A unique look back at the United States Road Rally Challenge by Dave Head, who partnered with Chuck Hanson. Dave had posted this on his Facebook page and I think we can all commiserate. Having been a long-time contributor to our pages and knowing of his long-awaited trek North to Alaska for Dave and friends, we asked him if we could pull the piece for RReNews. We hope to have received the wrap-ups and scores from the Rallymasters of the USRRC in our next edition! And now, from Dave’s August 2nd post…
It would have been a comedy of errors if it was actually funny, but it wasn’t.
Yesterday was an exercise in how many new and unfamiliar ways we could screw up a rally.
What was first? I don’t know, maybe getting the mileage screwed up after missing a turn and somehow not measuring in reverse back down the course correctly. Anyway, we got a series of bad scores at subsequent checkpoints until we figured out that the mileage was off. That took a toll on our finishing position.
The thing is, this GPS app is not, in my experience, 100% accurate. You’ll be going down the road, getting great scores, and then all of a sudden, a 0.9-second error pops up. Where did that come from? No idea. I don’t believe it should happen, but it does. So when something is wrong, like the mileage being off, you have to see a consistently bad set of scores over 2 or 3 checkpoints to know that there’s something actually wrong, rather than one of those “flyer” errors-for-no-reason things.
What else? Well, the GPS app has a very nice facility for entering delays of 10, 20, 30, 1:30, etc. minutes and seconds just by pushing a button several times. The problem is that this button is incredibly sensitive. If you do anything more than breath on it, it will register a delay. So what happened? That’s right; we got a 10-second delay into the GPS app to give us a 10 at the 1st and 2nd controls before we could figure out want was going on. I guess we were literally slow in figuring it out; why couldn’t we tumble to it after the 1st bad score? Slow. I sure as hell don’t feel I was sharp yesterday. I was below average for me. Dunno why.
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We continued, got a 4.6, adjusted mileage basically by guessing rather than calculating (again, not one of my sharper days), and then got a 3.6 at a subsequent control. Another adjustment, and then a “hard” mileage in the route instructions, and we were getting decent scores again, although not quite as good as I thought we should be getting—another mystery.
What else? OK, the rally itself had some problems that worked to keep us somewhat off-balance too. We would encounter the start of a leg that was supposed to be at a sign. But the picture of the sign that was supposed to be in the instruction was not. It was just blank. Since the instruction had mileage to the 1/1000th mile, we just rolled up to that mileage and used whatever sign was there. It worked, but that was weird.
Other than that, it was a pretty nice rally, with great roads, not too long, etc. Just anything that could go wrong managed to go wrong, at least for us. Not a “lucky” weekend. Glad I didn’t go to any casinos with luck like that.
Pondering, Dave added:
Reflecting back, I’ve figured out the way to deal with the mileage being off would have been to select the time auxiliary, zero it, and then back out time equal to our early error of 4.6 seconds. Still, I forgot about that, maybe from being “off” for a year and better due to the damned virus, and just took a guess, that only took us down to about 1 second less error. Not ideal. I could have zeroed the error if I’d done it right…bummer.
