John's account of the VIR event has inspired me to write a bit about our MG
club rally last Sunday. Every June we hold a rally in Wisconsin. It tries to
be around 220 some miles and it used to end in Dodgeville, Wisconsin (home
of the Land's End headquarters, at least until Sears acquired them), so it
is our "Land's End" Rally.
Generally it is an all-day event with a dinner at the end and a hotel
overnight, but this year, since NAMGBR is in a week or so, the Rallymaster
decided to be nice to us and let it end in Illinois so we could drive home.
I almost didn't go; I was a little tired of the format used in this rally
for the last few years and I was a bit unhappy about some of the questions
last year. However, since I am the Driving Events Coordinator for the club
(yes, I forgot to duck fast enough), I figured I should do it anyway.
I am so glad I did! This rally was more fun, more challenging, and more of a
fun driving experience than any other rally I have been in. The rallymaster,
Tom Josefek, assures me that the ideal route would have been about 200
miles, but I burned up about 240 myself, and I believe that was true for
most of the others as well.
There were 5 MGBs, 4 Midgets, and 2 MGAs in the rally, not counting the
rallymaster's MGB. We left from the Wisconsin Welcome Center on I90 just
north of Illinois. There were three separate sets of directions so that not
everyone was heading for the same first checkpoint. The rest of the
checkpoints were just blobs on a map blown up from a Delorme Gazeteer. Each
checkpoint was an intersection and each intersection had something that
would fill in a line in the crossword puzzle. We had 7 pages of maps, three
pages of crossword hints and one page with the actual crossword puzzle;
quite a handfull!
Once we had gotten a feel for the scale of the maps (after overshooting a
few checkpoints), I took over the map pages and my daughter/navigator,
Michaela, took over the puzzle. The puzzle format gave us a good comfort
level with the answers without giving too much away. We were able to guess a
couple answers, but we were so close to the checkpoints for them that we
went there anyway. There were a couple of technical details that had room
for a skosh of improvement, but it was still the most enjoyable rally I have
ever driven.
.
This was a rather high-speed rally, although probably not as much so as the
Porsche club that was holding a TSD in the same area that day. One of our
members came in at the end asking for extra credit for having checked in at
a Porsche checkpoint. One of the MGAs dropped out with release bearing
problems, but the rest of us made it through.
David Lieb
/// unsubscribe/change address requests to majordomo@autox.team.net or try
/// http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo
/// Archives at http://www.team.net/archive/spridgets
|