The Infinite Monkeys Rally is coming up on August 14, and it's your next chance to enter a navigational car rally. The green crew has checked it out and reported, "we love the roads you found in that area". What area, you ask? Ha ha, you will have to come and find them for yourselves. Lots of fun instructions for novices to experts, or you can opt to drive by the simple and most beginner-friendly "touring" instructions. Either way the winner will be the team driving most closely to the correct time (NOT the fastest time), so any kind of street legal car can enter; no expensive preparations needed.
Full info is on the event website http://pages.ca.inter.net/~guildsman/imr10.html
See you there!

Yep, we'll be there - entry already in!

Might even have the top off the car...

I'd love to be there but I am still looking for a navigator. Anyone interested can PM me here or just post a reply here.

Thanks,
Maxine

If only we could clone navigators, then there'd be enough for all the drivers ( and the competition would be down to the driver, all of us having the same nav. )

Hey, they only clone lower forms of life. That would be the drivers
Maybe they already have, and that's why you outnumber us navigators?

Huh. That makes me think of a new motto:
"Navigators. Guaranteed original".
(and you can imagine the silent word, "thinkers" right after "original"!)
Hee, hee, hee.
See you on the 14th!

Great event yesterday. Had a ton of fun and was happy to walk away with a trophy!

Now, where are the pics? I saw someone on the roadside a couple times with a camera. Who's got em?

Results are up, and I will try to make a summary.

http://pages.ca.inter.net/~guildsman/imr10.html

But.. first my congratulations to our new 2010 members, Kyle, Tim and Perry! Kyle took first Novice driver, and Tim and Perry were close seconds just 1.4 points behind on a tough rally.

And... T2 came back with an excellent result! Rita's never able to phase Ted... he just eats it all up. 2.7 points is a HIGHLY commendable result!

One might say that it's to be expected after they've been sitting on their butts since April. They should be well rested, afterall. But that wouldn't be me.


Cheers folks! 66 points for SPDA at that one! Whoohoo!

After missing three events due to mechanical issues, I went into my fourth Infinite Monkey's feeling very out of practice. I packed for the event, certain that I was missing about half of what I needed, and fairly confident that Steve and Opal would finally beat Ted and I at one of the Moore's Infinite Monkey's rallies. I.M. is the one rally that we consistently do well at, so I knew I had to make it out and give Steve and Opal some competition in intermediate.

After the fun, gentle start (the odo check) using roads in the Holland Marsh, Section two ramped up the difficulty with out of order tulips (expert class), some of which didn't have distances indicated. This wouldn't have been too difficult however one of the tulips with no distances wasn't depicted correctly (a route mistake, not an intentional trick). This caught up all the expert / intermediate teams, and some of the novices had trouble as well. For Ted and I, the error sent us off the map, literally, and we were forced to blow nearly our entire time allowance at CP2 (18.5 minutes of the 19.5 allowed). In true "I'd rather be lucky than good" fashion, we took a best guess at how late we were and managed a .5 early.

We may have managed to correct our route just in time, but that left us with two problems. First, we were now within about 11 minutes of Max Late, so if we lost any more time on the rally, we'd be into serious time penalties. Also, we now had no time allowance left for the remaining 90% of the rally. On top of that, I found I was having problems keeping the correct pace, as my speedometer (using the Performance Box for this) seemed to low on the fast roads, and too high on the slow roads.

In section 4, we almost blew the DIY checkpoint. I had missed the sign we were looking for, but Ted was able to correctly guess the distance of the sign and calculate our time in and out, zeroing that CP for us despite my error.

The first half of the rally was particularly enjoyable, as heading towards Shelburn, we used several of the roads Steve and I selected for the 2009 First Frost. In addition to these being great roads, it brought back a lot of great memories of building our own route last year.

CP10 at the half way rest stop (Superburger in Primrose) had it's own entertainment. Our instructions were to calculate the our time in, and hand our score card in to the CP on the minute we wanted to be scored (rather than noting our time and handing it in early). The trouble here was that Steve, Bruce Leonard and I all turned in our cards asking for the same minute. This meant that at least two of us (and potentially all three) were checking in at the wrong time. Fortunately, Ted had us dialed in correctly and managed to zero us there as well.

The second half of the rally started with a very challenging section for the navigators. Ted managed to get through it quickly (while cursing frequently). Keeping us on route and on time. I knew Opal was fatigued, and this section was slowing her and Steve's pace (we passed them early), but alas there were no CP's for us to cash in on their misfortune, and it wasn't long before Ol' Smokey came hurtling past like a sloth on several packs of muscle relaxants and one espresso.

Beyond that, we saw no major issues to the end of the rally. At the finish, we were surprised not to see Steve and Opal, since they should have arrived before us. This meant that at he very least they'd be using more time allowance. They arrived about 10 minutes after us, but the scores were tight in the first half and I wasn't doubting their ability to keep things close to the finish.

In the end, all the little issues we had ended as best as they could of. I'm very happy with the final score of 2.7, which was a win for Intermediate and the best time over all classes. All the SPDA teams did very well with low scores all around. Congrats to all the winners, and to the new teams running their first events.

Had a great time on Saturday and the TR ran well all day!! I'm tempted to say that we seem to have dealt with any reliability issues, but that's tempting fate so I won't say that.

Congrats to Kyle and Yvgeniy on their win - this rally is tricky and there were a number of things to trip up on, so you guys got a great result!

We were happy with second but it was a shame that, despite picking up three times our penalties, Peter Brownhill and Gary Corbett from MCO who are our main championship competion (so far) managed third. Therefore, we only scored one more point than they did for the championship - I can see this going down to the wire just like the all-SPDA tussle last year.

I say "so far" because I could see Kyle make a late charge if he can keep up these types of performances. So I would suggest a nice long rest before you attack the championship seriously NEXT year And in answer to your question, Kyle: No, it's NEVER too early to be looking forward to the Winter Rally.