Day 1 of the Navigational Rally
Hotel - Minardi Factory - La Rocca - Imola Race Track - Hotel
This was the only morning we got
anything like a lay in as registration didn't start until 10.00 a.m.
We visited our trusty travelling companion (apparently that's the meaning
of Sputnik's name) and washed some of the flies off of his nose and
windscreen, gave him a drink of oil and checked his tyre pressures.
Then we went to the lunchtime drivers' briefing and were given our
Roadbooks. These at least seemed quite familiar as the directional
signs were similar to the ones we used on the LSMOC treasure hunt (which
we in turn copied from the Mole Valley run). Not quite as pretty as
the ones we did though! The difference was that there are distances
(both between points and cumulative, and in both miles and kilometres) and
time restraints on each stage. Having frantically tried to read up
on the rules and see how they worked, we set off for the start line
wondering just what we'd let ourselves in for. We'd been told to
bring a stopwatch, but we didn't realise exactly how the whole thing
depended on it.
Here's us starting the rally, waved off by Mike
Cooper. This was the start, not the finish as it looks in the pic - it was
the nearest we got to finishing in first place, but it looks quite
impressive! Pic courtesy of Cuan who was car number 98 and had
plenty of time to get back to Cybil (who had been given a new alternator
overnight) before it was their turn to leave. Cars were supposed to leave
in the same order for each stage, with 30 second intervals between them.
We had a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown and we were off, but I bungled starting the
stopwatch so ours was a few seconds out from the start.
At this time we did not realise
that every stage would have loads of time to finish, so we were pretty
nervous and anxious not to look total idiots as we had nobody to
follow. What I hadn't realised was that the instructions were in
fact different to the way we'd done our treasure hunt in that there were a
lot more diagrams showing road junctions etc., not as we'd done it and
only given instructions when the route was anything other than straight
on. I was navigating and I got muddled up with all the distance
instructions and started looking at the cumulative rather then individual
distances. We saw a signpost that matched the directions we'd been
given, but I was looking at the cumulative distance so told Karen not to
take it thinking it was a trick and told her we needed to go four miles
further before the correct junction. Oops! Four and a half
miles down the road we decided we'd gone wrong and had to turn
round. Still by this time we had lots of other Minis to follow and
we'd worked out how to do it so we got to the Minardi factory in good time
to cross the line, in fact there were loads of others waiting, so we just
slid to the front feeling very embarrassed and crossed the line when our
stopwatch said the time was up, knowing we'd be slightly out. I
immediately stopped the watch.
The Minardi factory was quite impressive,
although I found it all a bit boring as I didn't really understand what
all the precision engineering equipment was actually doing. We had a
feel of parts of the bodyshells to see how light they were. We got
to talk to Mr Minardi himself, and they brought a couple of the Minis into
the factory.
The next problem came when we were
at the time to leave, I had to ask when it was time to go, totally
oblivious to the fact that I was supposed to work it out myself from the
watch. I still didn't cotton on to that one until the next
day. We went wrong on the next stage as well as we were flustered
about the leaving time, but as it happened it didn't matter then, because
heavy traffic from road works meant that everyone arrived late, so they
cancelled the time scoring on that stage.
La Rocca (Imola Castle) was quite impressive, they had bands and
country dancing to welcome us to the town. Everyone had been told to take toys to donate
to the children in a home supported by the Charity in Imola. We left
some of the toys by the castle, and walked down to the town square with
the rest. The children by the castle seemed as if they were 'needy'
but the ones in the square just seemed to be ordinary local kids, grabbing
as many toys as they could. I may be wrong, but everyone I spoke to
said that they would have rather visited a home rather than just leave
them in the square.
Karen had persuaded Corgi to donate some model
cars as MiniWorld's contribution, and these were extremely popular with
the kids, especially the Mini models. A lot of the Jobbers were
saying how nice they were, and that they'd like them, but what I found
totally unforgivable was the sight of a fellow Jobber nicking one - if
he's reading this then I hope he's feeling really bad to know that I saw
him! Probably not though, but I found it totally sickening. I
wish I'd confronted him but I left it too late as I was too shocked, and
didn't fancy a public scene.
After La Rocco we were given a police escort to
the Imola race track, where we all lined up for a couple of laps of the
circuit. It was getting a bit dark by the time we all set off,
but it was great fun as Mini Cavalcades always are. We managed to
get up a fair amount of speed, and we stopped between laps so both of us
got to have a drive, which was cool.
Then it was back to the
hotel for dinner, followed by a charity auction.
