Lost Long Weekend

On 10 March 2024, the HNCR is holding a navigational rally. The event is being set by me, Martin Leaver, a Z32 TT owner, and a member of the HNCR and Classic Rally Clubs. The Lost Long Weekend is an updated version of an event I set in 2018 for the Alfa Romeo Owners' Club. 

The event start is at the Common Grounds Cafe in Gowrie, where you can get breakfast from 8 am on Sundays. The drive to lunch at the Eagle Hawk, is about 160 km. There are no specified breaks along the way, but there are toilet stops along the route if needed. 

It is possible, but a bit awkward to drive the event alone, but is much easier to have a navigator beside you to advise on the route, notify when observation questions that you need to answer are coming up, and record your answers on your road card. 

Part of the event is to give HNCR and other invited club members an introduction to navigational rallies. To make it easier, the instructions will be available well before the event, to give you an opportunity to derive the route. If you are not comfortable with your solution, you can use the route chart instructions provided on the day, which give all the turning instructions required to complete the course. 

Please read this Guide to Navigating as a starting point to understanding how to dervice the shortest mapped route that complies with the instructions. Then, please download the Lost Long Weekend Map as you will need it to work out the route. Other maps will not work for deriving the shortest mapped route. Unfortunately the map is raster/bitmap image, not a vector graphics document, so it is about 55MB in size. 

Use the Lost Long Weekend route instructions to derive your solution. You'll need to create a route to follow during the drive on 10 March, such as a route in Google Maps. The route instructions do not include distances to leave some uncertainty as to whether you have the correct route before the day. The second instruction, the herringbone, was updated on 2 March, to simplify the interpretation.

On 10 March, at the start you will be given a sealed envelope with correct route provided in what is called a route chart. The route chart has all the distances and turns that you'll need to make. If you return the sealed envelope with your road card (effectively your answer sheet) recording your observations, you will be scored in the navigation category. If you don't hand it in, or the envelope is opened then you will be scored in the route chart category. 

Along with the sealed envelope, each car will receive a road card and a question sheet. The road card is used for recording your answers to the observations, and any control boards that you see along the way. All observations will be on the left side of the road while travelling on the correct route. The observations will have a distance, but your trip meter and my trip meter may give different distances. There will be two points where you can reset your trip meter to zero during the drive. 

If you'd like to use a mobile phone app as a trip meter, there are several available on Google Play or the App Store. The only one I have on my phone currently is Off-road Tripmeter by bitwize10 (Android only it seems, and a paid for app). It allows you to reverse when you go the wrong way, or input a non-zero distance if you really stuff up. It isn't happy if you exit the app, mid use, so you need to stop it and restart it, otherwise it says it trying to locate satellites. Some apps only allow you to reset to zero, so the navigator is left with adding or subtracting distances for the rest of the drive.

As a road-based motorsport series, the Classic Rally Club runs its events under Motorsport Australia's National Touring Standing Regulations, which define the major rules for these events. The Events General (pages 1-7) and Navigation Assembly (9-14) are applicable to these events. This is only optional reading, but may help with the context as I'm using the national format for The Lost Long Weekend.

For additional information on how a rally runs, see this how it works page, advice on navigation levels, noting that I'm also giving you a couple of weeks to work out the route, rather than expecting you to start driving almost immediately. For further tuition on how to navigate is available here.