Alan Perry's Blog

Wednesday June 01, 2005

What's a stage and a transit and recce?

In my blog on the Rocky Mountain Rally, I presumed an understanding of stage rally that some folks might not have. I'll try and correct that here.

Stage rally (sometimes referred to as performance rally) consists of a series of timed runs on closed sections of road (called stages) connected by a series of untimed sections on open, public roads (called transits). On a stage, cars are started a minute apart and the driver drives as fast as he can against the clock (no wheels-to-wheel action, unless he is a minute faster or slower than the car ahead or behind him). On a transit, cars are going from one stage to the next and must obey all traffic laws (including the speed limit).

Cars are occupied by a crew of two people. The driver drives the car. The co-driver navigates and deals with time controls set-up throughout the rally.

In the US, most stages are held on unpaved roads, usually logging roads, forest service roads or desert roads. There is no practicing stages. When the driver is driving the stage, it is the first time that he has seen the road at speed, unless he has competed on the road before. The driver depends on his ability to read the road and process directions given to him by the co-driver. The co-driver reads directions to the driver from either a route book, stage notes or pace notes.

A route book contains instructions that describe the stage route in the form of pictograms (called tulips) and mileages for each instruction. Usually, only road hazards and junctions are included in a route book. Rallies that only distribute route books are sometimes called blind rallies.

Stage notes and pace notes are similar. Both include every turn, junction, surface change and road hazard on the stage. Stage notes are prepared by the rally organizers (or a third-party) and pace notes are prepared by the competitors. Competitors prepare pace notes by being allowed to pre-run the stages, subject to the normal speed limit of the road, through a process called recce. Few events in the US offer the opportunity to do recce.

The timing of a rally is tightly controlled. Teams are given a certain amount of time to travel the transits and must check in at time controls preceding each stage within a particular minute, based on when they checked in at the preceding time control.

The way that this works is that the crew starts the rally at an assigned initial time (let's say, 12:00). The rally starts with a transit to the first stage and the crews are allowed certain amount of time to travel that transit (let's say, 40 minutes). They must then check into the time control at the end of the transit (and the beginning of the first stage) on the correct minute, based on the time allowance (between 12:40:00 and 12:40:59 in the example). The crew then run the stage. At the end of the stage, they are given their actual finish time (e.g., 12:45:21). They drop the seconds portion of the finish time and add the time allowed for the transit to the next stage (e.g., 20 minutes). They must then check into the time control for the next stage on the correct minute (between 1:05:00 and 1:05:59 in the example). And they continue the day like this.

The rally is scored by adding the actual time to complete the stages as well as penalties for making a mistake, such as checking in for a time control too late or too early. The crew with the shortest time wins.

Hope this gives some sense about how the whole thing works.

Note: In case you are wondering when I am going to write something about the stuff that I work on (Firewire), it will be after I get comfortable writing for blogs so I don't say something stupid about something important!

( Jun 01 2005, 11:26:26 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]