(Part 1)
I’ve been running sports car rallies since 1965. My first one was a National Championship Event in Houston, Texas when I was a senior in high school. My friend Neil and I ran it in my 1962 Volkswagen. It was a tremendously difficult event and we were lost most of the time. It hooked me on this form of motor sports, because it combined driving skill with navigational skill, math skill and timing skill. Sure, I’d like to drive a formula one car, but without hitting the lottery, rallying will do just fine. After I joined the Air Force, I ran Time Speed Distance Rallies in Oklahoma City, Upper Heyford (England) and Denver. After moving to Los Angeles, I discovered the “Into the Night” Rally Team and learned about Monte Carlo Rallies. Wow, these were really fun! Gone, were the complicated math and the difficult course following rules. Instead, we had simple timing to checkpoints and maps to follow. That means you can drive whatever speed you’re comfortable with! The magnificent scenery of Southern California made this a prime hobby of sports car nuts like me, who love motor sports, but don’t really want to put their life or car at risk on a race track.
Last Saturday, we drove out to Placerita Canyon Park for the Total Recall Rally. Usually, we expect to work diligently over the maps for an hour or more to plot our course for the Rally. Joe Akerman, the Rallymaster, had made this process much easier by posting the instructions and maps on the
http://www.ITNRally.org website for everyone to download and read in advance. Ron and I only had to compare our notes to make sure we both read things the same way. Other than a few minor differences, we were ready to roll in 15 minutes. We had plenty of time to talk with old friends and catch up on life’s events.
There was lots of ribbing about my driving style in the Cobra. Especially, for those occasions when we didn’t quite make it to the finish. The previous Friday, the Cobra had died during the Santa Monica Sports car Club’s First Friday Night Rally. I have not figured out the actual failure yet, so we were running this one in Ron’s Explorer. Ron brought his mother-in-law, Lenora, so we had an extra set of eyes and navigational help. The park had a beautiful picnic area with overhanging trees and the weather was absolutely perfect. Joe explained the route to the new people and they were able to make notes to follow during the rally. For them, the rally was a piece of cake. For Expert Class, it was a bit more difficult.
The rally didn’t actually start at the park. We drove exactly 22.80 miles up the freeway to Lake Hughes road to complete an odometer check and be timed out at one minute intervals. We even had time to stop for a quick burger on the way. Joe Akerman has been writing rallies for many years. The first one I entered was the Route 66 Rally in 1992. He took us all the way to Arizona and it was impossibly long 15 hour endurance affair in a Jeep Cherokee. Over the years since, we have run ITN rallies to Laughlin, Santa Cruz, Temecula, Paso Robles, Ridgecrest (that wasn’t where the rally ended, but it was as far as we got) and Las Vegas. We have run many shorter ones that stay in the Los Angeles area too.
My old friend and navigator from the Starlite years, Jeff and his son, waved us out at the start. Lake Hughes Road is one of the best rally roads of Southern California. The excellent pavement twists and turns through 20 odd miles of Lake Elizabeth Canyon and each curve has a different radius. It really keeps drivers alert. Many of the turns sweep by shear rock walls or drop offs so your really have to stay within your limits. Checkpoint one was only a couple of miles up the road and we hit it perfectly on time to collect a zero score. We got to see our old friends Dave and Kaylee at the timing car and they remarked that we had done well to get all four tires over the hose on the same hundredth. This is something I practice and try to achieve on all checkpoints. It didn’t work out so well on the next one.
The drive to Checkpoint two took us through the historic ghost town of Willow Springs. A few of the buildings are still there, as is the old mine shaft. The mine is blocked off to keep people from getting trapped in there when the old rotting beams collapse. Ron is not only an amazing Navigator with a photographic memory of roads, he also is a history buff and regaled us with stories of the discovery of silver, gold and copper in the region and the rise and fall of the mines.
This Checkpoint was a minimum speed affair. That means that you must keep the car above 30 miles per hour while you’re in sight of the timing car. As we approached the hose, I felt like we were fast and eased up on the gas a little. Suddenly, I realized we were slow and slammed the pedal down. But, it was too late, we crossed 4 hundredths of a minute late and our perfect score was ruined. Nathan and Keith had a good laugh at us as I was barely able to slow the car to a stop at the timing car. It turns out that this wasn’t bad and one of the better scores for the minimum speed trap. People who went less than 30 were hit with a 100 point penalty!
Checkpoint three was easy to find on Cameron Road. We had 9 minutes to kill while we waited for our turn to cross the hose. On some checkpoints, the road runs uphill and since we are not allowed to stop the car, you can burn up a clutch while killing time. Joe had thoughtfully made all the checkpoints downhill so you could just coast with a little braking. On three, the downhill was pretty steep and I put the car in neutral to save wear on the brakes as we waited.
I had to tell the story of the 1996 Starlite Rally when we blasted around the big curve on Cameron Road, saw the big embankment over the railroad tracks, slammed on the brakes really hard and just got the speed down enough that after we flew over the tracks, we were able to stop before the road kinked hard right. On that fateful night during the Starlite Rally, two cars had not been able to stop and drove straight up a rocky wall on the other side of the tracks. When we stopped, there were car parts and a big
oil slick spread across the road. It turned out that both of them were rental cars and only one of them managed to get into Mohave to exchange cars!
Our turn came to cross the hose and I pushed down the pedal, but nothing happened. I had forgotten to put the car back in Drive! By the time I recovered, we were two hundredths late. Ron really got to pick on me for that one.
Our bad score was quickly forgotten as we cruised up the 14 Freeway through the amazing formations in Red Rock Canyon State Park. We split off on the gorgeous Highway178. The rolling hills and forests were breathtaking and I had a chance to practice my two lane passing skills. On one pass, we were just door to door with the slower car when I saw a deer in the road ahead. I had time to complete the pass, but I was hitting the horn hard and often and flashing the high beams to get the pretty doe to MOVE! She did and we didn’t have to slow much on our run to Checkpoint 4. We got to admire the view of Isabella Lake as the light faded. Then, we turned off onto one of the twistiest roads in California, Caliente Bodfish. Now it may have a funny name, but you have to take this road seriously as it’s kinks take you straight up the side of Bald Eagle Peak. The standoff for checkpoint four was at the general store of the old town of Johnson Springs. It was kind of ironic to see all these high horse power cars parked in the same place where people used to tie up their horses. There were lots of Subaru’s, WRX’s, STI’s and even a Saab which was really a Subaru underneath. There were BMW's, a Volvo, a beautiful G35, a miata an Eclipse and a neat little AudiTT. Justin was there in his Silverado Pickup, It's not your average rally car, it's faster!
We also got to play with Ron’s new toy. It’s a Tasco binocular with a built in lighted compass. We were pointed out a flashing light off in the darkness. He was able to take the compass bearing and we added 15 degrees to convert from magnetic and plotted the line on our map. We had to decide which side of a fork in the road to take and the line took us exactly the right direction. At this point, I was regretting the darkness a little as we were passing through one of the most beautiful valleys on earth. They raise cattle in these parts and sometimes they stray out onto the road. During the rally, they are referred to as “moving chicanes”. We didn’t see any on the road this night and managed to get a perfect score at the checkpoint. It’s hard to leave a place as beautiful as Walker Basin and Ron told about a ranch there with it’s own airstrip that had recently sold for 18 million.
The drive off the plateau got very curvy again and brought back memories of the first rally that Ron and I had run together. It had been a wet spring and that day we saw a lot of waterfalls coming off the rocks. He was driving on that occasion and I got to enjoy the view that included a big black Brahma bull just a few feet away from MY side of the open car.