Culture|Garage

Time speed distance (TSD) rallying, was a new thing for me. And it was pretty interesting. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, TSD rally is where you are given a route, an average speed and a mileage to adhere to. They generally take place on back ass roads.

So to break it down. You show up for the driver’s meeting, they give you a route map and your car’s start time. You then head to an odometer calibration leg where you make sure that your odometer matches the official route log and mileage. From there you come to another stop and the start of the first leg. At your car’s departure time, you head off and then follow the route until you make a check point and are given your exact time, etc.

For each second you are over or under the route time you receive one point… just like golf, lowest score wins.

For the photos and event write up

Jessop was my co-driver in the rallyx/Home Depot/$600 Saab 900. He had one other TSD under his belt so he kind of knew what was going on… I just had to listen to him and point the car in the right direction.

Unfortunately, we kind of forgot one of the most important things… setting our clocks to “rally time,” instead, we went by AT&T time, which is approximately 90 odd seconds ahead of rally time. So we ended up with a 94 seconds off the pace in the first leg.

Now this was also the first time I had pushed the car since we built it up. So with the Konis all dialed into full firm and the monster rear sway bar on, I got caught off guard the first few turns. And by caught off guard, I mean almost took the car head first into a 30 foot ravine. But by the end of the first stage I was completely confident and capable of rotating and sliding sideways around turns.

The second stage we somehow managed to come in one second from the course time, so we were pretty damn happy.

Going into the third leg we made, oh a few wrong turns, which took us about four miles off course. So while Jessop had to recalculate all of the directions, I proceed, under his encouragement to “make up time.” As we crested the hill we spotted the checkpoint, he chuckled and said, “I can smell some brakes cooking.” Apparently, we made our time up, unfortunately too well… we came in 44 seconds early.

The fourth and fifth leg were relatively uneventful, by then Jessop and I had a rhythm going and could stay on pace just fine. Our last two stages were six seconds and nine seconds off.

Which put us in DFL. I am not used to losing. So I sulked.

All in all it was a good time and I would certainly do it again.

The rallyx chariot that took us to last place

I don’t know what I would have done without auxiliary lighting

Did you get your culture|garage sticker yet? Adds 15 hp. No joke.

There are multiple classes, including, uber-tech class, this Eclipse was running Linux or something, but whatever they were running it took them to a first place overall finish

I know it looks like the Mathaletes are hanging out at Godfather’s Pizza, but they are actually figuring out distances and speeds, or something…

Gathered at a gas station for one of the leg breaks

He really should have been looking at the directions

And a final one giving you a rough idea of what the road conditions looked like

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