In which the Mini masters mountains, negotiates nadger, and drives at almost exactly 45kph.
The event we are on is classed as an “endurance rally”, which means it is a rally that goes on for several days. As in all things motorsport-y, to finish first first you must finish, and so the wily endurance rally organisers try to tempt you to wear out your grotty old bus sorry gleamingly pretty classic car by throwing it around the roads vigorously.
But of course if you drive around the local roads like a loony, then you won’t be welcome in the area again, and you will run out of places to hold rallies. And so the “regularity section” was invented. In this, you are given a target speed to drive at, say 45 kph (30 mph for those reading in imperial units) and you have to maintain this over a distance of several miles or indeed kilometres. At any point one of the WEROs may hop out from behind a piece of scenery brandishing a stopwatch and say AHA!! I see you got here at this time xx:xx and that means that you were TWO SECONDS EARLY!! Oh pooh say the experienced navigators, how sloppy. Oh hurrah say the less experienced/skilled/diligent crews such as Sid and Doris, only two seconds, we got lucky that time. (Early or late are both equally bad by the way, so you can’t make up for being early at one point by being late later on.)
So far so good. But, I hear you cry, trundling round the Italian countryside at exactly whatever speed the organisers have carefully selected sounds unchallenging and tedious, and anyway what happens if you want to stop and have a coffee or admire the view. The WEROs have thought about that too. So the regularity sections tend to be on little twisty roads, often uphill, which don’t have a lot of traffic and have lots of tight corners to slow you down, and the speed set is slightly too high to be comfortable. That bit lasts for maybe 10 minutes (or in the case of Sid and Doris, 9 minutes and 58 seconds) and then you get an hour’s driving through the scenic countryside with time to drink coffee, admire views etc before the next one.
The first day of the event took us up into the mountains, big views along the Med coast, back down, up again and after about a zillion million hairpins inland to a town with the unexplained but memorable name of Bra, for a hotel in a converted equivalent of a mediaeval office building, and a rather alarmingly successful wine tasting.
How did we do on the regularities? Thank you for asking! A total of 6s early or late over 4 tests which is pretty surprisingly lucky.
