Rally in the Rockies

Aspen groves cut swaths of delicate yellow flame through the valleys, and fresh snow coated the peaks. But few of the fiercely competitive driver-navigator teams in the 66 sports cars that set out from the outskirts of Denver last week in the Continental Divide Rally had time for any sightseeing. They were too engrossed in solving the exacting problems of driving and navigating presented by the nation's toughest test in the growing postwar sport of "rallying." Boasted one official of the Sports Car Club of America: "One goof and they're out."

The object of the Continental, oldest of the S.C.C.A. national rallies, sounded simple in theory: teams had to cover legs of a given course in a given time, were penalized for not passing checkpoints on schedule. Rallymaster Charles Sink had laid out a 630-mile, two-day course between Denver and Aspen over highways and dirt roads that crisscrossed the Continental Divide through passes more than two miles high.

Blocks & Navigators. Over such a twisting, precipitous course, it is not easy to maintain required average speeds (e.g., 30.33 miles at 36.34 m.p.h.), and a single truck grinding up a narrow mountain road can throw a roadblock into the most delicate calculations. Heads low over their clipboards, navigators (often long-suffering wives) frantically figured rate-time-distance problems to tell their drivers how much to speed up in order to hit the next checkpoint on the button. Speedometers are considered far too inexact for rallyists' standards. They rely on odometer and stopwatch, backed up by slide rule, $250 automatic computers, and short-wave radios that let a team check the exact time broadcast by the U.S. Bureau of Standards. But odometers are subject to errors of their own, since their accuracy depends on counting tire revolutions. Wheels slip on ice, snow or a stretch of gravel. Even a rain squall can induce an error, cooling the road surface and thereby reducing tire pressure and size.

Because rallyists, faced with these frustrations, have been known to seek the low road to success, Continental officials set up nine secret posts to keep a sharp eye peeled for such old tricks as stopping just up the road from a checkpoint and waiting for the right moment to gun past the timers.

Ice & Cattle. But the competing teams had no time to think up skulduggery; an early-season storm turned roads into snow-clogged obstacle courses littered with jackknifed trailer trucks. Drivers fumed as they lost time putting on chains and crawling up mountains, tried to get back on schedule by hurtling down icy stretches at 70 m.p.h. In the valleys, they were slowed as they honked their way through meandering herds of cattle. Even so, Flight Engineer Mel De Loof covered the course as though it were laid out in a parking lot back home in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Beside him in his Jaguar XK-140 coupe was his wife Juanita. "If I get more than one-tenth of a mile off schedule, Juanita simply stops navigating," cracked De Loof. "She figures if I'm doing that badly I'm just not driving right."

When Juanita was done navigating, the De Loofs had hit three checkpoints right on the nose, missed ten of twelve others by no more than 15 seconds, and roared off with first place in one of the wildest rallies ever held along the backbone of the continent.

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