For the Team by RE Peter Bollenbecker, San Diego Region
All of us feel honored to receive this award from SCCA. We are grateful for the support of our membership and to all those that have come out to give road rally a try. Thanks for taking the chance with us! It’s been a tremendous amount of work, but we can officially look back to something positive that happened in the year that was … 2020.
We want to thank and individually recognize the members that made road rally happen – our RoadRally Committee. Jim Crittenden said it best in reply to our first rally, “If someone had asked me if it was possible for a person who has never competed in a Road Rally to write and organize a successful rally, I would have told them that was impossible. Yet you pulled it off beautifully.” (Note: Jim is being more than modest here and was actively involved in editing our first set of instructions.) That Committee consisted of precisely one volunteer (voluntold?) a year ago, Ric Senior, as our RoadRally Committee Chair. Before our second rally, the Committee had grown to ten, with six having volunteered from our first event. They dove in headfirst: designing the route, taking on the GPS mapping, writing course instructions, and running our second event. Those members include Tracey Kretch, Mike Kretch, Bob Rose, John Parine, Steve Pharr, Saulius Vabalas, Jeff Lonsdale, Diane Bollenbecker, and myself. Larry Scholnick and Jeanne English have also gone out of their way, literally coming down from Los Angeles, to fill the role of RoadRally Safety Steward and provide input on refining our courses.
A few months ago, we told the story here in Road Rally eNews about our journey into the sport of road rally. A goal of one rally in 2020 became a primary touchpoint for our membership with multiple events, and Rose Petals and Gas Pedals, our third rally, is coming up on February 13th. Yet another new course is already in the works following that! Rally has allowed us to engage in #funwithcars, while our predominately autocross focused region had to put those events on hold.
It is rewarding to create something from nothing. We received invaluable guidance and support from the SCCA road rally community when we had no idea what we were doing. That challenge was also invigorating, as we were not constrained in any way by the adage, “but we’ve always done it that way.” We asked ourselves how we could use all the latest tools, technology, and input from existing rallyists to make our events the best they could be, both now and when things return to “normal.” We learn new things as we strive to improve, and we make new connections and friends with every event.
We enjoy being part of this community and can’t wait until the first “after-event event” in 2021 when we can celebrate all together!
