Sunday 23 February 2020

How regular are you?

Even a 1927 Bentley needs the (permitted) electronic nav aids
A little glimpse into the esoterics of the ‘regularity’ might be helpful for non-rallyheads. Because the routes we take are public roads, even if only with the odd farm tractor, competitive stages aren’t ‘fastest time’ but rather involve maintaining a schedule of constantly varying average speeds, timed to the second at secret checkpoints. Not so hard on a highway but on the bucking, swirling gravel trail it means really pressing on, always of course (ahem) within the limits of safe driving. The nav uses the calibrated trip meter and stopwatch to feed the driver a stream of time/distance calls, adjusted for factors like corner cutting (sometimes essential to keep speed on up steep hairpins) and estimated degrees of wheelspin which has a significant impact on the trip meterage. Every second of error is one penalty point and getting a ‘bang on’, implying a less than 15 metre error at the end of a hustled 15 km stage on loose surfaces, is always worthy of a crew high five and probably a small beer or so at day’s end.

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