Rally Master Letter | SUN-Day Rally | June 9, 2009

Jim Voros

At 5 minutes to Eleven, I was worried. It was a beautiful day outside and I was guessing that a lot of people were choosing the beach, or F1, or the Greenwich Concours, or the French Open, or the Yankees, or any number of other things (Birds of Prey Festivals!) that was competing with the WSCC SUN-Day Rally for people's leisure time.

A few minutes after eleven when Frank Cardone and Debbi and Gary Kanzler appeared, I was still worried. Most of the night rallies we do, we get 30-40 cars. We expected less at this rally, but really didn't have any measure to gauge our success against, so we arbitrarily decided that if 15 cars showed up, we would be happy.

By 12:30 we surpassed our goal, and 16 cars lined up to start a somewhat different day rally, but one that promised to take the seven or so convertibles, eight cars and one pickup on a tour of back country Westchester county farmland and meandering reservoir roads.

The rally was different because, motivated by laziness, I chose not to use our standard 'Bunny Sign', but instead used questions to keep participants challenged. This meant looking alongside the road for numbers painted on rocks, numbers etched in bridges, words on billboards, and dog and horse mailboxes. There is still a debate over how many 'DRIVEWAYS' there were along one long stretch of road (61 or 71?) even though the word, being in quotes, meant that the answer was 2, since that is how many times the word appeared on signs. Few questions were intended to be tricky like that, some of them just turned out that way and a few people were caught out.

One question was unfortunately out of sequence and it caused some participants to circle around trying to find the answer for a time that was much greater than the 50 points it was worth. Because we said there would be no off course questions, people treated the questions almost like instructions. If they didn't see an answer, they assumed they must've done something wrong. It was an unforeseen negative side-effect of the format and one that I'm sure members of the club will debate for a long time.

The other time loser was a Birds of Prey festival going on off Rt. 22 and Doansberg Road. How many rally participants were watching falcons in great displays of hunting prowess instead of tearing up the back country roads? OK, so maybe that's not part of the demonstrations but the point is that there were a lot of people and it backed up traffic for a little while. This badly hurt anyone's chances for hitting rally time because I purposely cranked up the speed to something much closer to actual speed limits since I didn't want anyone run off the road while traveling at 23 mph on Rt. 116 during heavy Sunday traffic.

The good news is that all but one car was accounted for at the end. Thirteen cars made it to the checkpoint (two after it closed), and one handed in their answer sheet at Applebees. A very good ratio.

Everyone who we spoke to afterwards loved the course, felt the question format worked well and wondered who lived in the Spanish Colonial with the Shetland ponies and the fighting Bull.

While there is still a bit to learn about how to manage the 'question' format, personally I am pleased with the turnout and the rally. Perhaps it was a little too fast for people to keep on rally time, but it was fast for everyone so it didn't actually hurt anyone in the end.

This rally couldn't have been a success without the help and support of Debbi who not only pre-ran the rally a few times but helped hone the instructions so they were spot on and added questions to keep things interesting. In addition, Frank's wisdom cleaned up the instructions so that there really were no mistakes. Thanks also to Gary, Dave Trezza and Ed McGuirk who helped out on the day of the rally to pull off the event and the rest of the WSCC members who not only ran the rally but gave out tips (Thanks Mike Caroll!) and advice to all the participants.

I also want to extend a huge thank you to every participant, including the 3 first timers, who came out and endured (?) the course. Hopefully, you came away with some rally experience and new knowledge of some of the Westchester farm country. We hope to see you again at our next rally which should be in late summer. Also look out for our Halloween and Turkey Tours.