Bunny
The ’98 Turkey tour went off as scheduled. There was some initial confusion, as I decided to recycle unused Bunny Run answer sheets and general instructions. 65 cars entered the rally, with 42 finishers. The rally was designed to be an easy one, to give more rallyists a chance to do a time calculation, and have a chance to hit the time dead on. Several of the top finishing teams at this event have been traditional non-finishing entries at pervious events. The average time was set to 21 M.P.H., partly due to to predicted cold that night, but also to give entrants a chance to make up time lost without speeding dangerously. After the rally several rallyists mentioned that they thought the speed was too slow. In hindsight I agree, but some have taken entering our rallies as a license to tear through back roads without regard to oncoming traffic, or speed limit. This is not the essence of rallying, it is about being ON TIME.
The rally was originally planned as a 6 checkpoint event, we only had enough workers for 3. This is the reason the course looped through the same neighborhood several times, it was to give workers the chance to travel from one checkpoint to the next. Of the 37 signs posted 33 were recovered after the event, so only those signs were counted in scoring the event.
More than a few rallyists commented to me that they thought the mileage was off in the initial instructions. In the months it took to set up the rally, Fred and I had been over the course a dozen times, at least 3 times with mileage. The next day I reran the first 10 miles, and got exactly the printed mileage. I also discovered a self correcting loop that many rallyists took early on that caused their error. You missed a turn. We used my all-wheel drive Eclipse for all mileage since it produced the most consistent results .
One Driver discover that if you went from the end of page 1 to page 3(skipping 2) that you ended up at checkpoint 1 quite a bit early.
Some of you recall seeing me enter Tino’s wearing rubber gloves. As soon as I had returned from my checkpoint I heard a collision infront of the restaurant. I rushed out along with another rallyist whose name escapes me(sorry). A jeep and an Escort had collided at high speed leaving the passenger of the escort in shock, and with a head wound. We immediately put on rubber gloves and did what we could till the ambulance arrived. They extracted him from the wreckage and left. I hope he’s OK.
I will continue to bring new ideas to every event I can. I have tried to use new roads in attempt to keep events from becoming stale. Now would be a good time to buy an EZ-Pass. You were warned….