You're Late? Then Use It! Canadian Winter Scoring explained by Satch Carlson, spiritual advisor The Alaska Rally Team You may wonder how we could stand at the side of the road for half an hour at Thunderbird yet somehow wind up taking the second-place Historic Unlimited award. The answer is an explanation of how the Canadian Winter Scoring System works in the real world: The score sheets taped to the wall at the awards party gave us the chance to show several novices how the system works (and Martin Wilson can tell you what happens when you ignore the system and simply drive to get back on time!). It is not really as complicated as it may seem. . . or at least we have enough understanding to help us when I misdiagnose a loose coil wire for half an hour. The system uses two lines of penalty scores. The top line is the actual penalty-that is, how far the car was off perfect time at each control. The bottom line is the applied penalty, since the Canadian winter system is rather forgiving. Let's take you through three sections of the 2002 Thunderbird to show you how it worked for Car #20: Tunkwa Lake 1E 5L 2L 1E Raw error: 9 seconds 0 4 1 0 Scored Points: 5 Tunkwa Lake saw us all over the place, probably because we use a dead-wheel drive in a two-wheel-drive car for maximum accuracy-we need all the edge we can get!-but the organizers measured T-Bird with an all-wheel-drive car this year. . . which means close, but no anal retention. The thing to remember in this section is that this system allows one second early or late. Control #1 had us a second early, so it was scored as a zero. We were five seconds late at #2-how could that happen?!-so that turned into a four. Similarly, the two seconds late at #3 became a one, and the one second early at #5 was again scored as a zero. The real test of the Canadian system, however, came in the Red Lake section. That's the one where we coasted to a stop with me convinced it was fuel-related; while the rest of the rally came by, we blew through fuel lines, bypassed a fuel filter, and on and on with no result-until I saw the wire dangling next to the coil instead of firmly affixed to it. Then it was into the car, slap on the belts, and see how much time we could make up: Red Lake 1805L 1764L 1669L 1590L 1406L 1164L 1052L Raw error: 10,450 300 0 0 0 0 0 0 Scored Points: 300 We hadn't made up too much by the time we passed the first control; I estimate about 37 minutes at the beginning, and we were still 30 minutes down at the control. That's where the Canadian system actually starts; while our applied error was the 300 points that the Canadians apply as an arbitrary maximum, our true error was 1,805 seconds. Now all we had to do was to lower that error by at least ten seconds before the next control. . . which we did: 1,764 at Control #2 means we had made up about forty seconds. We made up another 95 by Control #3, then another 79 by #4, and so on. Thus our total score remained that 300-point maximum at Control #1. The logic of the system is clear from Red Lake. It is meant to eliminate double jeopardy, the term for applying penalties twice for the same infraction. That's because a rally with closed controls (like Thunderbird) does not allow you to recover from an error by getting to a checkpoint; the rally is a perfect time rally, with error measured from perfect time at any point between A and B, as opposed to a point-to-point rally, with error measured between subsequent checkpoints. You can see that since we could never have made up all of our error by the first control, every subsequent control would have been applying more penalties for the same occurrence: our longish pit stop at the beginning of the section. Thus we would have been penalized for being half an hour late at #1, and given another pile of points for still being 29 minutes late at #2, and on and on: double-jeopardy scoring would have awarded us a tidy 10,450 points for the section, a total of over 174 minutes-nearly three hours of penalty! Now let's look at a bit of strategy. (I assure you that the conversation in the car was not this civilized!) We came to the start of Watching Creek having made up nearly all of our late time. But with no windshield-washing system-and Lucas wipers!-and an afternoon spent passing other rally cars in the mud, we decided-okay, it was decided-that we'd be better off stopping to clean our windshield and continue to carry some lateness into the section than to leave on time. After all, we were still 1,052 seconds down at the last control in Red Lake; that meant we could be over seventeen minutes late at the first control of Watching Creek and still get a zero! However, the closer we were to perfect time, the fewer cars we'd have to pass, so we left with about four minutes left in our "lateness bank." We made up about half a minute before we came to Control #1: Watching Creek 212L 119L 87L 16L Raw error: 434 0 0 0 0 Scored Points: 0 Now it was imperative to watch the clock-not to make sure we made up enough time, but to keep from making up too much time; that is, we wanted the luxury of making up a quick ten seconds and then knowing we were "good to go" without having to stare at the computer read-out the way we do when we're running on zero. You can see that Driver Exuberance grabbed back over a minute between #1 and #2, but then calmer logic prevailed. It's good to have a cushion so you can slow down in the rough stuff and hit the yee-ha button in the clear, knowing that as long as you don't fall back below ten seconds better than the last control error, you're clean. But it actually took some discipline to stay late enough to keep ten seconds in hand after Control #4; after we passed that one, we ran back up to zero, but then dropped back to run two seconds late, because we knew we were in the safe cushion between ten and seventeen-but if we pushed the zero, we could find ourselves on the other side and get more of those pesky early penalties. In short, an understanding of the system can be an asset when you've found that magnetic snowbank (or failed to prepared your car properly, at least in coil-wiring department!). I hope you never need this kindness on the part of Canadian rallymasters, but it's better to understand how it works just in case. I hope we never need it again, either.-Satch Carlson 2003