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Ah yes, time again for our annual time - speed - distance rally against the Alfa Romeo club. The one time in the year when we can enter our distinctly "not show quality" 122S in a VSA event and expect to win something. The rare day when it's worth getting up at a weekday time on a day off. Our chance to shine and maybe even get on the cover of our chapter's newsletter. Alas, chèrie, it was not to be.
It was a fine day for a rally. Heading the ninety miles north on Highway 101 up the coast to the town of Buellton, light drizzle streamed cleanly off our brand new, unpitted windshield while our newly refurbished heater kept us comfortable. As we turned inland and began the climb into the Santa Ynez mountains, the drizzle gave way to sunshine and the temperature rose into the upper Marsha and I won this event last year and in '95, and placed reasonably well in other years. We've learned to keep an eye out for those little surprises that John Self and Karl Grimm -- the rallymasters -- like to write into the course directions. We spent the last twenty minutes of the drive to the starting point reviewing the "General Instructions," just to make sure there would be no confusion in understanding the fine points of those directions. Our watches were set correctly to the second in accordance with Coordinated Universal Time, our speedometer was calibrated with a digital tachometer, I had all the buttons on our stopwatch figured out, and we had an array of colored pens and highlighters with which to mark up the direction sheet. We were ready. For anyone who doesn't know, here's a quick explanation of how a TSD rally works. Each driver / navigator team gets a set of directions telling what turns to make and how fast to drive. One does this by spotting specified landmarks along the route and executing the directions at those points. It's a step-by-step process; one doesn't necessarily know what road one is on or where it goes. Our rallies go on for three hours or so. The object is to arrive at surprise checkpoints along the route at the correct second -- the team with the lowest cumulative error for all the checkpoints wins. Cars are dispatched at one minute intervals, so it's no good just following another car -- the "perfect" arrival times into the first checkpoint are also one minute apart. Inevitably, one gets caught in slow traffic or misses a turn at some point. The trick then is to make up the lost time, and that's where the fun driving comes in.
This year, we were number four in a field of fifteen cars. We left the starting marker without incident, and that's when things stopped going right. We were off course in the first eighth of a mile, discovered it We duly pulled in behind car number three, and, in a few minutes, car number six pulled in behind us. Number five was apparently having a nice drive somewhere else and wondering where the heck all the landmarks had gone. Heh, heh. Our stopwatch signaled us onwards. We went happily on our way finding landmarks, turning where directed, speeding up and slowing down until coming to a big intersection with a traffic signal. Traffic signal? There's nothing about a traffic signal in the directions... Aaugh! That wasn't just a speed change back there where the sign said "Jones Road" (all street names are fictitious in case John and Karl feel like inflicting this particular rally on some other clubs), there was a turn, too! On down the road until there's a chance for a U-turn, backtrack, make the turn and drive like heck -- there must be four or five minutes to make up. And so it went. We'd do well for stretches, and then suddenly find ourselves headed up some ranch's drive instead of on the road, turn around, crank for a while, etc. We found ourselves passing the same Alfa over and over again -- they were clearly going too slow (optimistic speedometer?), but we were clearly blowing it. The first checkpoint came as a relief -- a chance to take our lumps and start fresh.
Somewhere in the third leg, we came upon a direction to turn "onto Smith Road" and a reference to the General Instructions. Well, we'd studied those just a short eternity ago: "onto" means, roughly, "stay on the named road, following signs if necessary, until some subsequent instruction makes you turn off it." Aha! We'd obviously be coming to some sort of fork in the road where it would be possible to go wrong. I put that in the back of my mind -- in the meanwhile, there were plenty of landmarks to be spotted and speed changes to be accomplished. Smith Road wound prettily through a series of vineyards, and we enjoyed passing gates with names familiar to us from wine bottle labels. The unusually heavy rains we'd been having had made the area an un-Californian lush green, but they'd also caused damage to the road which had been hastily and inadequately patched. Perhaps because of this, John and Karl had specified annoyingly slow speeds -- I kept having to force myself not to speed up. We soon had a full-sized van hanging on our rear bumper, and no place to pull over to let him pass. This went on for some time. We were now trying to spot landmarks, dodge big patches of tar, change from one annoyingly slow speed to another correctly, and ignore the van behind us, all while looking for something other than ditch on our side of the road so we could pull over and let him by. Not that I noticed at the time, but the back of my mind had become a very distant place. Finally, the van turned into some winery's gate, and we had a speed change to 41 MPH as the road straightened out a bit. Reading ahead, the next two instructions were further speed increases, followed by a left turn onto Highway 154 and a 30-second pause. Typically, such a pause is directed after an anticipated obstruction, such as a left turn across several lanes of traffic (if it takes you 30 seconds to make the turn, you skip the pause). Highway 154 was obviously a pretty big road. "What does it mean again when there's a 'Rally No' sign?" Marsha asked, "We just passed one." "It means 'don't go here; this is the wrong road.' Probably some winery doesn't like a bunch of cars running up their drive by mistake." Okay, at this point, you probably have this all figured out. That's because you haven't been driving in a rally for several hours. Maybe you didn't miss your vacation this year. No large and aggressive vehicle just stopped tailgating you. Whatever. As for us, we just kept driving 41 MPH and looking for the next speed change. After about two minutes, an Alfa passed us. The road had improved, and 41 MPH now seemed annoyingly slow. We decided we must have missed the last landmark, and increased our speed accordingly. The Alfa continued to pull away and was soon out of sight -- probably making up time from some off-course adventure of his own. Never mind; there would be no missing Highway 154.
We soon came to a T-intersection with a divided four-lane highway, although without ever having spotted the final speed-increasing landmark. It took us 30 seconds to get safely across the median onto this road, so we discarded the pause. We apparently needed to make up some time, since we'd missed the speed increase before the Alfa passed Our first hint that something was seriously amiss came when we passed Buellton heading south. Wait a minute. This is where we came in. And that means that this is not Highway 154, it's Highway 101! And has been for the last ten minutes -- wherever we're supposed to be now, it's nowhere near here, that's for sure! We had to continue on another five miles or so before finding an opportunity to turn around. The only thing we could do was to backtrack to the last landmark we actually spotted, and try again from there. That was at least twenty minutes ago, so we'd be forty minutes behind time, but at least we could try to find the last checkpoint and let them know they could go home now. Easier said than done -- whatever road we'd turned onto the highway from, it wasn't Smith Road, and there was no sign in any case. Other than the Pea Soup Anderson's windmill at Buellton (which we passed again going north), one piece of the 101 looks just like every other piece of the 101 in this area, and there are a number of unmarked roads intersecting it. We eventually found one that seemed right, so we turned-- and found ourselves on a road we hadn't been on before. Now, we could get back on the 101, but headed which way? Had we passed the "wrong road who's name we don't know" yet, or not? For lack of a good idea, we decided to drive up this road a bit, wrong though it was. I don't know what good we thought it might do, but we did it -- and soon came to Smith Road intersecting from the left. Why, that must mean... We were on Highway 154, headed the right way, and back on course (through no fault of our own). Here came the "School Crossing" sign, more turns, and soon we were proceeding at an immoderate pace down one road and another, making up whatever small fraction of our schedule we could.
And so we blew into the last checkpoint (finding Alfa number one there; at least we weren't all alone), had our route John and Karl prepared to hand out the awards. "Okay, who did the Smith Road thing right?" Two hands were raised -- one car's-worth. "Nobody else? We put a special note for you to look up what 'onto' means -- didn't anyone see that? And not only that, but we put a 'Rally No' marker right after the place you should have turned to stay on Smith. We really tried to help you out." The couple that did it right (sorry -- I didn't get names) won first place. Second and third went to two very surprised teams who would normally have expected that five or six minutes of error would take them out of the running. We took the grand prize for "worst" with eighteen minutes of error -- four minutes late on leg one, two minutes early on leg two (no idea why), and twelve minutes late on the last leg. Sheesh! Last year our total error was 44 seconds. So, if you really want to avoid winning a rally, here's what worked for us:
Now, if you do want to win a rally, you'll have to figure that out for yourselves. I'm not going to give away any secrets. There's still next year's event to be won. Maybe even by us. OK, we were too disorganized to take pictures of the rally this year. The photos are from several previous Volvo/Alfa rallies. The clip from the magazine cover is from the May-June '97 issue of the VSA Western States Magazine. Easy-print version of this article |
sixties -- perfect! We didn't get to take our usual driving vacation this year, so it felt especially good to be out on the road.
right away, made a U-turn, got back on course and proceeded. Luckily, the first few instructions constituted a "traverse" -- a section in which driving speed is not regulated -- so the lost thirty seconds or so didn't count. At the end of the traverse, there was a few minutes' stop before entering the "speed matters" section of the course, and we had already calculated our out time from the stopping point.
The second leg seemed to go well; we didn't fall for any of the little traps in the directions (experience counts, after all), and got into the second checkpoint in good shape. We might have a chance for a respectable finish after all -- if we could stay focused.
us and one sometime afterwards, so we drove 60 instead of the 54 MPH directed. Nice smooth road, most traffic passing us going a few MPH faster, no problem. The next landmark would be a "School Crossing" sign, so we had a chance to relax; we'd have to come into some town or other before there could be such a sign.
card marked, and found our way to the picnic and rally post-mortem with no further trouble. Marsha had packed roast beef sandwiches for lunch -- crow would have been more appropriate.