[RallySnake]

2004 Angels’ Crown, Through Snake Eyes

The early weather reports were looking dismal for Saturday’s rally, “mostly cloudy with scattered showers”. As usual, the reports were wrong and the day was perfect with temps in the low 70s and plenty of sunshine. There were some unusually low clouds drifting across the Lebec start location. Then I realized, the clouds were not low, we were high! Tejon Pass is at 4100 ft. elevation. It was pretty chilly up there, too, enough to make us put on our ski caps. The power to weight ratio of the Cobra makes climbing the grade effortless. The view across the hills was fantastic. Made me really glad the hard top was back in the garage.

The Arntz was running great with a belly full of fresh Mobil1. Both of the rally computers were up and the GPS laptop (in the trunk) was working perfectly. I had just gotten a very small keyboard with a built-in mouse, but could not figure out how to add it to the cockpit. With all the other gear and the computer monitor on the dash, there just wasn’t enough space. I decided that it wouldn’t make the car any faster, anyway.

We were a little worried that we wouldn’t have enough time to figure out the routes. The instructions were not handed out until 12:00 noon with the first car due to leave at 2:01 PM. It turned out not to be a problem. Tim Errington, a long time competitor, but a first time Rallymaster, wrote this rally. He had created an 8-hour, 12 leg rally that had many unique features. The first feature was, that he didn’t tell us very much at the start! You had to figure it out as you drove along the route. On the maps, we marked in-marker roads with a hot pink highlighter and marked all the standoff locations with the yellow highlighter, drew directional arrows and we were ready to go.

The rally used all the best roads around the Bakersfield area. Standoff one on Sabodan Road, South of town, gave us compass bearings for Checkpoints 1, 11 and 12. Tim used a favorite Rallymaster trick here. Checkpoint one was on Millux road. The trick is that there are two sections of Millux road marked on the map with a third little piece of road that could be Millux in the middle. He compounded the problem by using an intersecting road, Rancho Drive, as another possible Checkpoint location for in-markers 11 and 12. Sure enough, the compass bearing took us to that dangerous section of Millux on the East side. I crossed the timing hose with a perfect zero and we got away with running up Rancho without encountering another in-markers disastrously early.