by Peter Schneider for RReNews March 2018
This year’s New York Metro Snowflake Rally celebrated its 62nd consecutive year. The Snowflake is a lightly trapped/course TSD rally and is the longest-running Porsche event in the nation and one of the longest-running rallies in North America. The event even predates the Porsche Club of America by one year.
I first attended the event in 1985. I live in Northern New Jersey. It is easily a six hour round trip to attend the event (without traffic), but I’m hooked and have run the event religiously over the past 33 years, only missing three events.
While the event has been shorted and now ends on the eastern tip of Long Island, I still feel it’s worth the trip.
As with all prior Snowflakes I have attended, the route instructions include both written and Photo Clues. I like the event so much, I modeled my annual December Toys for Tots Rally after this event. The Toys for Tots Rally is now in its 28th year.
Over the years, I have had three different drivers for the events, and as you can imagine each one is a little different.
This year, and for the past three years, my driver was Jeff Becker. Jeff began running TSD rallies in 1968 and has been competing on the Snowflake since 1973. Jeff may be better known for his success in the SCCA Pro Rally series where he was co-driver for the likes of Bruno Kreibich, John Buffum, and Paul Choiniere who together with them won 8 National Pro Rally Championships driving for the Audi and Hyundai factory teams. Jeff ran several events in Europe for Opel Team Holland including the 1982 and 1983 Rallye Monte Carlo World Championship events. Jeff has won the Snowflake four times in the past, three times while driving for Richard Mooers (the current Rallymaster) and once with me in 2017. In 2018, we were hoping for Jeff’s 5th win and my 18th, as you might understand my confidence was high. But as you will see, even though we were able to squeeze out a victory, we did learn some lessons this year to apply for future events. As the saying goes ‘even some old dogs can learn new tricks.’
As always, once we receive a copy of the Route Instructions, we sat down to read through them. We check to make sure that all the Route Instructions are in the correct numeric order, as in the past the Rallymaster has reversed a few to keep you on your toes. While the out-of-order instructions would not get you lost, they might have you execute a speed change at the wrong mileage which would cause you to be late at the next checkpoint. We also check to see if there were any route following traps on the 2018 event that had been used in the past.
I use color markers to highlight all the speed changes, pauses, beginning and ending locations of all Free and Transits Zones and Special Photo Clues. In addition, I review all ‘car zero’ restart times and write down my adjusted restart time based on our car number. You cannot do well if you start in the wrong minute. I make a note on the photo pages of what actions need to be taken once we locate the scene in the Photo Clue.
This year they had fourteen Photo Clues, which is a lot for this event since most times the Photo Clues are very tricky. Minor differences in a sign or background depicted in the photo are used to impact your time (if it is a speed change) or follow the correct course.
If you have the patience to keep reading, I’ll try to explain some of the tricks/traps that the Rallymaster used on this year’s event.
Section I of the event was a Tire-Warm-up Leg. This leg was designed to ‘warm-up/expand’ your tires to ‘running temperature’ (this is left over from the old ply-belted tire days). This leg was about five miles and lets you conduct a preliminary calibration of your odometer against the Rallymaster’s car.
Section II was a combination of the Odometer Leg and the first TSD section. This Section had two rally timing traps. The first was an overlap trap; the route instructions had you calculate your average speed, assuming it would take you exactly 28 minutes to complete instruction #34. Instruction #34, was the end of the odometer leg and a hard mileage (at Photo Clue B) to calculate your odometer factor, getting to the Instruction was straightforward. But instruction #34 also stated to ‘End Free Zone in the next half mile,’ the instruction was not complete until after you traveled the additional half mile. If you failed to notice this, your calculation of the average speed would have given you an average speed of 32.21 mph (incorrect) instead of 33.27 mph (correct). This seemingly small difference over 15.529 miles, which was the distance to the end of Instruction #34 resulted in you arriving over 56 seconds late at the first checkpoint, adding 93 points to your score, as the rally is scored in 100th of a minute, the idea is to accumulate the fewest points.
Apart from finding difficulty in attaining the erection it is also problem the he have to struggle for sustaining it. http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/corgi-getting-attacked-by-giant-squid/ pfizer viagra australia tadalafil 20mg cipla Not only that, but their products are natural and do not contain any chemical substances. Together with levitra brand cheap drug, other treatment solutions like surgeries are also available to defeat this state. levitra is offered at economic prices at online drug store. The height that the advertisements for enlargement pills for men in terms of dealing with erectile dysfunction, they can have certain side effects. http://cute-n-tiny.com/cute-animals/top-10-cutest-pygmy-hippo-pics/ cialis shipping 
The second trap in Section II was tricky Photo Clue (Photo Clue C) which was active for the 16.75-mile leg; it was a hard to see Photo Clue along an exit ramp of a state highway 13.39 miles from the start of the Section. If you saw the sign, you needed to reduce your speed down to 25MPH 2.398 miles after passing the correct sign. If you failed to select the correct sign or did not see it, you would not have reduced your average speed to 25 MPH at the correct mileage and would have arrived at the first checkpoint at the wrong time. So, to do this Section correctly, you not only had to do both traps right, you also had to avoid getting lost, or failing to add your car number to the specified start time of the section (a common error for new rallyists), or making a math mistake while calculating your correct elapsed time along the route, and this was only the first scored leg of the event. While we did not fall for these traps, we did not ‘zero’ the leg. Just prior to the first control there was a ‘Stop Ahead’ sign, and we increased our speed to adjust for the time we would have ‘lost’ at the Stop intersection, and as luck would have it the checkpoint was between the ‘Stop Ahead’ sign and the actual Stop Intersection, so we were a couple of seconds early at the 1st control.
Section III contained not only three Photo Clues but three opportunities to test your knowledge of the General Instructions. Photo Clue C had a hard mileage reference, so that was easy. Photo Clue D was active for the entire 10 mile Section, and Photo E was used to end a Free Zone (a portion of the event with no checkpoints), if you ran ‘on time all the time’ it would not matter if you missed it, but since the sign pictured in Photo E has been used in the past, we knew where it was and were not concerned about missing the sign. Photo Clue D was harder to spot; it was a Photo of a sign for the birthplace of Mary L. Booth. A quick search on Google only produced a picture of the house, but not a street address, so that did not help much. Ended up that we had to pass three ‘look-alike’ signs until we found the correct sign depicted in the Photo. So it ended up that the three Photo Clues were not hard to find. You just had to make sure you picked the correct background shown in the Photo Clue D to execute the speed change at the correct location. The leg also included several other timing traps, that 1st was a sign that included the word ‘Aleghany’ the only sign you saw was spelled Allegheny; if you missed this difference in spelling, it cost you a 30-second timing error. The next trap was based on the location of a School, since it was on the left, it was not valid, since all signs were on the right unless specifically instructed otherwise. The next test involved the correct definition of a valid road vs. a sign; the General Instruction states that Dead Ends, No Outlets and unpaved roads ‘do not exist.’ You were asked to Pause 50% of a minute (30 seconds) if you pass a ‘Dead End,’ you had to realize that in the ‘rally world’ Dead Ends do not exist, but a sign reading ‘Dead End’ does.
The restarts at both Section II and Section III had very little time built into them, and we had to leave the restart within 10 seconds of arriving at them, a ‘Flying Restart.’
Section IV started out with a trick concerning the restart location. Section III ended at the first ‘Stop’ sign after passing through an intersection. The first instruction of Section IV stated, ‘Re-zero your odometer at the second ‘Stop’, since this was a new instruction, you needed to remember that it had no relationship with the prior instruction and had to proceed ahead the second ‘Stop’ sign, which was actually the third ‘Stop’ sign on the road. No one should have gotten lost since no matter which ‘Stop’ you turned at, you still made a Right onto Moriches-Middle Island Road, but you would have lengthened your leg mileage by turning at the wrong ‘Stop’ sign and would have arrived late at the next checkpoint. This leg also had two Photo Clues, but they were easy to see and did not cause us any problems.
Section V contained some math problems you needed to solve. You started the leg in a Free Zone at 40 MPH. You were first told to decrease your speed by 50% (20 MPH), then a half mile later to increase your speed by 50% (which is 30 MPH not back to 40 MPH), and a half mile later told to Divide your speed by ½. By dividing by a fraction, you are really multiplying by the denominator. So instead of going 15 MPH which is ½ of 30 MPH, you need to travel at 60 MPH. But since you were in a Free Zone, it was just a math exercise to calculate your time to leave the end of the Free Zone. There was also a pause that you had to calculate based on pausing the number of minutes it would take you to go from Riverhead, Long Island to Miami, Florida at a speed equal to 30 times the distance. I will let you figure out how to do the math, but the correct answer is 2 minutes.
The next section (Section VI) entitled ‘Up the Creek!’ or as experienced teams on the Snowflake call it ‘the Red Creek Run-around.’ Just after passing the ‘Big Duck’ (home of the Long Island Duck, which is the most popular commercial duck breed in the United States, which started in 1873 after a small number were imported China), we turned Left onto Red Creek Road to begin the next Section and began looking for a Left turn after “Photo K”. The trap on this leg has taken many forms over the years, but the important thing to remember is never to turn at the 1st sign for Upper Red Creek Road, one day the Rallymaster will change this, and I will get tricked. This year the scene depicted in Photo Clue K was a curved black-on-yellow street sign depicted was bent in the lower left corner. In less than a quarter of a mile we spotted’ sign, so we turned Left at the 1st occurrence of Upper Red Creek Road. This just did not seem right, for 33 years we always turned at the 2nd occurrence of Upper Red Creek Road. So I had Jeff turn around, and we took a second look at the sign depicted in Photo Clue K. At this point, we convinced ourselves that the sign in the picture did not match the one we passed (we were wrong, it was the same sign) and we went zipping down Red Creek Road We passed what we thought was an emergency sign that contained the words ,’ so we turned Left onto the 2nd occurrence Upper Red Creek Road. Now we are driving briskly down Upper Red Creek Road with all the other rally traffic coming from the opposite direction. But who is right? We then see Car #2, who has won the event five times coming in our opposite direction. By now some of you might have figured out what the trick was, but we had not. At the next Intersection, per the instructions, we make a L’ back on Red Creek Road, passing the “Photo K” sign again (but now it is not ‘active’) driving past the 2nd occurrence of Upper Creek Road, where the other rally traffic who turned at the 1st occurrence of Upper Creek Road turn Left back on Red Creek Road. Just as we gotten back ‘on time’ we passed a checkpoint (these are all closed controls, so you do not stop) and while trying to figure out what happened in Section VI, we promptly missed the Restart for Section VII. For those more astute than us, you might have noted in my narrative, that the Instruction was to turn Left after “Photo K” (a sign with the words ‘Photo K’ and not a scene depicted in Photo K). It turns out we were the only team to do it correctly, but for the wrong reason. Sometimes you are just lucky. We had noticed the trap while reviewing the Instructions at the start but failed to remember it while on the rally. I only noticed it seventeen days later while writing this story.
We are now in the last Section of the rally (Section VII) which should have been an easy drive down Dune Road. But we had no idea of our correct time since we missed our Restart Out-Marker and we did not want to turn around to look for it, because the Checkpoint we just passed on Red Creek Road might have been a quickie for Section VIII and not the Checkpoint for Section VII and we did not want to get extra points for passing a Checkpoint in the wrong direction.
So we just guessed, passed Car #2 and tried to get ahead of them by a minute.
Dune Road is a narrow cause-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Shinnecock Bay in ‘The Hamptons,’ which includes views of ocean front and bay front ‘cottages’ of the rich and not so famous. Most of the houses can fetch as little as 3 Million each, with some priced above 6 Million, and these are summer homes. This is not an area to be playing ‘loose’ with the posted speed limit. But by now Car #2 is only a 100 feet behind us, so we resign ourselves to that fact that we had a bad day and pass the last Checkpoint and followed the rest of the instructions to the finish.
The rally ended at Birchwood Restaurant in Riverhead, which was serving brunch, the Metro Porsche Club provided 50% coupons, and we awaited the presentation of the awards. The brunch was very nice, after all, it is ‘The Hamptons,’ even if it was ‘off season.’
While waiting for the results, we sat with our major competition which it turns out not only missed the Section VII Restart (like we did) and was trying to adjust their time in Section VII based on our time, but they had issues with the ‘Flying Restart’ in Section II and Section III and started both Sections late. They also missed the Photo Clue of a Big Bull which is about 15 feet high in Section IV and had issues with “Photo K.” It was just one of those days. But we all ‘had fun.’
The 2018 Snowflake, as with all the prior Metro PCA events I have attended, was well run and enjoyable. Wish I could have blamed my errors on jet lag, after returning from a ten-day trip to the SCCA National Convention in Las Vegas and off-roading in Death Valley with friends or the long ride from New Jersey to Long Island, but that was not the case. I just was not ‘firing on all cylinders’, but sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.
Looking forward to the 63rd Snowflake in 2019, maybe next year Jeff and I will work the event.
