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The
1000 Rally
An Arizona high desert back road tour Most of our friends know that car rallies are our hobby, some would say obsession. We compete in them, and we organize them. March 2008 Our most recent foray into competition was the first weekend of March when we ran a pair of National Tour events in Tucson. This was the winter rally weekend that first brought us to Arizona and over the last ~ 10 years we have had some terrific triumphs (the one point rally) and some awful disasters. Think: three controls before the end and our rental car suddenly doesn't want to play anymore (we believe we would have won that event by about 10 points); or the year we ran over our odometer pick up on the way to the official mileage point (we worked that one); or how many times can we try to figure out one leg before it gets dark (I think 5 and we never did find that %*%( sign, but we did find a checkpoint eventually and started anew)? So, we have learned that anything can happen in Tucson. This year we decided to run the two tour events, one by Dave Jameson and one by John Sears. They turned out to be about as completely opposite as two rallies can be and still be part of the same series. Dave's tour, on Saturday, was really busy, with lots of things happening all at once, and then an occasional few minutes to breath. We went all the way to Texas (Canyon) and back with several lengthy interstate transits to get to more interesting roads. There were oodles of controls and after a few were tossed at the end, they scored 41 of them. Lunch was in a little place out in the middle of pretty much nowhere, but they food and service were both great - and the Rallymaster even had time to join us for lunch. We saw some roads and area that were new to us and it was a beautiful day to rally. Dave T & Dave H had an incredible string of 11 zeroes in a row at the end of the day, but their few extra points early on helped us out. We finished with 21 points and that turned out to be good enough for the win by three points, although pretty high-scoring by usual National Tour standards. We went back to our motel to try and finish up the (St. Valentine's Day) Massacre which had to be postmarked by Monday. Sunday, John's event also took us to some areas where we had not been, but we did some of that annoying slow stuff in neighborhoods, trying to go slowly enough to get a decent score, but not so slowly we were creeping. Lots of going around in circles and a few excessive breaks in the morning. Almost all the controls were passage, with just one DIY at the end of each section, so at the breaks Dave and Karl (who staffed all the controls) were able to tell us how we were doing. Sounded like Lois and John were getting a lot of zeroes and everyone else ones or twos. This is not good. After another pretty good lunch, we left that area and headed out into more open country. No more neighborhoods and some pretty nice paved roads. The event finished back at the same location as Saturday where the Course rally folks were holding a claims committee meeting. Dave K, with some assistance from myself, Dave H, and Bill got the scores posted in a timely manner and I checked the totals, fully expecting to have been beat by both Lois / John and Dave / Dave. Lo and behold, if we didn't win again, by two points this time. We didn't stick around for the end of the claims, etc. as we had a long drive home and the weather was getting very ugly, but an email from John let us know that he has T-shirts for us.
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