INFINITE MONKEYS RALLY 2010

presented by the Toronto Autosport Club

Thank you to all the team members and volunteers who came out on Saturday to participate in the Infinite Monkeys.  It even seems that some of you actually found the route, which really is the whole idea.

It all started out a little inauspiciously, when I came out to the location where instructions would be handed out and found the first team already expecting their package.  Aren't they eager, I thought.  But no:  it turns out that my wristwatch was not set to official time, and I was actually about a minute and a half late myself.  Good grief, what an error for a navigator like me to make.  Fortunately the packages were going to be handed out 3 minutes before the cars' start times instead of the more usual 2, so they were not really TOO late.  By the time the cars reached the first checkpoint they were totally under control, as can be seen from the low score of Car 1 there.  

The next thing which shouldn't have happened was an error in the instructions in Section 2 tulips.  It showed a right at a traffic signal, with no distance.  The idea when that was written is that, there being only one traffic signal in the entire section, it could be deduced that you turn right at it wherever you came upon it.  The problem with this is that the tulip was drawn as a three way intersection, ie, a traffic signal at a junction right instead of a 4 way.  That would be fairly unusual for sure, but such intersections probably do occur.  Unfortunately this wasn't one of them.  So teams were arriving at the actual, 4 way traffic signal, and since it did not compare to the tulip, they did not turn right.  Most of the competitors did recover from this, either on the spot when they recognized they had no other traffic signal tulip, or later by using a Time Allowance at the next checkpoint.  I can hardly say how sorry I am about the teams who did not make it back to that checkpoint.  I know too well how frustrating it is when you are thrown off route by no fault of your own.  My humblest apologies to all.

Things progressed rapidly onwards from this section.  Nobody was really thrown off by the "fencing" section, or the "Roman numerals" section.  There was one little glitch when a few cars made it past checkpoint 7's location before the checkpoint was set up; hence we were unable to use the scores for Touring and Novice at that check.  The checkpoint was fully operational when the Intermediates and Experts came through, though, so they had to live with their numbers.  I guess the Experts had a little trouble learning about sword pronation and supination, because most of them had to use a Time Allowance here; but they found it nonetheless.  Just before the end of Section 3 there was a "do it yourself" checkpoint.  This is a fairly new concept in Ontario rallying, which has only been encountered a few times before this event.  Since new concepts are always exciting, we decided to give you one also.  Touring was told where the spot was, and all they needed to do was get a correct time to that location.  Novices and Intermediates were given the name of the road and the approximate distance to look for the marker.  Experts were only given information on which road to keep their eyes out for it.  All classes were given a very detailed description of the checkpoint location, including specific "911" house address numbers.  Somehow even with all this, there was one Expert team which failed to pick the correct spot, and thus, calculated an incorrect time to the DIY checkpoint!  I would feel bad about being amused, except that I can call it divine retribution for the difficulty I had with HIS DIY checkpoint at an earlier event this year; so there!  

Everyone came through Section 4 with no problems:  even the construction zone we had feared could cause a detour was wide open, and no rerouting was necessary.  At the end of Section 4 was a checkpoint, followed by a 12 minute pause for refueling or snacking.  It is extremely uncommon to have a checkpoint at an EOS (without it being an end of leg, which are handled differently).  However I did explain it all in the drivers' meeting at the start:  a 3 minute pause was in the instructions immediately before the checkpoint to allow for parking, and this checkpoint would not be watching for the in-times.  The in time would be the competitor's responsibility to hand in their card when they chose.  I guess in effect that made this one a DIY checkpoint as well, but with an attendant!  Everybody found the checkpoint, and understood the idea; although as you can see from the scores (CP10), not everybody did so well with their timing calculations!  At one point, the driver of Car 12 came near but was waiting for his desired time to hand in his card when his chief competitor, Car 8, came into view.  He hid his card in the hopes that he would not give away the "select your time in" concept, in case Car 8 had not caught on to it on their own!  While this was going on, yet a third driver arrived in the "hover zone" near the checkpoint vehicle, and suddenly they all handed in their cards on the same minute.  As one of them commented, chances are only one of them must be right -- and sure enough, Car 8 zeroed the control while the other two were 3 minutes early and 3 minutes late.  I never heard the story on that, but I assume that the number 3 had something to do with the pause before the checkpoint.  

Another unusual thing which we organizers did at this checkpoint was to hand out the next set of instructions at the card exchange.  This meant that crews had the full 12 minute pause to prepare for Section 5 and beyond, and many of them did so.  Unfortunately a few did not really think this through at the time (hey, why would I give them the packages with so much time?  Because they're going to need it!), and spent the break gulping some lunch instead. This proved the undoing of most of the Expert class, who ended up losing significant time at the next checkpoint.  I did hear afterward that Section 5 was many of the teams' 'favourite' instructions, as it was mine.  I guess we are all romantics at heart, eh?  Kuan Kung would be so proud.

From there the rally headed generally east, with straight lines for the Experts and Intermediates, and a Giant Tulip for Novice, followed by a section of Road Counting.  Experts received their packages with these sections out of order, and it wouldn't be a worthwhile exercise for the organizer if it didn't catch out at least one team; we were not disappointed, when Car 10 was caught by this ploy.  It is much harder to catch on to being in the wrong section with straight lines, since there is no distances to compare your intersections with there.  This probably cost that team a place or more in the results.  Ah, that's rallying.

The finish was another place where we threw in an unexpected challenge.  As always, teams calculate their ideal time in to the finish.  Usually this is based on an elapsed time which they are given.  In this case though, the time was not explicitly stated:  rather, they had to work it out based on counting the number of bicycles painted on a particular section of road.  Maybe that doesn't sound so hard now when reading this report, but it was strangely harder than it seems.  Even when laying out the event we had to count them 3 times to make sure, and the Green Crew had a similar difficulty.  So it is not surprising to see that more teams did NOT zero the finish than did; something you don't normally see in rally results.  And yet, 3 teams did indeed count the bicycles correctly to get a perfect score here, and as for the rest, it didn't seem to affect anyone's final placing.

So now we come to the results.  Touring Class was a very close race between our three teams, with only about 8 minutes separating the scores of the whole category.  In the end it was Car 6 in the lead, follwed by home team Car 1 (member of the Toronto Autosport Club) and Car 11 only 3.9 points apart.  

A good field of 7 Novice teams competed, and the top two were Car 3 in first place and Car 4 in second with only 1.4 points between them!  In third was Car 9, followed even closer by Car 13; and for the fifth place trophy was the appropriately numbered Car 5 who would definitely have been higher up the standings if they hadn't had to skip to the end of one section.  Cars 2 and 7 were unfortunately the ones most affected by that tulip error in Section 2; but after the break they did some fantastic rallying, even getting some checkpoints under 1 point.  Clearly this shows that in their next rallies they will be solid contenders when they do not have to overcome organizer mistakes.  I hang my head again.

In Intermediate, first place went to Car 8, who actually achieved six "zeros", while Car 12 zeroed a whopping 8 controls.  The non-zeros were their breaking point, though, and they had to settle for 2nd place.  In the Expert class, the winning Car 4 also zeroed 8 checkpoints and ended up with a score of 6.1 for the day.  To put that in perspective, it means that they drove about 250km over almost 5 hours and were within 6 minutes of perfect time for the whole day!  Second place Car 15 struggled with the DIY checkpoint and the busy work in Section 5, but still triumphed over TAC entry Car 10 after that out-of-order instruction trick kind of took them out of this competition.  car 5

The special prizes awarded at the Infinite Monkeys Rally have always attracted a lot of interest.  For this year's Unstoppable team, the monkeys go to Car 7 who encountered difficulty with the tulip error, but knew how to recover by using the End of Section map and info.  They arrived at the mid point with the positive attitude that they were going for fun and challenge rather than points!  They headed out into Section 5 with more than just a great attitude, as their skills showed with the most impressive score of a zero at CP10, and only 0.2 at CP12.  Unfortunately more trouble came to them in Section 7 and they finally gave up.  We hope that their Unstoppable monkeys encourage them to try again next time!  

The other special award is the Top Banana trophy.  This is awarded annually to whatever team impresses me the most, and this could be for their rallying ability, their general behaviour, or just about anything else.  This year, there were several contenders who deserved recognition, but only one team can be the Top Banana.  We gave serious thought to the team whose navigator learned the hard way that navigating is a job which often requires you to be drugged (on Gravol or Transderm, eg!), and yet worked on through the problem to finish in the trophy placings.  The crowd of experienced navigators were in awe of that competitor's toughness.  Then there was the team in car 13, who found the car had no working speedometer.  That would certainly make it difficult to drive anywhere close to the Average Speeds required!  I have no idea how they managed to keep as close as they did and finish 4th in their class, with even a few zeroed checkpoints.  Those guys must have a sixth sense for speed!  However, I think you can all agree that nobody could miss Car 11 and their zebra-striped paint job.  For purely esthetical reasons, they could have taken the Top Banana competition; but add to that the African association of zebra-to-monkey, and their scores which included a zero, two 0.1's, and a total of nine checkpoints with scores under a minute (not bad for a beginner!), it was Car 11 which was selected as Top Banana for 2010.  Rumour has it you may see them at Targa Newfoundland soon, so watch for them there!

I can't conclude without giving credit to our wonderful volunteers who came out to man all the checkpoints.  It was a pretty spread-out route, and we covered a lot of distance, so the need for workers was high.  You guys came through for us however, and because of these fantastic people we were able to hold this rally.  Our most sincere and deepest thanks go to Adam D, Dave L, Mike M, Doug H, Nick, Ingrid, Heidi, and Tim B, Rob and Janet J, Tim L, Fred W and Jane.  Thanks also to our Green Crew, Alan and Carolyn R; the RSO technical guru, Rober R, who checked the instructions for difficulty; and the RallySport Ontario Steward, Paul H, who also manned a checkpoint near the far reaches of the route.  

A big thanks too to the establishments who allowed us space for the start and finish locations.  Everyone loved the food and friendly service we were treated with at both the Tim Hortons' on College Manor, and The Big Catch (best fish & chips in York Region!).  

Here are the results from the event on Saturday, Aug 14.  The standings for the Ontario Road Rally Cup will include these results for Novice, Intermediate, and Expert classes, as well as the Club Championship competition.  Check out the other events in the series at the RallySport Ontario website.  The next event is the President's Prize Rally, held in the Peterborough area on Oct 23 this year.  

Thanks to Tim Laye for the photographs.  If you care to see the results for previous Infinite Monkeys events:  click for 2009 IMR; 2008 IMR;  2007 IMR.  By about April 2011, there will be a site for the 2011 IMR.  See you next year!

Results:  An "e" refers to penalty for being early at the checkpoint.  "20M" means the maximum score of 20 points, for missing a checkpoint.  A score in red indicates a checkpoint at which a Time Allowance was requested.  "TA Pen" is the penalty, in accordance with RallySport Ontario rules, of 0.5 minutes for each TA after the first one.  
Car # Class Driver Club Navigator Nav Club CP1 CP2 CP3 CP4 CP5 CP6 CP7 CP8 CP9 DIY CP10 CP11 CP12 CP13 CP14 CP15 FIN TA Pen TOTAL POS
6 T Evan Simons - Martin Simons - 2.2 0.9e 1.7 0.1 2.0 1.1 0 0.3 1e 2e 2.1 1.0e 0.6e 0.3 0.5 2.0 0 17.8 1st
1 T Steve Antunes - Ross Leonard-McCaffery TAC 0.3 4.6 0.7 1.2e 0.7e 0.2 0 0.3 0 6 1.0 0 0.6 2.2 1.8 2.0 0 21.6 2nd
11 T Laura Stover KWRC Chris Ricci KWRC 2.9e 14.7 0.7 0.1e 0.3 0 0 0.2e 1e 2e 1.2 0.5 0.1 0.3 0.3 2.0e 0 26.3 3rd
3 N Kyle Power SPDA Yvgeniy Gospodinov MLRC 0.3e 0.3 0.2 0 0.5 0.1 0 0.4 0 1e 0.1 0.2 0.3 1.4 0.3 1.0e 0 6.1 1st
4 N Tim Burgess SPDA Perry Ford SPDA 0 1.7 0.7e 0.1e 0 0 0 0.1 1 2e 0.2 0.1 0.1e 0.5 0 1.0 0 7.5 2nd
9 N Peter Brownhill MCO Gary Corbett MCO 0 1.1 0.1e 0.2e 0.3e 0.2 0 0 0 2 8.3 0 0.1e 4.4 0.6e 5.0 0 22.3 3rd
13 N Taras Magun MLRC Vitali Mossounov MLRC 0.3 7.2e 0.8 0.2e 0.1 0.8 0 0.2e 4 0 2.2 0.3 1.5 0.9 2.4e 3.0e 0 23.9 4th
5 N Scott Justason - Dawn Ashforth - 0.2 17.3 0.5 0 0.8e 0.1 0 0.1 1 1 10.7 20M 20M 20M 5.4 0 0.5 97.6 5th
2 N James Whyte - David Gritt - 5.3e 20M 20M 20M 20M 20M 0 1.0 1 6 0.9 0.7 2.1 3.8 1.4 6.0 0 128.2 6th
7 N Colin McGlone - Daniel McGinnis - 1.3 20M 20M 20M 20M 20M 0 20M 20M 0 1.5 0.2 1.0 20M 20M 0 0 184 7th
8 I Trevor Hancher SPDA Ted Doig SPDA 0 0.5e 0.1 0 0.1e 0.1 0 0.1 0 0 0.1 0.1 0.1e 0.5 0 1.0 0 2.7 1st
12 I Stephen Deneka SPDA Opal Gamble SPDA 0 0.1 0 0 0.1 0 0.1 0.9 0 3 0.3 0 1.3 0 0 1.0 0.5 7.3 2nd
14 E Jane Leonard MLRC Bruce Leonard MLRC 0 0.1 0 0 0.2e 0.2 0 0 0 3e 0 0.1 0.1 0.4 0 1.0 1.0 6.1 1st
15 E Roger Sanderson KWRC Dennis Wharton KWRC 0.1 3.1 2.8 0.2 0.7e 0 1.3 0 20M 7 10.6 0.3 0.2e 0.4 0.5e 0 0.5 47.7 2nd
10 E Andrew Kinal TAC Dietmar Seelenmayer TAC 0.6 1.1 1.1 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.2 0 1e 9.7 0.2e 20M 20M 9.5 1.0 1.0 66.4 3rd

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