Discover Ontario Car Rally

[rmoore]

Next weekend, on Saturday June 5, the Discover Ontario Car Rally will take place in the area around Woodstock. Presented by the Toronto Autosport Club, this rally is the longest-running navigational event in Ontario (2010 is the 27th year for the D.O.C.R.!), and it is well known as a beginner-friendly rally. One of the distinctions of the Discover Ontario is the huge permanent cup awarded each year to the top placing Novice team: this is the largest prize which can be won by Novices in Ontario. [won by SPDA members Stephen D and Opal G last year!] So make your plans to enter this rally next Saturday, and spend a fun afternoon exploring the beautiful roads in the Brantford area.
Full details can be found on the event website at http://www.brooke.net/docr/
Hope to see you there!

[STeveD]

Okay, the BIG TROPHY is shined up and ready to go to the next Novice champion team!

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4054/4663380162_5aea537581.jpg

If you need a navigator or driver, Eugene on the TSC (aka "Napping") is willing to do either.

$45 to enter,

NEW - Start location:
TA Truck Stop
535 Mill Street
Woodstock, ON
Just north of Hwy 401 at Sweaburg Rd - Exit 230
43.103134, -80.756594

Registration opens sat noon and first car is away at 1:31.

[STeveD]

Okay, so Kyle isn't able to make it this weekend. So which SPDA team is going to win that trophy this year? Tim and Perry, or Laszlo and Christine?

[TR_Tim]

We'll do our best... See you there!

[TrevorH]

Good luck guys, and bring back that massive trophy.

[STeveD]

Congrats to Tim and Perry on an excellent finish; a very close SECOND place in Novice class. It was close at the top of Novice, but Peter and Gary edged them out by a bit. It looked like Tim and Perry's clock went off after the card exchange because they started to be at least 0.2 early into all of the checkpoints thereon in.

Brooke was his usual creative / cruel self with lots of tricks for both novice and expert classes. (Intermediate ran the same notes as Expert.) We have now concluded that Brooke is more evil than Dennis. This was our WORST performance in over a year for sure.. it utterly astounded us that we didn't miss any checkpoints when we look back on the mistakes that we had made.

Section 1, the ODO calibration didn't seem to match the rest of the rally. I was kind of expecting that since Brooke had to scramble last minute to relocate the start of his rally. I thought I'd fix it in the next section, but unfortunately the tricks started fast and furious and we ended up coping with error for the whole rally instead of really fixing it.

Section 2 was apparently simple tulips in order. Really? For expert? Of course not. The first two... sure. Then there was a Junction Right instruction when we came to a Junction left. APPARENTLY we were supposed to somehow know to mirror this, but there were no clues to do so. The last two weren't, so why this one. So Opal mentions that according to the rules, they don't have to give us instructions for every intersection. She was correct. With no clues on the page, we mustn't have come across the legitimate junction right yet. Okay, head straight.

Sure enough, then there was the Junction RIght onto Rivers Road. Great! We take it, and shortly come across Dietmar as CP 1. Perfect! Until I get the sticker... 7.53 km into the section, but our ODO showed only 5.64km. And we were only 30 seconds early when off 2km? Something's wrong here. Maybe Brooke had to move the CP, or Dietmar was in the wrong spot. Never mind, continue on. Well, the next two intersections don't match the road either, then we come across Roger at CP2. His sticker says we're still 2km early. Huh!

We come to a T which we SHOULD (if the stop signs were wrong on the previous tulips) make a right. A novice team comes up beside us, signals left, and I call out the window asking what distance they're at.

"11.90"

"Thanks!"

CRAP. So we scratch 6 unexecuted instructions from the page and go on. Same thing for much of the section... instructions with the stop signs in the wrong position. But if you ignored them and went to the next one, you were still on route. We zeroed CP3 in section 2, and we didn't get caught by the extra instruction in that section.

For Section 3 Opal had to do a Word Search puzzle, and take the unused letters as instructions for the section. L for left, R for right, S for straight ahead. We used our first TA of 2.5 for CP4 21.79km into the section.

Section 4 was a flowchart which I thought would be easy. Not quite, with a dyslexic moment. With several KEY pieces of information given at the drivers meeting, Opal and I forgot about one of them in section 4... Even though it was copied onto the page incorrectly.... Oops. Sigh! 14.5 minute TA there for CP 5 (with some help from the Leonards.)

Section 5 was clockfaces which Opal translated onto sheets for me. Went well except for when I had my thumb on a crucial piece of information. We stopped for a local in the middle of the road and I won't expand on that here. I'll limit my comment to a thought that the Children Playing sign should be changed to a Daft Parent sign. After that, one U-turn, a 0.5 late penalty (we spent a while thinking about where to turn when we were actually in site of the CP down a road to the left if we had just looked), and the rest made sense.

Section 6 was a blind map where again we somehow ended up with an odo off 200m compared to the CP stickers. ARGH! That cost us the last of our TA (2.5) at CP 7. Then I went left on Norwich 19 when I should have jogged right to go left on Cockshutt. Argh!

Then it was Section 7... a geometry class nightmare. I have a scan of the instructions and the map to upload eventually. This was the "bad one" that Brooke warned us about early on. Distances were measured in Smidges, Tads, and Hairs. Yes, we used a protractor. yes, there were radii.

I later find Dennis at CP 10 in Section 7, and he asks "You didn't want any TA's?" as he hands me the sticker. (A popular question from CP workers today, actually) and I responded to Dennis, "If only I had any left to use!!!" I didn't know it then, but the Leonards ran out of TA back in Section 4.

Section 8 was a simple ET to the finish... except for the crowded park/fairgrounds, and the lack of parking at Moose Winooski's. Unexpected little challenges.

So, we found out that the Moores and Leonards made a couple of the same mistakes we did. But we definitely faired worse. The Moores finished with 3.3 and the Leonards with 9.9 vs. our 10.8. More evidence that we're not ready for Expert class yet! We need all the Intermediate practice that we can get.

Ted, Trevor... if you wanted to beat us, you missed the perfect rally to do so. Challenging notes, several errors from both of us... our worst performance since Infinite Monkeys 2009. 10.8 was last place expert for us, but first place Intermediate. Maybe we were off our game because of the lack of consequence if we didn't perform our best... but I don't think so. It was just a really BUSY rally for the navigator, with lots of tricks, difficult spots, and that added to our mistakes.


Ah well, a really well run rally by TAC! It went tickety boo and it appeared that all of the CP's were where they were supposed to be. (Even if we weren't.) We'll cautiously look forward to this one again next year!

The next rally is Infinite Monkeys on Saturday August 15th, organized by the Moores. Opal and I have always struggled with IM... we have yet to beat Ted and Trevor at that rally, so we'll aim for our first win.

I uploaded some of the sheets to a website, since attachments aren't working well.


http://www.caslube.com/rally/inst.pdf (All of the instructions with Opal's notes on them.)

http://www.caslube.com/rally/eosmap.pdf (Has the blind map and Geometry sections on it.)

http://www.caslube.com/rally/protractoruler.pdf (You have to see this thing... the tool that was necessary for Section 7.)

http://www.caslube.com/rally/cpcard.pdf (The card we use to pre-calculate and argue our scores at the end of the rally. We didn't bother to argue today...)

[TR_Tim]

Great write-up, Steve.

As reported, we managed a close (but not nearly close enough) second to the guys from Ottawa-way. The distance they travel for these rallies makes it due time they won, and they were consistently better than us this time out. Congratulations to some very nice guys.

Obviously our Novice instructions were simpler than those for Intermediate and Expert, but the description of it being BUSY for the navigators was certainly true in our car!! Perry was fully occupied working on DIY, out-of-order tulips and a LOT of column-type instructions and unable to check my driving often enough on time/distance against our book of speed tables. In conjunction, my speed judgement was just a little off all rally. This is when we realise that eschewing modern rally tools in favour of keeping to the spirit of 1960's road rallying is a tough call. Or a foolish one...

However, we learned some more things on this event and our planning will be better next time out.

Despite all that, we enjoyed ourselves and it was an impeccably organised affair - and the ribs at the end were excellent!!! We've kept the lead in the Novice championship, albeit now only 7 points instead of 8, so we'll keep pushing on at the next one.

Come on you monkeys!

Tim

[STeveD]

Brooke has a copy of the scores up:

http://www.brooke.net/docr/2010_DOCR_Results.htm

Update to the overall pending.

[STeveD]

BTW, I'm not sure if all of you are aware, but Rich who checkpoints with his wife Eloise do some write-ups of the rallies from a CP worker point of view:

http://www.torontoautosportclub.ca/fifthgear/february2010.pdf

Here's the Fifth Gear launching page:

http://www.torontoautosportclub.ca/fifth_gear.html

I hope to see a July issue with something about DOCR.

PMSC also sometimes has aomething in their magazine about the rallies they host. Though they're a bit behind this year...

http://pmsc.on.ca/PMSC/Bulletins.html