The Porsche Club of America’s Northern New Jersey Region held its 2022 Welcome to the Club Question and Answer “Gimmick”‘ Road Rally on Sunday, May 15th.
For those who do not know, the Welcome to the Club is a dual event; the day starts as a Concours/Car Show and finishes with a 2-hour rally ending with a free buffet at the Long Valley Brew Pub. A great day of seeing friends and cars and a scenic drive on paved back country roads.
In addition to having “fun with cars,” the event was a fundraiser for Cheshire Home (cheshirehome.org).
Believe it or not, planning for the event started back in December, confirming the start location (Madison High School) and the ending place, which would accommodate parking for 60+ cars. The next step is to lay out the rally route and ensure that the roads are all “Porsche friendly,”‘ meaning no unpaved or potholed-filled roads. The focus is to provide our members with a great drive. For those that want a little more adventure, we have the Pine Barren “Off-Road” Excursion in the fall that features the sand trails of southern New Jersey.
After starting and ending locations and the roads are selected, next comes the fun part. It is finding some fun/tricky and interesting questions along the route to “test” the observation skills and sense of humor of those that want to challenge themselves competing against fellow Porsche owners.
The idea for the Rallymaster is not to make the questions too hard or too easy but just right.
Since the route instructions are designed to ensure everyone stays on course and is kept from getting lost, the focus is to ensure you get most, if not all, of the questions correct. Each incorrect question is penalized by awarding 25 points, and each mile driven off-course is worth 100 points, low score wins. The rally has an “odometer correction” leg, so the scoring program will adjust your car’s mileage to the Rallymaster’s official mileage. Mileage is a “tie-breaker,” but as you can see by the point structure, going off-course or doubling back to find an answer to a missed question can quickly add up the mileage penalty points. The idea is to take your time and read ahead to catch everything and stay focused on the scenery and the fun roads you are driving.
A good mileage score is anything under a 2/10th of a mile; it is tough to do any better since everyone’s driving style is different. If you look at this event’s scores, you will see only about a dozen teams had a mileage score under 2/10th of a mile, and only five cars were in single digits. One team was only 1.1 hundreds of a mile off the official mileage, which was a “perfect score.” Having a 100th or 1000th reading does odometer help because it removes any human errors with reading your car’s stock odometer. New vehicles have digital trip odometers, which “click” over to the next tenth and do not roll over, making it harder to estimate the 100th of a mile. Older Porsche odometers only read to the full mile, which is a distinct disadvantage.
In answering the questions, getting them all right to a perfect score, and depending on who you are competing against, getting one or two wrong will generally get you a trophy, as long as your mileage points do not kick you out of the winner’s circle.
Looking at the Question Grid, you can see that a couple of the questions were hard to spot (Questions 18 and 19) or near impossible (Question 11).
The most straightforward question was question 7, “______ XING.” The rally passed two very large “SWAN XING” signs while traveling on Lloyd Rd in Bernardsville Township. For some reason, two teams got that wrong. 
Question 11 asked A SWEET PLACE TO PLAY? While no one competing in the event got this question correct. The pre-check crew (Eric and Pat Sjogren) did. Driving at the posted speed limit, it was only visible for about 1 second. But finding it was doable if you looked just at the right time or knew enough to check out the driveway/walkway entrances along that section of the route. There were two very large gate pillars about 5 feet tall with the words “HONEYFIELD” engraved at the top of each pillar. 
Question 18 asked HOW FAR AWAY IS THE BRIDGE? We even told you the answer would be found on a sign. The tricky part was that the answer to the question was immediately after executing the prior route instruction, so reading ahead was very important. Hence, you know what is coming up and do not drive past the answer because you must look for it at the right time. The answer was “1 1/10 Mile.” Only five cars got that question correct. 
Question 19, was also tricky. The question was, HOW MANY ADIRONDACK CHAIRS @ #37 WATER ST? The obvious answer was two because two chairs were on a sign attached to the Mail Box. The correct official answer was four because, in addition to the two on the sign, there were two more by the stream in the front yard. We accepted any answer greater than the two because some contestants spotted more chairs about 200 feet away from the road, up by the house around a fire pit, which both the Rallymasters and the Pre-Check crews missed when creating the rally. Jeff and Margie McFadyen, noted the extra chairs on their score sheet, which resulted in the scoring crew adjusting the official answer. Only six cars got that question correct.
Thank you to John Vogt, Hurbert King, and Kevin Fizsimmons for organizing the event. Eric and Pat Sjogren for pre-checking the route and assisting with scoring, and my wife, Joanne Schneider, for helping write the rally and the umpteen times driving the route with me to ensure all the signs were still there, the roads were still open and assisting with scoring Sunday afternoon.
We hope everyone enjoyed the event, and we appreciate the Club’s generosity in providing breakfast and lunch, so 100% of the entry fee for the event went directly to Cheshire Home.
Our next rally is the Summer Sizzle, which will start at High Marques in Morristown on July 17th. See you there!
Here are the standings for the Welcome to the Club Rally:
