Last night was the second event in the FLR SCCA winter road rally series. Cassie and I just started this season, so we’re still getting the hang of things. Unlike the last event we did, this one actually had “winter” conditions. We started in Piffard (near Leicester/Geneseo) with rumors of heading west around Batavia and back, for a total of over 160 miles.
The competition included:
(not the Z4)
^^ that’s us.
Conditions were totally clear at the restaurant. At the drivers’ meeting, the rallymaster reminded us to stay safe, saying “you can’t win if you don’t finish.” There was snow on the ground, but a lot of the roads were clear. We all got stuck behind a huge plow on the way out to the actual starting point (indicated by a tree with a sign on it)
So we sit here and wait for our assigned time to leave. (check out my night vision)
Anyway, the way this works is, they tell us when to leave, where to go, and how fast we should be driving. The checkpoints are at unknown locations along the route; they know what time we should have arrived, we get points for being early or late, and the lowest score wins.
see . . . “checkpoints”
Early on, we went right into some twisty seasonal roads through the woods. It was hard to even keep up to speed. Snowmobiles were out, but there was not much other traffic. My car managed to pull the Slo Car (Cory’s 89 hatch) out of the ditch at the third checkpoint (it’s important to pull over, but more important to not pull over too much!)
As we headed further north and west, the weather got worse. The drivers were ducking behind the workers’ cars at the checkpoints, trying to stay out of the wind. Snow was blowing across the roads. My driving lights became useless. Visibility decreased dramatically. I should have taken a picture, but I didn’t . . .
We slowed to a crawl, just trying to stay in control. Cassie started to fill out our “time allowance” form. The sweep truck was nowhere in sight behind us. It had been miles and miles since the last checkpoint; we couldn’t see the street signs, and I wasn’t sure if we were really on course. At one point I wasn’t sure if we were really on a road . . . we weren’t. The 20 degree tilt of the car kinda gave it away. I got us out though.
Finally, near a farm somewhere between Batavia and Bergen, we came over a crest and discovered a virtual parking lot of rally cars. The checkpoint sign was there, but nobody would take the scorecard from me – for the first time that anyone could remember, they had decided to end the event early due to weather.
We took a group photo, got in line, and headed back to the restaurant, wagon train style. As we drove further south, the snow cleared – there was not a cloud in the sky over Piffard.
spot the rally cars . . .
Back inside, they decided not to score the event based on only six out of the twenty planned checkpoints, and instead rescheduled the event for sometime in 2008. You can’t win if you don’t finish . . but you won’t finish if you can’t see. We went to Denny’s and called it a night.
Of course coming back up to the city on 390, the snow found us once again. From the last checkpoint back to downtown, we saw no fewer than 20 cars off the side of the road.
Total rally time: an hour and ten minutes. Typical event: around six hours. Time until the next rally: three weeks. It was still fun.
