The two Mike’s took home some hardware! We not only finished the 600-mile Nor’wester Auto Rally, sanctioned by the Rainier Auto Sports Club, but we were also 2nd in SOP (Seat of the Pants) class. Okay, to be fair, only three entered as SOP, but getting a participation trophy wasn’t the real story. We messed up badly on Day 1 by not understanding the checkpoint system vs. how Mike Nagle ran this event in previous years. It used to be that your time was essentially “zeroed” between checkpoints, so you’d just try and maintain pace and not makeup or drop time.
Well, this event all-time between checkpoints was cumulative. So if you were 11 seconds too fast on the first checkpoint but then maintained perfect pace by the second checkpoint, you were still 11 too fast again and accumulated 22 points! You would need to slow down below the marked average pace to get to a zero at that next checkpoint. So not knowing that we had a whopping 350.1 score on Day 1, our more experienced rival in the lead scored just 173.1. Day 2, after learning our mistake, we did a whole lot better with a score of 156.1, and just 6.1 points off the class leader for the day! Additionally, we scored three different 0.0 checkpoints with no aids.
How hard is it to get a zero checkpoint? The only ones to score more zeros were in the “Equipped” or “Unlimited” classes, where they have fancy add-on-trip computers to aid in maintaining their pace. By comparison, Mike and I didn’t know if we were on pace until the first checkpoint rang in on the app! So many great stories and experiences. Thank you to the organizers and Mike Nagle for roping me into this, and I will have to do more in the future.
Here are the standings —
