From the Armchair Rally Archives of Gary Starr
I have always enjoyed teaching those new to our sport the Road Rally concepts for Course and Tour rallies. Perhaps you have seen my Tips for Novice TSD Rallyists in RReNews? I am hoping to do the same teaching with these Armchair Rallies in each edition of RReNews. I would love to see more people try Course rallying. But it often is too hard to understand for people who have never done it, so they get frustrated and never return. There is just no way to practice and learn rally traps before running the actual event. And Rallymasters don’t help by making the traps way too hard. These Armchair Rallies are an excellent tool to introduce the concepts and show how to navigate trap rallies without even getting in your car. And believe me, the traps in these mimic the actual traps on real events. After doing a few of these, you will be ready to take on the challenge of Course rallies!
I have already submitted all my easy and intermediate rallies, so this month I’m offering a hard rally. All these Armchair rallies were scanned in from my original paper Generals, so some are a little faded. I have also added handwritten notes on some, or circled meaningful Generals sentences, or put prominent arrows pointing to the areas in the Generals you’ll need to do the Armchair Rally.
The hard rally is the 1981 Tarheels. This rally has both LRI (lettered route instructions) and NRI (numbered route instructions) and LRI has priority over NRI, with a fixed 3 determinant main road. The rally uses a unique “negative inference” main road “follow” concept which can get both quite difficult (or “challenging” as some hardcore rallyists would say) and frustrating. Make sure you read the areas in the Generals that I have circled with arrows pointing to them before starting (or you won’t have a chance with this rally). Unfortunately, some of the map signs did not copy well (and are too small to doctor up without making it worse – I tried) but hint: they become much easier to read when turning the map (to make the sign right side up for reading). This rally is my least favorite, as in my opinion, it becomes much harder than it appears, the street signs are extremely small, and you can get lost easily going through many intersections before the next instruction’s correct execution point (which the critique doesn’t mention). Because of this, I have included a color-coded answer map I did. The 4 colors don’t have any meaning other than I changed them periodically to the next color so it’s a little easier to follow (as you go around the map many times on the same roads). I also put a tiny number at the intersection of the first execution point of each NRI. You can try running first without the answer map (hardcore rallyists only) but I suggest most people, especially the inexperienced, should just run using the answer map the entire time to learn this rally’s concepts and traps (or you will get so frustrated you’ll just give up).
Note: I’ve only heard back from one individual about these rallies, and I would appreciate more people emailing me their thoughts on them. Did you try them? How many did you run, and did you enjoy them? Did you learn anything about Course rallying? Do any of you old-timers remember them? Does anyone have any other armchair/map course rallies? Etcetera! I have enjoyed pulling these sixteen rallies together, and this has been quite an effort for me to check all 16 of these rallies out. I’ve “run” each one and checked everything before submitting, adding helpful comments and corrections and getting them ready for publication.
I have saved all 16 rallies from actual events that I attended over the last 44 years to use for this very purpose of teaching. The Generals were used on both the Armchair Map Rallies to teach/practice the concepts and the actual rally running the next day.
Click Download to open the file for viewing and printing!
You can certainly do this from your screen by clicking on the images above, yet I encourage you to print them out and head to the “START” line with a pencil. Depart on Route Instruction #1 and enjoy the adventure!
Next time I will submit my final and most difficult, yet enjoyable rally: The 1978 Heart of Dixie (which has all the most difficult traps/concepts in a single event). If you think you’ve become good at traps this is the real test. Don’t worry – I will again have a color-coded answer map!
Send me an email at maprallies@comeroadrallywith.us. I would love to get feedback from you on these rallies and this column. I have heard of various rallyists having archives of these, and I encourage you to share them with us!
