Winter Challenge Rally

Time-Speed-Distance Rallies
RipStik
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Mar 24, 2015 11:49 am

Re: Winter Challenge Rally

Post by RipStik »

Dave_G wrote:
Gravelguy wrote:By the looks of it, Jamie and I had the lowest score on section 3. I'm shocked especially considering we took ZERO TA's for that section! :shock:
Wow, that's incredible that you did that with no TA's. Congrats on that. You must have been flying! There was no way that I could keep up the speeds on that last section, so we ended up taking a 1.5 minute TA on six of the eight legs, due mostly just to falling behind on the clock mile after mile.

For those who weren't there, the last section was 3+ hours of driving 38-40 MPH (those are average, not maximum speeds) on twisty, hilly, slippery snow-packed one-lane roller coaster roads. It was totally awesome. :D
clear me up on what TA's are. it sounds like you apply them to your section to reduce your time/score, but whats the point if everyone gets them?
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Dave_G
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Re: Winter Challenge Rally

Post by Dave_G »

RipStik wrote:clear me up on what TA's are. it sounds like you apply them to your section to reduce your time/score, but whats the point if everyone gets them?
A TA is a Time Allowance. In the old days before TA's, when teams got lost or took a wrong turn, they would try to make up the time on the road. This led to stupid speeds (these are open roads we're talking about) and was deemed unsafe. Time Allowances were introduced to avoid the problem of teams speeding to make up time on the road.

If you get lost, when you later get back on track, you need to figure out how long you were lost for, and claim that as a TA. The trick is that in addition to being able to know how long you were off course, TAs are allowed only for specific values, i.e. 0.5 minutes, 1.5 minutes, 2.5 minutes, etc., up to 19.5 minutes. (They're on the half-minute to keep you from being on the road at the same place as other cars theoretically on their perfect time.) Your TA is subtracted from the elapsed time to get your scored time for that checkpoint. What I normally do is if I'm less than a minute behind and I don't think a checkpoint is coming up soon, I'll try to make it up on the road. Otherwise I'll take a TA. They're surprisingly tricky to get right.

Buffum's winter rally is different. In the last section of this rally the speeds are so challenging that we, like many teams, were taking TAs not because we got lost but because we simply couldn't keep the speed up and were falling behind.

This year's event will be on Feb. 13. Sadly, I'm going to be out of town and will miss it for the second year in a row. But it really is a fantastic event and well worth doing (or working).

Dave G.
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'90 Miata (summer fun)
'91 BMW 325iX (winter fun) oo=[][]=oo
'04 Mazda 6s wagon (family fun)
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