INNOVATIONS ON THE CLOVERLEAF – by Nigel Raeburn

A late addition to the KDMC Road Rally Championship, the Cloverleaf Rally around the Cambridge area was also a new event for the HRCR Clubmans Championship. A well-run promotional campaign and website attracted a fairly good entry to this West Essex CC daytime historic road rally, similar in format to our Tour of Cheshire. The two key organisers were driver Paul Hernaman and especially navigator Ray Crowther who won the ToC earlier this year and are the reigning HRCR Clubmans Champions, and they had to some extent modelled their rally on ours, but also applied a lot of original thought and brought in some interesting innovations, some of which worked and some didn’t.

They had driver-only and navigator-only regularity sections with common start and finish controls. LeJog has run driver-only regularities before, but navigator-only regularities (Ray called them ‘Pegularities’ and the driver-only were called ‘Insularity’) are new and were good fun. The penalties were capped so the results were not affected too much, although actually they were so close that they became significant. There were two of each in the day, all at the start/finish conference centre venue. Both drivers in their cars and navigators on foot set off at the same time after a countdown at the start control. The navigators had to walk a route of about 0.3 miles with Tulip diagrams to guide them around the footpaths of the estate (including things like circuits round trees!) and had to average 2.7 mph and 2.6 mph on the two regularities respectively – following the Tulips until they arrived at the IRTC control where timing stopped when the navigator touched to control board. Meanwhile the drivers were driving a Gosularity-type test (test diagrams to follow and average speed to try to keep) over a road route between the same start and IRTC/finish controls. Beforehand a calibration route was set up with ideal times provided in a table so that navigators could practice their strides and speeds – which kept many amused for hours! Now I wonder if we could do something like this on the ToC! Ray Crowther runs summer parties at his home where the entertainment is everyone tackling a series of Pegularities around paths in the vicinity! His websites contain more information on this – and he is also the king of Internet Table-Top Rallying – Steve Skepper has tried some of these.

The results automatically deleted each crews’ two worst regularity times over the day. The idea behind this is to eliminate any penalties caused by unfortunate baulking, tractors, sheep etc which are an unavoidable hazard of regularity events – and also to take the pressure out of these incidents as the crew know it will not ruin their whole event. The problem of course is that real errors by a crew (wrong slot, timing calculation error, breakdown etc) also get deleted which does not seem fair to all those who get it right! A good idea with genuine pros and cons.

Absolutely no plotting was required as the entire route was given by marked map handouts with the entire route shown – not just the controls but the route and nearly all the speed changes too. In fact maps were not essential although I did refer to mine a couple of times when the photocopies were not quite clear enough in intricate areas.

There were a great many average speed changes – probably more than any event I can recall – and they included having to change average speed through every signed speed limit until the de-restriction sign. There were a lot of these and you had to average 15 mph in a 30 mph limit, 20 mph in a 40 mph and so on. Getting a single figure (seconds) penalty at an IRTC was a good result!

An experiment was conducted asking crews, on Transport Sections, to phone in or text the times on their Time Cards to the results team. Only a few crews found time or inclination to try this (I tried texting one and getting the correct format took so long we had ended the Transport before I finished) so I think it will be regarded as a failed experiment – but worth a try. The first time mobile phones have been encouraged during an event – they are usually banned!

There were quite a few tests at an airfield with the unusual feature of a simultaneous Regularity running multiple laps round the perimeter track outside the test areas within. This worked well. Less well received was a gimmicky task of cross-word style look-up tables which had to be used (with limited time to do it) to work out the required average speeds.

I have probably forgotten some of the other innovations but as you can see this was a refreshing rally with a difference – well done to Ray, Paul and their team – which included Rob Roebuck who helped us with timekeeping on the first ToC. I had a special association with this rally as the Cloverleaf has a long history and in fact I won it when it was a long night rally with my driver since University days, Chris Baker-Duly, in a Mini-Cooper S, 40 years previously in 1967 – as a result Colin Evans and I were seeded number one in his MGB GT. At number two was navigator Dave Kirkham who had won it 30 years ago – a mere youngster! Also out from KDMC was Shon Gosling navigating for Brian Cope in his newly-acquired SAAB 96 – and Pam Butterworth was doing a fine job marshalling. I’ll not mention our results – neither of we KDMC navigators was in the top 10! It was my first rally for 9 months but actually my Regularity times were not too bad – we were well into the top ten on regularity penalties only and even came a close second best on the long airfield regularity. Overall a great addition to the rally calendar when the trend seems to be, unfortunately, for these types of 1-day event to be declining (eg Targa, Alan Rogers).