RALLYES
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Oral
tradition has it that gimmick road rallyes grew out of extracurricular
outings of employees of Western Electric in the early 1960s. The first of
them may have resembled treasure hunts, where participants had to track down
clues to find their way to a hidden endpoint, with the first carload to
arrive winning the event. Somewhere along the line these may have morphed
into TSD events – Time, Speed, and Distance. TSDs are divided into legs. Cars
are dispatched from a checkpoint, and must try to average a specified speed along
the way to the next checkpoint. For each 1/100th of a minute (.6
seconds) their arrival is over or under the par time they are penalized 1
point. Top competitors using Rallye computers will consistently arrive within
1-2 points of par on each leg. Adding one more level of complexity, each leg
typically has some sort of gimmick, designed to trick the unwary into taking
an alternate route to the next checkpoint, guaranteeing that they will
receive a maximum penalty for the leg. By about 1968 some rallyemasters in
the What is a
gimmick? Imagine that you are working with two sets of instructions. One set
is general, and tells you everything from what roads you may or may not use,
to how to read signs, e.g. for instance if you must read signs left to right
and top to bottom a sign written bottom to top would for your purposes be
illegible. The second set is more specific, telling you where and when to
turn. You
cannot tell it from the map fragment above, but the major north/south road
marked with “V60” is actually named Having
succeeded in dividing the troops, rallyemasters naturally wish to know who
fell for the trick. There are various ways of doing this, each involving one
more bit of paperwork, a score sheet. One way of finding out who is off
course would be to place a checkpoint along During
the late 1960s and early 1970s rallyes were staged at least weekly throughout
the year, and drew 100 or more cars. Currently the In 1985
two friends of mine, Wayne and Kerry Kuhn, wrote their first rallye, and
persuaded me to lend support by running it. I had a good time, and began running
regularly when in town. There is a ranking system, and I worked my way up the
ladder – beginner, novice, master – finally reaching the Grandmaster rank in
1991. At about the same time Altogether
I have written ten rallyes, one a year from 1991-2000. The third and fourth
were CO-written with my partner and navigator Ted Zelman, who has had to pick
up the load since I moved to The
following are links to some rallye sites. |
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