I promised the detailed accounting of this year's Starlite Rallye, and
here it is.

Because of the overnight nature of this event, I have always found it
advantageous to make an effort to shift my internal clock towards a
nocturnal behavior pattern a day ahead, so Dave and I took off a little
after midnight Thursday for the drive south.

Most hotels these days are very insistent about their noon check out times,
we chose to go for a bargain motel up the road in Santa Maria, and just
booked ourselves 2 nights. This tactic allowed us to arrive at like 5AM, put
up a "do not disturb" sign and sleep well past 2 on Friday afternoon in
preparation for the overnight expedition Friday night.

This plan worked very well, although the motel was a little on the seedy
side, we managed to land a decent few hours sleep before heading out Friday
afternoon.

Being the equipment coordinator for TRC (The Rallye Club of silicon valley)
I had to meet my fellow team members at the local Sizzler (kind of a TRC
tradition) before the start, to hand out clocks and stuff.

Dave and I got there after most of the rest of the team had arrived and
proceeded to eat all we could.

Then we were off to the registration. At 6:30 registration opened and the
route instructions started being given out, we got ours and went to work
figuring out where we had to go.

I had Dave just see if he could find the map locations on a state map and
from that, connect the dots to figure out where we'd be going. While
he worked on that, I entered the official true times for each leg into my
little spreadsheet for timing and scoring. This generates a list of times
when a 15 minute countdown timer can be activated to go off when we reach
the true time, this allows Dave to just read numbers off the clock as we
roll through the checkpoints.

Frankly I was a little disappointed, the last two years had taken us some
interesting places, Death Valley and London Bridge amongst them, but this
year the course was comparatively mundane.

From Santa Barbara, we'd head over to Carpenteria then up to Ojai,
over to Gorman, across the northern edge and foothills of the San Bernardino
range out to Victorville. Then along I-15 up through the mojave with a side
trip down towards Cima before heading into Nevada and straight into Las
Vegas.

The total run time was only to be 12 hours and 45 minutes. But the Expert
class has to report to some 16 checkpoints and a pair of course controls in
that time, while we novices started out trying to hit 10 timed checkpoints
and our own two course controls, along with a breakfast break re-start just
before dawn.

Since all these experts only checkpoints left a lot of blank entries in my
spreadsheet, I stupidly cleared those rows only to find that in doing so,
I'd upset the calculation fields and screwed everything up.

Dave spotted the errors as soon as I printed it up, so I went back to the
template and started over, everything made much better sense at that point.

Our start time was 8:37 so once we had our route and timing sorted out, we
had a while to hang out and wait, but as the time drew near the adrenaline
started going and we prepared to embark on our journey.

Our start went smoothly, the first leg time was nearly 2 hours so we had
quite a lot of time to get out there.

Novices were to skip the actual checkpoint labeled 1 as that was an experts
only checkpoint. In fact we were specifically directed not to go down a
certain road where that checkpoint would be, so we were off to arrive at the
Standoff for 2. As we went up into the mountains north of Ojai, we noticed
it getting much colder and suddenly there seemed to be snow on the edge of
the road.

About 12 miles before the expected standoff location we came across a few
cars by the side of the road with a standoff sign there in the snow, so we
pulled over and checked in.

The standoff worker handed us a slip with the location of the inmarker
explicitly described to within a mile and told us to take our time, "they
won't be scoring this leg, it's very icy, but if you keep your
speed down around 25 everybody should be OK".

So we tried to head back out but found ourselves spinning hopelessly just in
the thin layer of ice coating the shoulder where we pulled off.

With a push we got back on the road, but now we realized it was indeed VERY
slippery and caution was seriously in order.

So we were leading a group of about 4-5 cars out of the standoff, I'm
trying to stick to the advised 25 mph, but with everybody behind me I might
have drifted to a bit closer to 30-35 at times, but the car was feeling
pretty solid until...

There was this kind of short radius right hander, with sort of an off-camber
transition into a gentle left turn going downhill, initiating the left
seemed OK. Then all of a sudden into the left turn, the track didn't
correct to the curve, rather the car broke loose at all 4 contact patches
with the ice and began spinning.

The first time around was pretty exciting, obviously, ABS wasn't any
use as there wasn't any traction at all, even without the brakes.

Luckily, the car more or less seemed to be staying centered on the road, but
we could see there was very little between us and the exposed side of the
mountain on what was our left side.

The second rotation seemed to go just as fast as the first, maybe even a bit
faster with still nothing looking like it would keep us from launching down
the side into a snowy oblivion.

Then completing the second 360, the front end tagged the snow bank on the
left side of the road and we could see a nice big rock that was going to
come between the chasm and us.

So we breathed a sigh of relief, as the 635 did one last half spin and stuck
its butt in the snowbank facing the direction we didn't want to go (at
least we were pointed the right direction for the lane we needed to get
"unstuck" into)

The snow was thick enough to keep us from needing our big rock and spared us
any serious body damage.

The car behind us slowed enough to ask if we were all right, and we watched
the rest of the immediate field behind us drive by, pretty much figuring
that we'd dashed my hope for a trophy on my last chance to run in the
Novice class.

I went around to the trunk and pulled out a pack of flares while Dave
checked out our situation. In a minute or two I had 3 flares set up hill
from us and we began the arduous and somewhat stinky job of getting an open
diff RWD car out of a polished ice lined ditch. With Dave pushing uphill
from the rear, we managed to get it pretty much up and out, then underwent a
freaky, half-sliding 3-point turn to get ourselves headed the way we wanted
to be going, figuring we'd lost somewhere between 8 and 10 minutes in
the ordeal.

And away we went, REAL slow this time, until in about 7 more miles we got
out of the icy stuff and could try to make up some of our lost time.

On the way down out of the mountains, we noticed a yellow Toyota MR-2
heading the other way which seemed odd as they were thought to be one of the
more experienced teams.

At the checkpoint we were given a slip with an out time of 10:34 which would
have been 2 minutes late had that leg been timed, so there was a pretty good
chance of us getting back in the game.

Standoff 3 found us on the Gorman Post Road just off the highway in the town
of Gorman. The inmarker light was straight ahead from our perspective and it
was stated as being on LA COUNTY HWY N2.

Unfortunately, LA COUNTY HWY N2 is a twisty little bugger that goes up and
down over hills and through valleys -all in the general direction, so we
headed out not really knowing when we'd come across it, but with
plenty of time - or so we thought.

It turned out to be a long ways down that N2 to IN3. When we finally got to
the inmarker we were pretty close to our in time. We had to pass a few cars
that had arrived early and were creeping in, to nail the timing line a mere
2/100 minute early, not bad for having stuffed it in the ditch en route!

That bolstered our spirits significantly, although Dave was upset that we
hadn't zero'd it which was totally my fault.

Next we had to run up in the mountains a bit more to find a "T" sticker on
the back of a stop sign (our course control) then drove into Palmdale for
our scheduled fuel break.

Legs Four and Five were both Expert only so our next objective was
CP's 6 and 7 which shared a single standoff location. There were two
flashing lights and the Standoff crew person told us which was which.

Without even looking at a compass, Dave deduced where the lights were and
what route would take us to them, I got kind of upset at his dead reckoning
approach and dragged us through the little compass map exercise only to
prove him right.

The deal with 6 is that it would be timed to the 1000th for tie-breaking
purposes, but they would be looking for the center of the hundredth, so for
a true time of 49.65, a perfect time would be 49.655 minutes. We managed
49.649- they were truncating, not rounding, so we scored one point on that
one. For leg 7 we overcompensated and came in 1/100 late.

In another adventurous twist, one of the locals in this neighborhood got
upset with the noise of 60 cars driving through their rural setting at 2 AM
and decided to express themselves with firearms.

Rather than donning the kevlar vests, the checkpoint crew closed the
checkpoint and fled, so leg 7 got dropped from scoring as well.

Leg 8 was for Experts, so we set off for Standoff 9. This time, I'd
swear there was some kind of magnetic anomaly or aberration in the
earth's fields at this standoff. My compass bearing was some 10
degrees off from Dave's reckoning, and this time he could back it with
a reasoned explanation, so we set out on a course he found through a
residential neighborhood and cruised in for our first zero! (Sadly, it was
to be our last as well.)

Leg Eleven included a side trip out towards the ghost town of Calico for
another course control. This time on a stop sign at the "Yermo Cutoff Road"
As we drove out towards this the only sign we saw pointed to a road and said
"Ft Irwin", but then we headed out around a turn and found ourselves driving
away from where we expected the course control.

We came across another rally car stopped with it's occupants studying
the back of a stop sign, but it bore no resemblance to the location
described for ours. Going back, we noted the road to Ft. Irwin is in fact
the Yermo Cutoff Road and there was our "X".

Then we needed to head out in a maze in the middle of the Mojave Valley for
Standoff 11, where we would see which of the two highways frontage road had
the inmarker. It seemed a long ways out so I rushed it a bit, even up to the
line (which had dual hoses to penalize anyone traveling less than 20mph as
they cross the line) - and we scored another 2- early.

We were given over an hour to grab breakfast and regroup in Baker, just as
we headed out, the eastern sky started to glow and as we drove out to the
standoff we were greeted by a beautiful desert sunrise.

Once again, I overcompensated in trying to correct our recent timing errors
and we rolled leg 12 a full 2 hundredths late.

Leg 13 was for experts, and appeared to be on the infamous Power Line Road
(which can be found referred to in historical articles on the SBSCC web
page).

Leg 14 had the added constraint that you were not allowed to travel less
than 30 mph within sight of the inmarker, so we estimated the distance
we'd have to travel and waited until we'd expect to need to
average about 30. This tactic allowed us to score another 2, this time too
late again, but not bad considering the technical nature of the checkpoint.

Leg 15 was again for experts, so we headed towards the ever-expanding
outlying reaches of Las Vegas for the final leg #16 entitled
"Mayberry's favorite son".

The more clever amongst us spotted a road in the area named Pyle and figured
that this must be the in marker road ("Gomer Pyle"- Mayberry's
favorite; get it?).

Indeed that was the level of clue that the rallymaster could be expected to
throw out there, so it was another pretty easy one, despite all of our
clocks indicating that we were right on time, we scored one last 2,
supposedly too early.

So we went to check in with a score of 12 on 9 legs, not great, but in the
Novice class it could still be in contention for the trophy.

Dave and I both crashed out pretty during the day Saturday- pretty much out
cold until awards dinner time.

When we got to the dinner, our car number was happily absent from the
penalty assessment sheets, and we learned that legs 3 and 7 were thrown
along with 2, so we were now seriously in the running with a total official
score of 9.

We also learned that the yellow MR-2 had gotten stuck back up in the
mountains, had a CalTrans snowplow come down and smack into them, only then
to have a second snowplow- following behind the first one pile into the both
of them! Fortunately no one was seriously injured, but the road had to be
closed and a few of the last cars just couldn't make up the lost time.

Once all the warm up rally awards were awarded (I got second place novice on
that one) and silly prizes were handed out (the checkpoint captain for leg 7
was given a bag of "Jolly Rancher" candies and a copy of the "Shotgun
News"), our Team - TRC, was awarded the best team score plaque for an
average amongst our top 5 finishers of only 5.3 points.

When the runners up in Novice were announced (only 1st place gets a trophy
in Novice) we knew we had it clinched, our score of 9 was good for a couple
of big ol' honkin' trophies- (I'm gonna need to build a
trophy rack!)

Next year we will be forced to run in the Regular class where 3 way ties
with only 1 or 2 points for trophies aren't unheard of, so it's
probably going to be a while before you hear about us winning another
Starlite trophy.

But in February we're responding to the call of the wild North Country
as we embark on the granddaddy of American endurance rallies, the Alcan 5000
winter rally, some 4500 miles over 8 days.

No doubt some wild tales will come out of that one.



















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