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Ken Meese answers the call to duty
Last year as we were closing up shop on the 2009 LowCal 250 Rally I got a chance to chat with first place finisher Ken Meese. He had really enjoyed the day,
and went out of the way to thank the staff and volunteers, saying something to the effect of, “The rest of us can’t play if no puts in the effort to put these games together.” Ken and I first met at George Zelenz’s
“Up-Chuck
1000”. It was great to have Ken come down and we promised to get together later in the year to… well…’ talk rallying’ of course. Ken ended up getting a bit busy tallying up one rally win after another
(Spank Rally, Cal24,Utah1088) and subsequently received a special entry offered to him for the 2009 Iron Butt
Rally. After the dust settled on his top-ten win in that rally, I had an idea that was a little better than just getting together to ‘talk shop’.
By Summer I had the 2010 LowCal Rally formulated and I realized I could really use an extra hand this year from the rally community. The
planned ‘mileage cap’ would require a formal odometer course and I knew that would spread me pretty thin in the morning with my other volunteers. I asked Ken if he would consider being the Rallymaster for 2010. As it turned out, it wasn’t just Ken taking over the top job in the morning that helped; his experience in scoring had a substantial impact on our efficiency in the afternoon.
Rally Routing 101
After observing simple mistakes and oversights riders committed in our rally in previous years, I wrote up a tutorial for basic routing strategies. Nothing fancy. Nothing software or equipment specific. Not a “How to Win” technique, but rather a set of guidelines and ideas to increase the odds of a “Strong Finish”. My goal was to get people ultimately focused on the safety and enjoyment of rallying. I presented the course materials to Gary Orr of San Diego BMW Motorcycles and he suggested we do a live class sometime before the rally. I thought sure... it would be worth having a small workshop style class. I was astonished that we had over 25 attendees the first night, and 5 more participated in an encore lecture the following afternoon, and another 15 were on the list to receive theRally Routing 101
course material by email (I’ll never forget, Doug Barrett dubbed the Saturday lecture the “no child left behind” class, since we added it to accommodate out-of-towners who couldn’t make it in Friday evening). The following night Ken Meese gave his 2009 Iron Butt Rally presentation at the shop, which was likewise very well attended.
The Mileage Cap
We distributed GPS coordinates to riders in 2010 a week ahead of the rally, however riders were warned:
"Consider access to the files a 'thanks' for pre-registering for the rally. Hopefully they will save you some time the morning of the rally if you have this data preloaded. Though it certainly won't hurt to get familiar with the waypoints, I would not obsess about them too much... as some are decoys... and you do not know what they are worth or in what combination they must be obtained. It is not my intent that they keep you up all night trying to figure out any hidden
puzzle."
One of the reasons for the ‘decoys’, was to de-emphasize the
high proportion of bonii located in the municipality of San Diego. The mileage cap was a twist
that riders would only learn about on the morning of the rally. The mileage cap had a very specific purpose, but a side-effect was that it allowed us to showcase more locations in congested areas, where riders would not be under as great of time constraints as in a normal time-limited rally.
So what diabolical purpose was there in having a mileage cap? In the Rally Routing 101 class I went through several illustrations of how planning and stop management had a far greater impact on rally performance than simply twisting the throttle to let speed cover your mistakes. If I was wrong, then the mileage cap would change the distribution curve for the 'total points' of the top finishers, If I was right, the distribution of scores would be unaffected. But in order to ensure that routing skills would be critical, the layout of the rally had to ensure at least 12 core base route possibilities existed within 2% of the 250 mile limit. In
other words there had to be many possible ways to get a good route
without exceeding the mileage limit.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Please start your Rally Packets!
The decoy bonii in the GPS files that were missing from the rally packet probably had a bigger initial impact on riders than the mileage cap did. Several
accidentally used a decoy location near Mecca to calculate the feasibility of reaching the sucker bonus in Vidal. Ah, sucker bonuses… where dreams and math
collide. Once they plugged in the correct location, there
initial euphoria subsided and it turned out no one made the attempt.
 For a good synopsis of the day, please
check out the lead article about the 2010 LowCal
250 Rally in the latest addition of Riders Review!
Thanks to Heather Phillips and Cal Morlon for squeezing us in this year
under a tight deadline!
So what then is the untold story? Well it's really not that ominous, but some details were left out of the
Riders Review article to keep it brief enough for public consumption. The first fun and games came when one of our riders came in from the odometer check admitting right away he need to redo the course, "When I made the exit for I-15 South, my GPS took me back to my
hotel".
Was it true that even with the 250 mile cap a rider ran out of fuel? I never verified that exactly, but one disheveled rally packet had
"G A S" written in large letters on the back of one of the pages. It did appear from
that rider's timeline that they had a long period of little or no progress.
How did 'team scooter' come back scoring higher than nine motorcycles? The scooter was a great story.
A local college geography student took great interest in the rally this year, envisioning it like it was a version of television's 'The Great Race'. Knowing ahead that the mileage cap would give the scooter plenty to chase within 100 miles, I gave
approval for the entry without fanfare. I knew the scooter would not come in last. Why? Typically you get a sample of missteps and errors that account for
the lower scores. Also a number of riders might just come out to take a look at things they haven't seen
before (and not ride as competitively), not to mention the inevitable DNF
status ('Did Not Finish' status). The couple on the scooter basically scooped up every bonus within the City of San Diego. This year those bonii were the most efficient. If you didn't scoop up some of those you missed the game. The scooter went only 86 miles and had a respectable base score. The funniest part is... they went home twice to check in on their dog during the rally!
So
what was my conclusion of the mileage cap then? I am happy to report
that the statistical distribution of scores was no different than our
previous years. It really put an emphasis on route execution, and
rewarded the riders that really kept their missteps to a minimum. I loved the mileage cap for what it
illustrated and I would do it every year if I could... but it would never have the same effect.
Also, it took a lot of extra coordination to manage a formal odometer check and make it fit within an 8-hour rally. It was fun, but I would have to predict it won't happen
again, at least not as it was presented this year.
I'm not sure if it was the mileage cap or the rally class, but one pleasant outcome of the 2010 LowCal 250 was that we got everyone back safe and sound in record time. All 42 starting riders finished! How can we accomplish that again? We'll be looking at that closely and doing our best to repeat that every year!
The
Top Finishers - a detailed look |
