On Sunday, July 17th, the Porsche Club of America’s Northern New Jersey ran their Summer Sizzle Rally. I’ve put together the Answer Grid to help you understand which questions were too easy or too hard. The July event was straightforward since most of the teams did very well, with nine teams getting one question wrong and seven getting all questions right.
Before I go into the details of the July event, I want to discuss what goes into writing a rally and how NNJR-PCA splits the workload among the club’s rally committee. First, there is the Event Chair, John Vogt. John handles all the club pre-event paperwork (insurance and advertisement), arranges for the start and end locations (including food), rounds up the individuals to help with registration/scoring, and finds someone to write the rally and do a safety/pre-check. The Event Chair also selects the “tone/style” of the events. It is very handy that John is also the owner of High Marques Motors, which is also our starting location in Morristown for the majority of the club’s rallies/treks. The next set of organizers is the rallymasters and safety/pre-check crews. These duties usually fall to the team of Eric & Pat Sjogren and Peter & Joanne Schneider, my wife and I. Depending on the event and personal schedules, the two couples switch off as the rallymaster or the safety/pre-check team. Eric and Pat have been doing the heavy lifting of writing the rallies while Joanne and I check out the rally and help with registration and scoring. I also do the post-event paperwork, including posting results, putting together the Answer Grid to see who got what right, and writing a story for the region’s newsletter and Road Rally eNews, a “national” rally newsletter.
We also receive help from Ellen & Bruce Hays and Duncan & Britt Findlay, who help out at registration.
The Summer Sizzle Rally was initially written by Eric and Pat back in November 2019 and checked with John in February 2020, yet put on hold due to the Covid-19 outbreak that started in March 2020. Dusting off an old event has its difficulties, and this one was rewritten many times during 2019 and 2022 and originally had a different endpoint. Signs for questions disappear. Sometimes new ones appear. Street signs go missing, and roads become unusable over time. To that end, on Saturday, the day before the rally, Eric & Pat were doing their final rally check and discovered that the road department outside of Newton had decided to freshly oil and gravel a paved road. That required them to rewrite part of the original route on the fly and find new questions. Porsche Club events do not travel on unpaved roads. It usually takes at least 8 to 10 runs of the route to get everything right before turning over the event to the safety/pre-check crew, and there is a final run the day before the event to ensure nothing changes before going to print.
The idea for the rallymaster is not to make the questions too hard or too easy but just right. A few tiebreaker questions “break up the pack” as the rallies are part of a series. Since John V likes to keep the rally fun and family-friendly, NNJR’s events tend to be easier than other car clubs, and NNJR focuses on the food and social aspects. After all, where else can you get breakfast, lunch, and a fun rally with awards for only $60? The rally program, like all of the club’s social activities, is, to a small extent, subsidized by the club as a whole.
As a contestant, if you want to do well in the event, you must understand how the rally scores. You receive 25 points for each incorrect answer; for each mile your odometer varies from the official measurement, you get 100 points. So not only do you have to get all the questions correct, you have to drive the course “like the rallymaster.” We have an odometer correction leg, used to adjust your car’s odometer to the official mileage, but that only goes so far. It accounts for tire size and other factors but not driving style. My 968 is 7% off the statute mile, so without an Odometer leg/factor, I would be at a disadvantage to a team whose odometer reads closer to the official mileage. NNJR utilizes a GPS-driven unit that is “geared” to statute mileage. There are also specially built rally “computers” that have adjustable odometers that measure to the thousandth of a mile. Still, most people only put out the cash needed to purchase one of those if they are very serious about the sport. Since how you drive the odometer leg or write down your odometer reading at the 1st Checkpoint acts as a multiplier for overall mileage compared to the Rallymaster mileage (measured by a Garmin to the 100ths), it is crucial to get it right. Estimating your mileage to the 100th is useful.
Now to the questions on the Summer Sizzle. There were 22 questions, and as I said before, most of the teams got most of them correct. Here are some of the questions and their answers:
My favorite question of the event was Question #2. What Travel Company Guarantees to get you Back? The answer required a sense of humor and a quick eye. “Boomerang Travel.” 
Question #9 required you to read ahead in the rally instructions and ensure you knew what was coming up next. The question was, “Just like your Porsche, there is an underpass ahead that has ____________” the correct answer was Low Clearance. While the sign was a standard Yellow and Black road department sign, it was attached to the backside of the Stop sign, right at the beginning of the turn. So, it was easy to miss if you did not plan and know what question was next. Some people only read the question after executing a turn and can miss anything at or near the corner. 
Question #10 was a fill-in-the-blank question, “Double N _______________ Club”; the correct answer was Sportsmen’s. The answer was found on the bottom of the Shooting Preserve No Trespassing sign. 
Question #11 asked Who has the Fleurs-De-Lis? The answer was found on a sign up the driveway on a gate, just past the Sportsmen’s Club. It was Landgraf. 
Not all questions are hard to see or tricky; some just referenced things seen along the route. Question #19 asked Without this ___________ colored robe, I’d be “bear” naked. The answer was Red or Burgundy, which was found on a life-sized bear carving in front of someone’s driveway.
In looking at the Answer Grid, questions #9, #10, and #11 were missed the most. Each had one thing in common: they were hard to see or spot.
John went over everyone’s scores and awarded diecast Porsches as trophies to the winners in the Novice and Expert categories and small Porsche diecasts for the children that participated in the rally. We hope everyone had fun and enjoyed the great buffet at Nonno’s Italian Restaurant & Tavern in Sandyston in Sussex County.
Our next event will be on August 7th, the annual Run for the Stone Walls rally, which will end at The Inn at Glen Gardner. See you there!
