Rabbit Stages Editor as timing support for a Richta-scored National Tour Rally: Great Potential deserving of future development.
We used Rabbit Rally’s Stages Editor feature at Roads Scamper on Sunday, June 4th, by the SCCA Milwaukee Region. This app, running on my Samsung tablet via an external Rabbit Glo GPS, kept track of timing while Competitor – Richta GPS Checkpoints ran on a cell phone for scoring. We used the standard paper roadbook because we had no integrated Rabbit roadbook. Entering the speeds and corresponding distances into Stage Editor, including one CAST without a given mileage, took about 15-20 minutes and was 100% complete before getting in the car. Even though the nine stages each had up to five-speed changes baked in, I only made one data entry error over the entire rally.
The good news is, when Rabbit was working properly, we almost got the best of both worlds. I was happy to chat with Mr. Bireta before starting the rally to make sure we were “dotting our t’s” after exclusively using Rabbit for years, and his app worked very well. Even with CZT restarts, we could enter start times with Rabbit while Richta recorded them automatically. The speed changes baked into Rabbit were a boon to our sanity because, as novice rallyists, we had plenty to keep track of otherwise. I enjoyed using its Gauges screen to stay on time. Richta’s instant feedback was hugely helpful, providing confirmation. On the flip side, our choice to use an iPhone for Richta proved to be the weak link in many of our scores; we are used to relying on independent Rabbit transponders to do the scoring.
Our biggest mistake was not synchronizing our Rabbit clock to Richta at the beginning of the day. We did this during a transit later on, and from that time, it must have been within five-hundredths of a second. As my grandfather said, “Good enough for a town this size!”
However, we are still learning the ins and outs of Stages Editor in the real world. To implement the ubiquitous pauses, including the six-second pause at each stop sign, one must manually alter the Set Start Time field to trick Rabbit into thinking you left that amount later. This must also be done for all other pauses in the rally, including Time Allowances (TAs). I recommend writing down the “before” start time as well as the “after” start time (in 00:00:00 format) whenever it is changed. We fat-fingered Rabbit into forgetting our start time on one of the later stages and had to run by the speedometer only for the rest of that stage. As beginners, we also can’t do TAs by reflex yet, so we got ourselves confused. Overall, altering the start time to accomplish pauses is very clunky, and doing so on a touchscreen in a moving Saab Sonett is even harder.
However, Richta or not, we agree the rally would have been more stressful and less fun without using Rabbit for timing.
Where do we go now? My dad and I have some practice to do with TAs, longer pauses, and redundant notes. I will also continue to press the Rabbit folks for TA/pause buttons; hopefully, they can work toward instant feedback. Repair and restoration on a 50-year-old plastic sports car? Well, that one is on me!
Press On!
Tyler