WI: Chippewa Trails National Tour Wrap-Up

The Chippewa Trail National Tour Rally, run on 15 May 2021, was my 2^nd National Tour of the year, just three weeks after the SCCA Steel Cities Region’s Laurel Run on 25 April. The next National Tour rally will be SCCA Milwaukee Region’s Roads Scamper National Tour in three weeks. There seems to be a welcome pattern here of many rallies in 2021, partially making up for their dearth last year due to the pandemic.

The biggest news of late is the advent of rally timing via GPS systems. They provide precise checkpoint arrival detection and the best available timing source that doesn’t require people to have to set clocks and mess that up to ruin the rally before it starts.

Timing for the Chippewa Trail was with the less popular but very capable MI-Rally GPS system. This system was unique in having hardware available that precluded needing to run an application in contestant’s phones and monitor them to detect their stoppage if something went wrong. There were two devices for each car, one that reported checkpoint arrivals via cell phone data and the other reporting via WIFI. The system was set up to read both the devices, and should there be a discrepancy, assign the best score between the two devices to each checkpoint entry.

The cell phone app for this system could still be downloaded, and if one did so, the display of time of day was very close to perfect. I couldn’t see a difference between my atomic watch and the time given by the app, and my atomic watch always steps in near-perfect synch with WWV and CHU. This is better than past years with any of the rally apps.   Technology progresses.

Further characteristics of the event were that the legs could be started at any time, whenever you got to a leg’s start, and the system would track it and report your scores correctly. The checkpoints were not marked on the route nor called out in the route instructions, which made for a “run on time all the time” rally where you had to be dead-nuts-zero “on time” at every competitive moment. Fortunately, out of over 200 miles of the rally, only about 87 miles were thus competitive. Other mileage was getting from one competitive section to another or taking breaks between competitive sections for comfort and telling rally lies.

Yet another unusual aspect of the rally was copy controls. Copy controls were contained in a particular leg marked as “Copy 1” and “Copy 2”, etc. You needed to note your time of passage at all points along the route on the first of two traverses of the leg and then duplicate that during a second traverse of the same leg. This style is commonly known as a “regularity run” in the US. Previous rallies that I have run with this feature allowed you to set your own speed the first time through, but this rally specified a CAST to follow. The job then was to note how early or late we were at specific points along the route and attempt to duplicate them the second time. We did OK.

Or not. We didn’t win, so “OK” may have been an exaggeration for any part of the rally. We’ll just say, “We didn’t get lost.” We got beat by about 13.9 seconds, even though we ran the rally with 49 zeroes out of the 206 controls, more zeroes than any other competitor. That’s pretty good. But the other variances for the controls that were not zeroed added up to a 3^rd Place score for us. GPS-timed rallies, most often, are timed to the 1/10^th second, as was this one, so a zero is accurate to the 1/10^thsecond. I even impress myself when thinking of this. We were pretty much dead-nuts on much of the time.

Otherwise, the other usual rally features, such as beautiful roads on lesser-traveled parts of the region, were a delight to experience, primarily what I come to rallies to enjoy. Pretty, pretty, pretty. Wisconsin is scenic, as was Pennsylvania three weeks ago, and we’ll be back in Wisconsin in three more weeks for the Roads Scamper National Tour Rally. It was all done with reasonable speeds not designed to scare either participants or the general public while providing some driver challenge with higher speeds on tighter roads occasionally.

Other new wrinkles available due to the GPS tech was the setting of speed limits within the rally. That was not possible in rallies that measured arrival at each of a limited number of checkpoints. With GPS reporting of positions, it was also possible to report speeds, with the rally prohibiting speeds over 68 mph and ten mph over the speed limit on the road you were driving. This should keep those who think to make up time physically, instead of simply taking a delay, think again. I’ve talked to some who, in the “good old days,” broke 140 mph while getting back on time. I never really enjoyed having to choose between driving like that or having to give away an advantage by choosing to take a penalty rather than significantly exceeding the speed limit to get back on time, so that GPS timing may have buried this mode of rallying forever. That’s a good thing.

A greatly simplified timing system requiring few workers with outstanding, beautiful roads and countryside, so who won? Bruce Gezon and Bob Morseburg won Class E, Satish Gopalkrishnan and Savera D’Sousa won Class L. No one entered class S.  Of the two classic entries, Ted and Teah Rurup in their 1979 Datsun 280ZX and Bob Nielsen and Tim Winker in their 1974 Triumph TR6, the Rurups finished with the lower score to take the award between the two old cars.

Rallying seems to be back, with everyone pretty much ignoring the virus, most having been jabbed and thus refusing to worry about it. Things will only get better if the vaccines continue to be distributed and be effective. The 2021 season appears to be on the way to a full schedule and fun enjoyment of rural roads around the nation.   

Below are the results as given by the MI-Rally software, which doesn’t call out the classes. There were three cars in E, Bruce Gezon and Bob Morseburg, Mike Thompson and Fred Rosevear, and us, Chuck Hanson and Dave Head. Everyone else was in class L due primarily to using GPS navigation.