Alcan RallyLog

Last (real) Practice

This was it: our last chance to practice with the computer on a rally even remotely resembling the kind of scoring we’ll see on the Alcan. Chuckanut Sports Car Club put on the Armageddon XXII Redux rally on January 25. This event was rescheduled from last

November due to excessive flood damage on forest roads that comprised the planned route. Now it would be almost all paved instead of the gravel we crave but regardless, we looked forward to it for the valuable seat time in a competitive setting. After all, it’s been many weeks since we had to try and stay on time during the Totem Rally in British Columbia last November...

Jim was over on Saturday doing random wiring and re-wiring and installing of additional gadgets. (My youngest son’s comment: “you again?!” – already a wiseass at the age of four). I worked on some stuff for this web site that will be revealed later. We got the GPS multiplexer mostly working, installed the rally computer and planned on a 7:30 departure for Bellingham. I programmed the coffee maker and my alarm clock for our wake up and Jim fretted about a last-minute problem report from his nest of computers at work. The fact that I didn’t push all the right buttons on the alarm clock was foreshadowing that I failed to heed. Fortunately the sound of the coffee maker squeezing out its last drops of human starting fluid woke Jim and we got on the road a mere 30 minutes late for our jaunt north to sign in.

We love getting our car number, and we really love getting car #13. There was a whole lotta love for us in the silver WRX but we were unfazed. Perhaps I should’ve done a fazing practice, or read a fazing manual. But who the heck knows what being fazed actually means? Hindsight is brilliant in its clarity...
Eric and Steve got lucky #7 so we knew we wouldn’t see them much, if at all, during the event. Six minutes is a long time when it comes to hanging out before a scored regularity section begins.

First car out was 10:01 and we weren’t far behind for the very brief odometer check. No wrong turns is a Good Thing when it comes to matching up our odometer signal to what the rallymaster used to measure the course and this was our first success of the day. I had our speed programmed, the odometer factor calculated, speed changes highlighted in the route book... what else was there to do? Our start time approached, I said “hit it” to Jim, and then realized that a significant task had been left undone. Setting the odometer to zero is kind of important when beginning a rally. It’s vital, in fact. I quickly scrambled my limited resources to come up with a plan to get our odometer on the right number and while I was congratulating myself on solving that problem I managed to miss a speed change. I tried to fudge it and gave Jim a variety of instructions to adjust his speed: “Faster!” “No, slower!” “Ummm” – Perhaps it was that last utterance that clued him in to the fact that his navigator was ... fazed?

So we did not love the first section. The rest of the rally went pretty well. Long story short, it was a great touring rally on some interesting roads. Snow was not really a factor though we saw some slush on one section but with the surefooted Subaru it was never a worry and the organizers had plenty of provisional plans in place in the event of too much slippy stuff. We were running the GPS as a curiosity and one of the sections had us getting (literally) within spitting distance of the U.S./Canada border. The built-in map for the GPS showed us making a brief foray over the border but we never left the road and the laser guns on the camera towers never lit up so I figure it was a glitch in that piece of technology that provided plenty of in-car speculation/entertainment.

The event ended at a restaurant in Bellingham and before scores were released Jim and I decided we needed to head home. We were able to get the details from Steve over the phone later and found that my fears about our result on the first section were well founded. We placed OK in the event, but were around 30 seconds in error for the three or so checkpoints in the first section resulting in around 100 points of error, putting us well out of contention for a low score. Other sections sounded like they went well for us (plenty of one and zero scores for checkpoints) and we look forward to seeing the details when they’re published. Steve told us we placed fourth in class and fifth overall.

Eric and Steve in car #7 did a fantastic job and placed 2nd, within one point of the first place finishers. 16 points (i.e. 16 seconds) of error over more than 100 miles bodes well for our team’s Alcan effort.

Question of the day: Should I have “RESET ODO” tattooed on the back of my left hand or will I remember this important detail before we head north?

There is one Friday Night rally the week before we leave, but I will have to give that one a miss in order to go skiing with my oldest. Those events are completely different, though, so probably not much help.