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The rallymaster thought he could knock off a little rally in a coupla’ days.
Not that easy. No such thing as a "small rally".
The Route Instruction’s were written as a long, continuous
"run" for the checkouts. When the RI’s were written to turn right
and head into the CP, the fact that the next RI on the final RI’s occurred
before rallyists entered the CP didn’t get caught. Oops! They entered the CP
at the wrong speed. This made the RI at the outcone (a speed limit sign) hard to
do, since it was already executed!
Now add in a real twister- the rallymaster
did a last minute renumbering of the RI’s -But didn’t update the handouts
given to the rallyists at the checkpoints!! Then throw in a technical snafu:
"AT STOP CAST 33". STOP is defined as a meeting of rally roads,
there would have to be more than one valid road. Since the dead end road to the
right didn’t exist for rally purposes, this wasn’t the STOP the rallyists
were looking for. The error was obvious as the rallyists went up a 33 mph road,
still doing 22! But it could be a trap! So they did it!
Fortunately, the rally was only 98 minutes long, and there were only 12
entrants. The horror didn’t last too long, nor was it widespread. Trying to
put a good face on a bad scene, the rallymaster handed out trophies according to
some arbitrary criteria- folks from furthest away got trophies, and all the
Novices went home with a trophy, even if it said "First Equipped."
Recycling old dash plaques worked pretty well- take a master sheet to the copy
store and have them make up a color "overhead display" transparency,
then carefully cut and paste onto some old ES1000 plaques. Trophies were
somewhat more difficult, but four households have cleared out some storage
space!
Since the scores aren’t valid, they won’t be printed.
"I
apologize for putting on a bad rally." –Mark Nolte,
Rallymaster
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