We knew no one would finish early; there were a lot of tricks on this rally and we suspected that everyone would fall for at least one or two. The first car into the checkpoint was car number 5, arriving almost fifteen minutes late, leaving us anxiously waiting. Those headlights were a welcome sight, much like 2 years ago, the distinctive Acura Integra lights were the confirmation that this rally was possible. The critique was easy to take, there really wasn’t any. But the anxious wait didn’t stop; the next car was 20 minutes later. At that point, cars started rolling in, one hour late. Everyone was commenting on the beautiful route, the mistakes that were made, but no criticism of the directions. Why was everyone an hour late? We never found the answer to that question. We did make one minor error in the directions at the beginning of the rally. The mileage at the “Right at T” was indicated at 1.5 miles, but it was actually 1.3 miles. This was an editing result that we made in Excel.
When we set out to build the course for this rally, we knew that we wanted to do several things. First, we wanted to drive through the Windmill section of Armonk; second, we didn’t want any transit zones on major roads. This rally was going to be all back roads with no major thoroughfares. And most importantly, the Bunny signs were going to be well hidden. Last year, most teams found all our Bunny signs; our goal was to hide them much better. Bunnies went behind several bridges, behind trees, on dead trees, on fences and in the woods. We even placed bunnies strategically to pull you away from correctly navigating the rally. Sorry, we had to do it, and we succeeded. No one found all the signs and there was a nice distribution of sightings.
When designing the course, we used every trick that we could think of. This wasn’t an easy rally; in fact, it was the hardest rally of the 4 Bunny Runs that we have designed. We wrote the route in early March, which allowed us to forget enough of the route so that we could pre-run our own rally. Frank also pre-ran it and provided a few worthy suggestions, including the off-course ‘K’ bunny. If you drove by the ‘K’ correctly, it would be on the left side of your car; according to the general directions, all bunnies would be on the right and that was not the 90° turn for which you were looking.
Done correctly, this rally went through Greenwich, North Stamford, New Canaan, Port Chester and Armonk. Done incorrectly, who knows. Although we stated the longest distance between directions was 5 miles, there were plenty of opportunities to go off course. The total distance of the rally was 57.3 miles and the running time should have been 2 hours 4 minutes and 31 seconds. The last person to arrive at Applebee’s arrived about 15 minutes after the last call at 12:45 AM. Talk about persistent. Only 6 people gave up completely and never arrived at the restaurant.
We will be having an October rally and the Turkey Tour in November. We are always looking for more people to be involved in producing events, both autocross and rallies, if you are interested in becoming a member or helping out, drop me an e-mail at: jesse@vgallery.com.
See you soon.