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reprinted from Northwest Magazine
Sunday, June 12, 1983
It must have been a dismal morning. Maybe forebodings of a truly wet and whiny day stirred about. Maybe the bacon burned, or we were out of coffee. Or the dog scattered garbage all over the floor. Or our son, Damon, woke us up at dawn wanting to watch "Friday the 13th" on HBO. It must have been quite a morning or we never would have signed up for the Rallye de Roses.
A sports car rally? Us?
In the first place, I always have found cars distasteful -- necessary perhaps, but still large and smelly. I knew all about the fanatics involved with cars, too. "Automobile enthusiasts" -- car nuts -- were ducktailed louts in T-shirts who spent their lives on those little-wheeled trolleys rolling around under the four-wheeled objects of their obsession. Not my sort.
In the second place, we were conspicuously short of a sports car. Our only working and legal car was a 12-year-old rusted, dented, turquoise Datsun 510. Not that my husband, Ed, didn't grind his teeth and curse in envy every time he saw some fancy-free gentleman tooling down the highway in one of those tiny, topless things... But he was stuck with the turquoise Datsun.
Nevertheless, we went to the rally. Any port in a storm, I suppose.
By the end of the day, we were hooked.
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"There are no losers, only non-winners." |
A rally can be described loosely as a car race. As in any race there is a start, a course to follow and a finish. Unfortunately, the racers know only the starting point; the course and the finish line are mysteries to be probed. Once they set out, racers only can hope they end up in the right place. They must follow blindly a set of cryptic, written instructions that dictate ideal speed and direction between various landmarks or checkpoints. The race goes not to the swift, but to the precise. The point is to get to the finish line exactly on time. There are no losers, only non-winners.
More than anything else, rallying is a game of wits. The rally instructions, the route, the roads and the turns all are intended to trap the unwary into what one master rallyist calls "creative stupidity." There is little point to being exactly on time if the driver is in the wrong place. Any trying to remain on time requires a bit of complicated numbers-juggling. No car can go exactly the given speed all the time; the route is entirely on public roads and has its share of stop signs, traffic lights, Sunday drivers and traffic tie-ups. Rallyists use time and distance to calculate the best speed at various points along the route.
A rally team consists of driver and navigator. The driver directs the car -- cooly, calmly and totally within the law (receiving anything worse than a parking ticket can be grounds for disqualification) wherever the navigator airms him. The navigator interprets the written rally instructions and tells the driver where and how fast to go.
In our case, Ed is the driver, I am the navigator and Damon is sort of assistant navigator. His main job is to sit in the back seat and yell, "There it is!" any time he sees a landmark.
Rallye de Roses is carefully and lovingly set up each year during the Portland Rose Festival by a small group called the Rallye Fanatics. We did rather well on that first rally. We had a marvelous time charging around the wet, green hills of Battleground, Washington. Deciphering the directions, finding the right roads and signs and trying, in a rudimentary fashion, to figure out time-speed-distance relationships reminded us of the struggle to escape an oversized maze. We didn't exactly win, but we enthusiastically muddled our way through the course, made all the checkpoints and finished somewhere in the respectable middle.
It is not always as easy.
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"By 8 p.m. or thereabouts, we were helplessly, hopelessly lost." |
We went on our second rally a few weeks later, one of the "Friday Niter" series sponsored by the Cascade Sports Car Club. Veterans now, we decided to win this one. I stayed up the night before reading "The Rally Book" by David Hebb and memorizing all the formulas (60D + ST). We set our watches to the official time bleeping over the radio. We stocked the car with plenty of gas, pens, paper, flashlight batteries and nacho cheese tortilla chips. We grinned at each other and joked with the other teams about getting (ho ho) lost. We were car No 11 and, as instructed, left the starting gates at precisely 7:11.
By 8 p.m. or thereabouts, we were helplessly, hopelessly lost.
I insist that it was not entirely my fault. My head was full of complicated rules and formulas. For one thing, the general instructions, which give the definitions and rules of the rally, appeared, as usual, to be written by the same folks who write the small print in insurance policies:
"Opp -- A possible change in route in the direction indicated that required an instruction and that is a named and/or numbered road as indicated by sign(s) at the intersection, or in the absence of a name and/or number, a paved road."
Got that?
The route instructions, handed out just before leaving the starting gate, may be simpler, but are still cryptic: "R 2nd Opp," "L after T MBCU" and "CST 43." They are, as I said, intended to entrap. At one point, the numerical order was confused deliverately so that a number of unwary teams ended up driving in circles until finally discovering their error. At any rate, with all those numbers and words competing for attention, I lost track of just where it was that we were supposed to be.
After two hours of crisscrossing Multnomah and Clackamas counties in a fruitless search for a sign reading "Hemrich" (at which we were supposed to make a left turn), we sheepishly gave up and drive to the after-rally meeting place, a joint called Pistol Pete's, the address of which had been prudently printed in full at the end of the instructions. We had missed all four checkpoints. Scoring is by point penalties. The worst possible score was 2000. We got 1995.
We didn't care. All we wanted was a cold beer.
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"Had there been a booby prize,
it would have been ours." |
I did, however, corner the rallymaster, the scheming villain who sets up these diabolical little exercises. In this case, he was a smallish blond man named Dave McAllister, called Mac by friends. He looked harmless and ordinary enough at first, but when I asked him innocently about the degree of sadism necessary in a successful rallymaster he got a fiendish gleam in his eye.
"Got lost, huh," he said gleefully. "That's too bad."
Of 225 club members, Mac is one of the 30 rallymasters who take turns setting up the rallies. All rallies begin at 7 p.m. on the first Friday of the month in the Lloyd Center parking lot. There the similarities end. Each rallymaster picks his own area and drives through it picking roads and planning traps.
The rallymaster also works out the complex time schedule. He cannot afford to be wrong. Serious rallyists time their race to the nearest hundredth of a second (although the Friday Niter series is not intended for those in the "equipped" class who own special odometers and dashboard computers). The route is tested and "guinea pigged" several times by other club members before the rally.
After copious beer and pizza the organizers announced the winners. They received cheers, catcalls and homemade trophies of mounted matchbox cars. Had there been a booby prize, it would have been ours. Instead we were invited to console ourselves by coming along on a "hare and hound" rally the next day.
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"It all had the distinct flavor of a
Laurel and Hardy movie." |
A hare and hound rally is no ordinary rally. There is absolutely no opportunity to take it seriously. It is derived from an old motorcycle race resembling a game of touch football in which participants chased each other around the countryside. The Touring Club of Oregon, which was started in 1957 as a motorcycle club and has evolved into a general "automotive enthusiast" club, claims authorship of the present version for cars.
The exercise lacks written instructions and employs few rules. We received a car number, a starting time and an average speed (in this case only 22 mph). Earlier in the day the rallymaster had marked the route by dropping little bags of lime at the turns. All we had to do was find them. At intervals he also had used lime to draw a line all the way across the road. The barrier served as a signal for each team to stop, to get out and to start crawling over rocks, berry bushes, mud flats and poison oak to find a specially marked empty beer can. If and when we found it, the rules required that we stuff a ticked with our car number into it, make our way back to the car and take off in the direction of the next lime bag. It all had the distinct flavor of a Laurel and Hardy movie.
But this time we didn't care. The average speed, remember, was only 22 mph and all those hares who finished the course 45 minutes before us finished 45 minutes too soon.
The shambling old hound, our rusted, dented turquoise Datsun 510, won.
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REBECCA HICKOK is a Portland free-lance writer who has become a rally nut. She recently replaced her dented, rusted turquoise Datsun 510 sedan with a turquoise Datsun 510 station wagon, dented, but not rusted -- yet.
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