Friday Night Run of the Month

From the Armchair Rally Archives of Gary Starr

I have always enjoyed teaching those new to our sport the Road Rally concepts for Course and Tour rallies. Perhaps you have seen my Tips for TSD Rallyists in RReNews? I hope to do the same teaching with these Armchair Rallies in prior editions of RReNews. Sadly, this is the last one in my collection.

I would love to see more people try Course rallying. But it often is too hard to understand for people who have never done it, so they get frustrated and never return. There is no way to practice and learn rally traps before running the event. And Rallymasters don’t help by making the traps way too hard. These Armchair Rallies are an excellent tool to introduce concepts and show how to navigate trap rallies without getting in your car. These traps mimic the actual traps on real events. After doing a few of these, you will be ready to take on the challenge of Course rallies! 

I have already submitted all my easy and intermediate rallies, and in this column (until I find another stash of Armchair Rallies), I’m offering the hardest rally – the 1978 Heart of Dixie (which has all the most difficult traps/concepts in a single event). If you think you’ve become good at traps, this is the real test. Don’t worry – I will again have a color-coded answer map. All these Armchair Rallies were scanned in from my original paper Generals, so some are faded. I have also added handwritten notes on some, circled meaningful Generals sentences, or put prominent arrows pointing to the areas in the Generals you’ll need to do the Armchair Rally.

And here is the 1978 Heart of Dixie Armchair Rally —

• The Route Instructions

• The Map

• The Critique

• The Legend

Note: I’ve only heard back from one individual about these rallies, and I would appreciate more people emailing me their thoughts. Did you try them? How many did you run, and did you enjoy them? Did you learn anything about Course rallying? Do any of you old-timers remember them? Does anyone have any other armchair/map course rallies? Etcetera! I have enjoyed pulling these sixteen rallies together, and this has been quite an effort for me to check all 16 of these rallies out. I’ve “run” each one and checked everything before submitting, adding helpful comments and corrections and preparing them for publication.

I have saved all 16 rallies from events I attended over the last 44 years to use for this very purpose of teaching. The Generals were used on the Armchair Map Rallies to teach/practice the concepts and the actual rally running the next day.

You can certainly do this from your screen by clicking on the images above to view them on Dropbox, yet I encourage you to print them out and head to the “START” line with a pencil. Depart Route Instruction #1 and enjoy the adventure!

Please send me an email at maprallies@comeroadrallywith.us. I would love to get your feedback on this rally. I have heard of various rallyists having archives of these, and I encourage you to share them with us!