neglect.

Now research has begun to reveal the rallye history of Studebaker. The makers achieved great success in the Mobil Economy Run of the 50's and 60's. The successes of Studebaker and AMC cars in this event caused their vehicles to be put in a new, separate class because the big three automakers couldn't even come close to the figures (up to 25 mpg) recorded by these cars. 

Greater success was accorded to the Studebaker Lark winning the Shell 4000 rally outright in 1961 and 1962. 

So there you go, quite by accident I've ended up buying a car with a Rallye heritage. Quite the bonus. So perhaps once it's running we'll end up turning up to a road rallye in the car. Perhaps having been inspired by the whole experience of the Goodwood revival we will turn up to road rallies in a 1963 car wearing 1960's clothing, using 1960's navigation equipment. Who knows? 

Time to turn to the tables.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm so fascinated by the sport of road rally. There's a lot of maths involved and mathematics and I do not get along terribly well. Is seven multiplied by eight 48 or 56? I'm having to count it out in my head right now, and now confirm it on a calculator 7 x 8 is 56. So, how does a mathematical nincompoop like myself cope with this? (Apart, of course from turning the calculating over to the navigator). If you are like me then fear not for these below are here to save you.

Larry Reid's Rally Tables on my dining room table...

These tables do all the hard work for you. I suppose it's not dissimilar to using the logarithm tables that we used to have in school. (Log tables and slide rules? It's getting just like school maths class.)

The book is a plethora of numbers and rallye calculations already worked out for you.

The riveting chapters include: Hundredths of minutes converted to seconds. Seconds converted to decimal parts of minutes. Miles per hour converted to seconds per mile and minutes per mile. But the biggest proportion of the book is given over to the Navigation Tables. Some 89 pages of tables where each speed between 12 and 59.75 mph is listed in tenth of a mile per hour increments along with the time it takes to cover a distance between 1 and 40 miles. 

About as interesting as watching paint dry to the uninitiated, but bread and butter stuff for the Rallyist. Three miles at 23 mph? 7 minutes 50 seconds. 

In the past, having these facts easy to hand must have been quite helpful to a navigator if they were trying to look out for landmarks and follow Rallye instructions while at the same time being bombarded with requests from the driver about their speed and progress. 
Also, you needn't go thinking that modern high tech equipment has replaced them. For one of the first things I was shown on my first Rallye, by a friendly fellow rallyist, and was advised to buy, was a set of Navigation tables on an iPad.

There you go, more Rallye fun, and more maths. I really should have paid more attention at school...

An old rule for a new rallyist

This is probably one of those posts that will be of interest to those friends of mine who don't road rally and are curious as to what makes it such a fascination for me (and my wife). For you more experienced rallyists the article might illicit a wry smile or two.

The road rally world of today is driven by expensive computers. Big black boxes that sit on the dashboard and tell you how fast/slow you're going in relation to your actual time, how far you've gone/got to go, even counting your time to the perfect arrival time. Even now though these big black boxes are being replaced by iPad apps that do exactly the same for 5% of the price. So it's fun to think back the old days and see what rallyists used then.

This is one of those pieces of equipment. A Stevens Rally Indicator or Stevens Wheel. 

It's basically a circular slide rule. They came in two sizes 6" diameter and 10". This is the six inch version. The ten inch was more popular because of the larger size meant larger, easier to read numbers, especially at night. 

What I'm doing with a slide rule I don't know after my brushes with them in school. I can well remember having a small circular slide rule, when everyone else had a straight rule. 

"So Holmes." Said Rob Morton, maths teacher at Queen Elizabeths Grammar School Alford. " A circular slide rule. Whats three multiplied by two?"

I diligently set to rotating the wheels and sliders to do the calculation.

"Six" I said proudly, having  worked quite hard to get the calculation right. 

"Well done." The teacher said. To this day I'm not entirely sure if he was taking the Mickey or not. I think I heard a few giggles go around the classroom. 

So, how does this disc of plastic work for the rallyist?

As you see, there are three arms. The large one is marked T the two smaller ones E and M. 

When you go out on a rally the first thing you do is check how accurate your cars odometer is compared to the rally official distance on a special "Odo Check" section. This is what the E and M arms are for. At the end of this stage you set the M arm to read the official miles and the E arm to what your cars odometer reads. This takes care any measuring errors. Now set the T arm to the speed for the section of the rally you're ready. In this picture it's set at 43mph. A somewhat brisk pace.

Right, let's say you need to know how long it's going to take you to drive 11miles at the 43mph pace. You move the E arm to 11 and then read off the T arm. It says 19.8 minutes. Point eight minutes? You sound confused. Don't forget you also have the Galco hundredths reading stopwatch from a few posts ago. That's what you'll be using to time the leg.

Easy.

Now let's say you need to know how far you've gone in a certain time. You set the T arm to the amount of time that has passed. Let's say 11 minutes. Then if you look at the reading on the smaller E arm you see it says 6.45. You've travelled 6.45 miles! Calculations like this are the bread and butter of road rally, and I know of contestants who, in this world of the high tech black boxes I referred to at the start of this piece, still use the Stevens Wheel today to great effect. Road Rally is a sport that doesn't have to be run using the highest of tech.

To me it's just a bit of a novelty thing to have at the moment. It would though, be rather fun to compete in a road rally using one. 

After my first brushes with the slide rule at school all those years ago, I never thought I'd buy another one let alone consider using one.

Counting to one hundred

Confession time.

Do you know what the thing is I struggle most with in road rally? 

It's counting to 100.

To be more specific, it's counting in hundredths of a minute that's the problem. After a lifetime of knowing that there are sixty seconds in a minute, having to think that there is another way to count a minute is very difficult, especially at the end of a rally after a five or six hours of hard concentration on driving. 

So, for those who read this blog but don't road rally, here's my latest acquisition. A hundredths reading stopwatch. 

If you're anything like me it looks weird the first time. A one hundredth of a minute is six tenths of a second. If you're counting in hundredths and the time to a checkpoint reads 2.33 minutes that's not two minutes 33 seconds that's really two minutes 20 seconds, a whole 13 seconds difference! That piles on the penalty points for sure. So you can see the need to be accurate and totally unconfused by your timekeeping. 

The stopwatch in the picture is reading 0.84 minutes, which in normal time is 50.4 seconds. 

My stopwatch acquired from a member of the Minnesota Road Rally fraternity is a Galco.  It was made in Switzerland by the Gallet company. Although Gallet are unknown to most, they are the worlds oldest watchmaker, their history can be traced back to Humberto Gallet who became a citizen of Geneva 1466, and began making timepieces there. From the 20th century onwards they have become noted for military chronographs and timepieces. President Harry S. Truman even wore a Gallet watch during his presidency. Gallet chronographs were supplied to members of the US Military in Operation Desert Storm. The Galco name on my timepiece indicates the watch was assembled in the USA, probably by the Excelsior Park company, a subsidiary of Gallet, who themselves had the highest reputation as a producer of sports related chronographs. Mechanisms for the watches were made at the home factory in Switzerland and shipped to the factory in Chicago to be placed in the cases that were specially tailored for the American market. The Excelsior Park company went out of business when the sports timekeeping world went digital. Gallet however goes from strength to strength. It's a fascinating history that I have only skimmed in researching this blog entry.

In these days of digital timepieces it's refreshing to listen to the relaxing tikka-tikka-tikka of a quality clockwork timepiece.

An interesting find.

In Steve McKelvies blog the other week he gave mention to an old Rallye book. "Sports Car Rallies, Trials and Gymkhanas" by David Hebb and Arthur Peck.  It's a book that was first published back in 1956 and outlines the motor sports mentioned in the title for those interested in getting started in them. Of course the language used in the text in the book is from a different time and reflects some social attitudes from then. Some might say that some bits might seem to be just be a tad sexist looking at them with a 21st Century eye. But that's not what I'm writing about.

I was impressed enough with Steve's write up to seek out the book from an online used book retailer for myself. 

When it arrived I was treated to a surprise, for when I opened the book up some pieces of paper fell out from inside the dust jacket. 

This particular one I thought I'd share with you. Dated from 1959, and nicely typed on some vellum is the first owner of the books critique of his performance in the Bristol Rally. There are some very interesting comments on there. Many of which are quite relevant to the beginner even today. 

I particularly like number 8. "After each rally, take the time to run it again theoretically... Try to see what we could have done better... Where we goofed." I did this after the Summer Solstice Rally and found a turn that we missed that tacked on perhaps half a dozen miles to our driving and caused us to arrive at a control from the wrong direction, thus scoring some penalty points.

Of the other comments number 4 resonates with me as a plea for clear concise instructions. Keep it simple. Sometimes it's hard enough just to keep going on the route at the prescribed average speed, without having the navigator perform complex calculations, wading through baffling instructions. I recently saw some rally instructions that were presented as a flow chart. Right now I can't conceive that we would be able to run a rally like that.

From what I can gather many (not all) Rallyists are Rocket scientists, Computer Programmers, Engineers and Biochemists all with incredible abilities with numbers without thinking. Alas, Team Holmes Rallye is not so gifted. But we cope and we bear in mind point 7. "Ask the stupid questions". Sound advice for anything.

Finally, comment number 6 is worth a mention of. "Learn Rally definitions." A comprehensive list of rally terms and definitions for instructions wasn't published by the SCCA until 1963 or thereabouts. Before then you were very much at the mercy of the Rallymaster and his use of the English language in instructions. So this seems to be an appeal for consistency in terminology. A point that is borne out in some of the other letters that fell out of the dust jacket covering this very issue.

This piece of paper was a delight to find and along with the other letters, has provoked some interesting discussions among some of my Road Rallying friends. I hope you all get something out of it too.

Road Rally Car boutique #2 (Ooh La La)

I don't really want to get ahead of myself. There is time a-plenty to discuss the world of Classic Car Road Rallying. It's a whole subculture of its own. I was going to wait until I'd introduced the idea of Road Rallying in cars over 25 years old before introducing some as Road Rally cars. But my hand was forced by the following vehicle appearing for sale on Craigslist. So here goes...

Je t'aime... Oh, je t'aime...

Once in a while a car so unusual appears for sale that you have to do a double take. Such as when this Renault 4CV appeared on Craigslist in the fall of last year. I was immediately captivated by its Gallic charm. The car disappeared from sale over the winter but reappeared the other day.

For those of you not familiar with the car, here's a brief outline, the full history is a fascinating  story of covert World War 2 car design that needs a better person than I to tell the tale. Constructed between 1946 and 1961 it was the French answer to the VW Beetle, and Ferdinand Porsche did have his hand in the development of the car. Over the course of its history it was the first French car to sell over 1 million units. 

From the front, I think it is bears visual similarities to the English Morris Minor, which it pre-dates by two years so we should really say the Morris Minor bears a similarity to the 4CV. Power came from a rear mounted, 4 cylinder, 750cc engine. The rear wheel drive affording excellent traction. The front steering on the early models was very light and went from full lock to full lock in 2 1/4 turns of the steering wheel, (How's that for positive?)

By now you are probably asking yourselves "Why on earth is this ugly piece of French auto engineering considered a good rally car?"

Well, the high gearing, light steering, and traction led it to be an outstanding Rally car. Between 1951 and 1954 4CV's were class winners in the Monte Carlo Rally, Tulip Rally, Alpine Cup, Tour de France Rally and even Le Mans. Clearly you should never judge a book by its cover.

So if you're looking for something different to road rally that really represents a totally different era in motor sport, this could be what you're after.

I absolutely adore this little car, I really do. I'd have it if I could.