Recce schedule at RALLY COLORADO 2008
Since the Event Schedule for RALLY COLORADO 2008 was made public earlier this week, we have had a few direct inquiries and at least one general inquiry in the Forum section of the Special Stage website regarding our plans to have the recce for this event on Thursday, September 11th. Some have suggested that it would be better and less expensive for entrants if this element of our rally was held on Friday, September 12th, instead of on Thursday to reduce the number of nights on the road and the number of days off work required of entrants to participate in our rally. As ex-competitors, the organizers understand this logic and appreciate the high costs involved in being on the road any additional days. However, there were a number of critical organizer considerations included in this decision that were equally compelling that caused us to select the Thursday date for our first attempt at recce at RALLY COLORADO.
A few of these considerations were;
1.Though we had always scheduled Competitor Registration over two days in past years, the Rally America folks, and our own volunteers most responsible for this registration, encouraged us to limit this process to one day in 2008. Most other National level RA events were working with just one day of registration for all of their entrants and most of them were dealing with a much greater number of teams than we were. But with only one day for registration, we knew that we would need to schedule more hours for this element of our rally and that we would need more volunteers for the entire time in order to assure prompt entrant processing. With only one day, we couldn’t afford to get behind nor be distracted with any additional event functions than those already planned for Friday.
2. With a longer registration period that was going to require more volunteers and with multiple volunteer requirements for each of the other event functions that could only happen on Friday (Press/Media Registration, Shakedown Stage, Media/Sponsor function, Scrutineering and preparing for our Fan Fest on Friday night), it became obvious to us early on that we were not going to have enough volunteers available on Friday to do anything else…we’d be lucky to have enough volunteers to adequately staff the volunteer spots that had already been created by the functions listed above. Because most of our volunteers do not live in Steamboat and they have to pay for accommodations in town while they are here to volunteer for our rally, it has always been very difficult for us to get very many of them to arrive in town much before Friday night. And, like many of our entrants, many of our volunteers have to take time off work to join us in Steamboat to volunteer so they aren’t very anxious to take more time off work than absolutely needed. Getting enough extra volunteers for Friday to fill this shortfall was going to be tough…getting extra volunteers for Thursday was going to be borderline impossible!!
3. We wanted some knowledgeable personnel to organize and manage our recce…this was going to be our first year with this and we wanted to do it well. When we surveyed our Committee Members and a few non-committee volunteers who we were prepared to trust with this responsibility, NONE was going to have any time available on Friday for anything other than their already assigned event duties. The ONLY time that any of them had was on Thursday…and this was still going to be tight for a couple of them. So, from the outset, our choice was NEVER either Thursday or Friday for recce…it was ALWAYS either Thursday or… no recce at all!!
4. Fortunately, we were able to find two of our committee members who agreed to run the recce with their own cars on Thursday…one is our Rallymaster and the other is our Chief of Controls. As the Event Chairman, there was absolutely NO WAY that I was going to agree to allow the individuals holding these two critically important committee positions to be tied up all day Friday with recce…each has more important responsibilities to the overall event on that day. So for them and me, Thursday was the only option.
5. Finally, and not insignificantly, we have historically had a number of crews doing a wide variety of course work on the Friday before our event…banner crews, arrowing crews, photographers scouting photo locations, video crews doing the same, etc. Since many of our stages are one lane roads and none of them are scheduled to be closed on Friday, we were all concerned about the amount of traffic and congestion that might result if we had scheduled any other activity on these roads on this day.
For 2008, it’s too late to make any changes to our recce schedule. We’ll monitor how it goes this year and will clearly listen to all competitor input this year so that we can plan properly for 2009.
Jim Gill, Chairman
RALLY COLORADO 2008