What is a ‘Continental Road Rally”?

By Steve Bromfield

A rally is a kind of game with many competing teams each using a car to drive to various locales by following identical printed instruction sheets. The teams start the rally at one-minute intervals so that they don’t follow one another through the rally course. Each team must interpret the instruction sheet by rules (rules of the game). Also, the rally uses public roads of several towns and communities. The design of the game is a cross between a word puzzle (following the directions) and a keen test of each team’s observational skills. The rally being put on by the South Florida section of Mercedes-Benz Club of America asks the teams to find large things on the order of a church or a school. Exactly what will be disclosed on the day of the rally.

For those teams able to display superior navigational talents and strong observational skills, there are rewards in the way of prizes and trophies.

A more complete explanation of a rally follows:

A road rally is a type of game played on public roads in your private car. It requires a car, a driver and a navigator. On some rallies, such as ours, passengers are invited along to help. The game consists of several elements; primary and essential is reading your copy of the rally route instructions (indicating where to drive) and following them as best you can. The instructions infrequently refer to streets and roads by name, rather they indicate turns by wording such as “take your third left”; or “Make a right after passing a sign that reads “Joe’s barbershop”. Following the directions accurately is a bit tricky because the rally rules tell you to ignore private roads. You will be amazed how many private roads we have in Broward County. If following the directions were all that the driver and navigator had to do, it wouldn’t be too bad but added to the task of following directions is a second task; finding certain “things” that the rally master has asked you to locate as best you can.

That is the gist of it; here is the reason you might want to join us; the rally master has selected mostly back roads wherever possible to make road traffic a minor nuisance. Better yet, the rally course intentionally seeks out scenic and somewhat unknown locations to make the drive interesting. I would speculate that many of the participants in our rally will eventually go back to visit the ‘places of interest’ used in the rally with friends or family, they are that interesting.

So far, we have a rally course that travels over lesser-traveled roads that are scenic and of which the participants cannot predict where they will be going; it is a drive of discovery. The rally will pass or enter neat places. Another element of the rally is to find “things”. The things we have selected for this rally are big! Real BIG! But sometimes big things can be hard to find. This rally is looking for things the size of buildings or bigger. (Much bigger in most cases). As much as it sounds that would be easy, it isn’t so. Following directions and also looking for these “things” gets fairly tricky. The rally instructions ask the teams to write down certain types of “things” they find. I can’t tell you what those ‘things’ are; it would spoil the game. Points are assigned to finding those things that are actually on the rally course. At the end of the rally, we add up the scores for each entry and we award trophies and prizes to the highest scoring teams. I will mention that the harder to find a ‘thing’ is, the more points it is worth.

Since the rally runs over lunchtime, we will have sandwiches and beverages for the entrants plus there is a rest stop in the middle of the rally for sightseeing, picking up something to eat and any other necessities.

The flyer should spell out the time frame; driving the rally course without stops is one hour. But I believe everyone will want to spend fifteen minutes enjoying the picturesque spots where one can stop.

There shall be an instruction program prior to the beginning of the rally specially designed to help novice entrants in getting up to speed with reading the instructions. Additionally, the instruction sheet for the novices is most carefully annotated with explanations for the first quarter of the rally so that everyone catches on to the game. This will make the tricky parts of the rally a challenge as opposed to frustrating. There are also built in safety catches so that if a team gets off track, they can recognize the fact quickly and go back to pick up the rally course without wasting much time.

As a final safety net, we allow calls to the rally master for help with the directions, just in case someone does get frustrated. The rally was designed to need one and a half hours to drive with stops included. We have also included an extra half hour to one hour if some of the teams get off course. There is ample time to regroup.

Please come join us. I promise a fun afternoon.

Steve

Back to the rally flyer.