What is a road rally? How fun is it?

 

An internet search should yield good results, but a road rally is basically a staged time trial in which there are numerous checkpoints (stages). Get there too late and you are penalized. Most road rallies also penalize the driver for being early.

While most modern rallies are for fun, such as the Long Beach Poker Rally that is coming up, some are very competitive and typically take place over closed roads. A navigator reads pace notes to the driver – this may be in the form of a riddle like, “north where the cow doesn’t moo” (turn left when you see the steakhouse on the corner) or competitive pace notes that tell the driver the exact turn angle and grade of the road at any given moment so that he can take it at the highest possible speed – they used to say that a good team can blindfold the driver and the navigator can get them through the stages at full speed!

The old Mini was the quintessential rally car. Among other things, it won the grueling Monte Carlo Rally three years in a row and took first, second, and third overall in 1966 while beating cars that had three times the power. The rallies are what put Minis on the map.

A poker rally is a casual event in which you are given a hand of cards. You stop along checkpoints along the way to trade in your cards as if you were playing poker. The person with the best hand at the end wins. Are they fun? Hell yeah!

Here are a couple of fun classic Mini rally links:

http://www.smithmaps.fsnet.co.uk/montetext.htm
http://www.btinternet.com/~robert.cl...mini/monte.htm

 

And here is a link to the 1st Long Beach Poker Rally

http://www.heimlich.net/~techno/MINI/LBpage_01.php

 

My high school's sports car club used to put on a "Hare and Hounds" rally. The goal was to come up with the right distance, not the best time.

The night before, someone from the committee went out and marked the course. The next morning, the cars would go out and run it. When you came to an intersection where you were supposed to turn, there would be a brown paper bag full of lime (like they mark athletic fields with) on the corner. If you saw a sack of lime, you had two choices - turn right or turn left. If you turned the right way, you'd see another sack of lime. If you didn't seen another sack of lime within a certain distance (what was it? 1/4 mile? 1/2 mile?), you'd know you turned the wrong way, so you'd turn around and go back.

There would be riddles to solve along the way, like the cow that doesn't moo, above. You could get a distance correction for a correct answer. Each car also got a sealed envelope that contained the final destination (a pizza place or drive-in) and the official ending time, so if you got totally lost, you could still find the party.

These were loads of fun, and being high school kids, there was a lot of cheating - people throwing out false bags of lime, etc. One team even had a broom and dust pan for sweeping up the markings!

 

I did a "Roller Coaster Rally", twisty roads with minimal clues, straight roads with more clues, and cool questions. It was a blast!