It’s Sunday 11th September 2005, and I’m recovering from the annual exertions of the Inter-Association Rally Challenge, held this time in southern England on sheet 163.
The ‘recovery’ process comprises a lazy remainder of the day just trying not to fall asleep while watching the telly. By the middle of tomorrow I’ll probably be just about back to normal. Even writing this report takes a lot of will-power. And it’s all because of the lack of sleep last night. It’s a problem I always face after a late event, but of course this one was later than usual, and it was a lot farther away, with a consequent long drive home. 880 miles all told, approximately.

Of course it’s all worthwhile, for the enjoyment and satisfaction gained by going to far-flung parts of the UK to do this once-a-year event, which rotates around the ‘Regions’ each year.

In theory the events, and the competitors, are the cream of the country’s offerings. In this case I have reservations on this score, as I’ll explain below, but in general the standards are very high.

Because of the high abilities of the competitors the organisers usually have to set the difficulty levels fairly high. But by the same token they must take extreme care to ensure that everything is spot on, and nothing is left to chance. I felt that some concepts were not explained clearly.

For example, somebody asked about ‘Goers’, and some description was offered, but when I asked about the significance of this I was given a rather sketchy reply that didn’t convey a lot to me. I had no idea how important it might be, and I still don’t, as I took nothing to do with clue-solving. But I do know that Ewan Leeming was struggling with some of the clues, partly because of interpretation of things like ‘What is a road’. Ewan and the other navigators may contribute to this report later.

The usual post-event discussion revealed that lots of the navigators were unhappy about some of the clues in the first half, while the second half proved much better. For me the second half flowed nicely, and we only dropped 2 minutes, whereas the first half had been full of problems for us, and for many others – more of which later.
From my own perspective the biggest issue was the use of a large proportion of extremely rough whites throughout the event. My perception is that about 10% of the route was on whites, and about half of the white mileage was unacceptable, in terms of width, ruts, potholes, mud and length. This last one is because if you have a more committed driver behind you he could be pressurising you to go faster than you want to go, for up to 2 miles at a time. And by ‘width’ I mean lack of it. I was scraping hedges on both sides and running up bankings.

I’ve just re-read the regs. and I see the total unsurfaced mileage was supposed to be 8 miles, and that “sumpguards shouldn’t be necessary unless you want to be super-competitive”. Hmm!!!

The other 2 crews in our (ESACC) team were Alan Cowan and Iain Craven in a 1.8 Brava, recently acquired by Team Captain Alan for commuting, and Euan Brodie and Oly McCollum is the 205 XT (1.4) that Euan has had for a few years now. My own car is now a Rover 420 that I got mainly for competition use about a year ago. It’s not ideal, but it offers good value for money, and the 2-litre T16 is more reliable than the smaller K-series engines. Performance is a bonus. Fuel consumption is the only downside. Handling is not as good as the Maestros I used to have, especially in the wet, and the disc handbrake is pathetic, but it does have ABS, which has its advantages. Another drawback is a cast aluminium sump that is a bit vulnerable. Steel gives a bit, while aluminium breaks, and it’s dearer to replace if it does. I must get a sumpguard.

The weather prior to the event had been tremendous, but it started to go downhill a few days before, and the forecast said that most of the country would have some rain at the weekend. We had a heavy shower just before we got to the start, and there was a fair bit of rain during the event, most of it light. But of course even light rain is not conducive to marshalling, so we were grateful, as always, to those intrepid guys that helped out.

In case anybody is interested, the start was at Cirencester, and the finish at Burford, kind of south and east of Cheltenham, respectively. I don’t know the area at all, but I have heard several references to ‘The Cotswolds’, which conveys nothing to me, but it may to some of my readers. There were lots of restricted zones on the route, some of which were tiny villages with grossly extended 30 limits.

Oly and Euan stayed after we left, but the rest of us felt there was little point in waiting for the results. My own view was that the longer I hung around the harder it would be to drive home. The others were just pissed off, and knew our results were poor. Why? Because we had been forced to ‘cut and run’, the ultimate desperation tactic when you are getting too close to OTL.

The results were up on the Oxford Motor Club website late this afternoon (still Sunday), and I see that 3 crews tied on 6 minutes. So clearly they didn’t have anything like the problems that we faced, and I guess that should console the organisers that at least some people saw the intended interpretations. It may just be a geographical thing, i.e. we didn’t know what they meant by some of their conventions. I’m hoping the navigators in our team will help me to understand this one.

The upshot was that we didn’t get the same overall enjoyment levels as we’ve had on most of these Inter-Association occasions. We also heard that the Semi-Expert crews in the ‘local’ event got the same route information as we did, so if we found it hard-going I shudder to think how they got on. There were some very high scores in the results. We missed 2 TCs, so we got 2 fails, but there were some crews with even more fails. I don’t think they would go away happy.

One discouraging factor – a sign of the times – was the number of Associations that didn’t have full teams. They were made up to three by using some of the ‘local’ crews. The results don’t show the teams, but there was a list on the notice board that said there were nine of them. But it seems that some of the stand-ins were from the Semi-Expert class. That’s why it was announced at the start that their information was the same as the Experts, to prove there would be no advantage to them. In fact some of them beat us.

Just after one TC I saw one of the NI crews going WD. I asked them about it at the finish, and if I picked them up right they did go into the control WD. But the results don’t show them with any fails, and WD was meant to be penalised by a fail. So I’m a little confused. Nothing unusual there, then!

Conclusions

I won’t go back to that area without first asking lots of questions about whites. Indeed, I may apply this criterion to the whole of England.

I would be tempted to seek advice about what they consider to be roads, e.g. what is a ‘goer’? And I mean this in every sense. What do they mean by the term? In our experience it’s not a relevant item, so I wonder why it was even mentioned. Is there some significance that’s over our heads? Are navigators meant to have some clairevoyance about the roads?

This may have played a big part in Ewan’s performance and obvious frustration. I’ve never seen him as short-tempered. He was shouting at me a lot. I could have shouted back, but that would have made his mood even worse, so I played punch-bag for him.
Maybe we should offer less detailed Final Instructions in 2008 to give our boys a local advantage! It seems to work that way in other areas. Maybe we were too naïve in 2002 by spelling everything out.

Maybe I ought to have foreseen organisational problems in view of the lack of precision in the regs. in respect of eligibility. I had to seek clarification before I was sure it really was meant for the purpose of the I-A, as the eligibility was restricted to four Regional Associations. They hadn’t thought it through properly. And they had asked us some questions about the philosophy of the I-A event a few weeks earlier.

None of the others in the team has responded to the invitation to contribute, so you’ll just have to accept my own assessment as written here. Has it put me off anything? No way, except that I will be more careful in future about asking the question about whites.