Vince's Stuff: La Grosse Ride navigation rally 2024

The team of car 3 after the event

My co-driver Josée and I signed up for the Grosse Ride navigation rally that took place this past Saturday, as we have come to enjoy attending this type of event together. After many, many years off, I decided to start doing these events again when I bought my Saab 92x a few years back. When I sold the Saabaru, I replaced it with a large, heavy and fragile BMW, so I didn't really have a car that was suitable for an event on bumpy, snow-covered roads. Fortunately, last year, Josée and her partner Guy offered me the use of their Impreza for the event and we achieved our best result ever, a 3rd place finish.

Now that I have one of the most high-performance Subarus, I was very much looking forward to taking part in this rally. In fact, since I bought the car, I have barely ever driven it in true winter conditions... I don't drive that much during the week and there has just not been that much snow this winter. My oldest son Jules, now 11, wanted to learn more about these events, so we decided he would ride along, in the back seat, to see how it all works.

We arrived early enough so that Jules could catch part of the co-driver training class. After a while, we drew numbers, along with the other "experts", to determine the starting order. We were to be the second car on the road. At least we would finish the long event earlier than most!

Group photo of all the participants

We got settled into the rally and realized that neither of our phones had a decent, up to date speedometer/odometer app. It didn't matter, really, as there was only about a 1% difference between the car's odometer and the distances in the route book. As we have done in the past, we proceeded with the "seat of the pants" method of maintaining the right speed.

I would love to say that we achieved an even better result than last year, but we actually had our worst performance ever... mainly because we somehow went off course at one point in the first leg of the rally and missed a checkpoint, taking a 30-minute penalty in the process. When we realized our mistake, we probably should have backtracked and found the checkpoint, instead of looking at our GPS to find a reference point and get back on track from where we were. The mega-penalty was more than all our penalties combined last year. Also, when I look at the scoring, we took some other weird penalties that I'm pretty sure are based on errors by the timekeepers, but I'm not going to ask them to recalculate just to move us up a couple of positions. We just didn't perform that well. We ended up 32nd out of 53 cars.

To add insult to injury, at one point when I had pulled over to read a street sign that seemed to indicate the wrong name, a police car pulled up behind us. One of the officers came up to me and asked me what wer were doing there... I told him we were participating in a navigation "event" (I didn't want to use the work "rally"). He took my papers for a couple of minutes and then sent us on our way. He was friendly, but of course this affected our result as well, as there was no way to make up those lost minutes. By then, we already knew we were screwed, result-wise, because we knew we had missed a checkpoint. In the second leg, one of the checkpoint volunteers actually said "Is it possible you missed checkpoint 4? I was working that one too". I responded that yes, we had, in fact.

Results aside, it was a fun event. Many of the roads were not that challenging, as there was no snow at all, while others were completely snow-covered, reminding me of previous winter events. The car performed really well, almost too well, as it could esily keep up with the required speeds. In reality, the car was not more suited to the event than Josée's non-turbo Impreza last year... there is no real advantage to having 300 horsepower. In fact, the car we brought was the opposite of an underdog... it was more like an overdog. I was impressed with the performance of competitors with 2-wheel drive cars, who seemed to be easily keeping up with the ideal times for the stages. Watching Toyota GT86's drift around so many corners made me almost jealous, as I never came close to sliding the STi around a corner, despite having the traction control partly turned off.

As for Jules, he had many interesting questions, but eventually fell asleep in the back seat part way through the first leg. The rally was long, lasting over 7 hours. Still, I think he had a good time. He hadn't even realized that the police had checked out our paperwork. We left Ste-Agathe around 3:30 am and drove Josée home, where she handed me our 3rd place trophy from last year's event, which she had held onto since last year. Ouch, what a difference a year makes! It was 5:00 am by the time Jules and I got to bed, but we had had a good time.

I highly recommend events like this to anyone who wants to participate in a form of organized motorsport, learn about teamwork, and enjoy some of the province's most challenging roads (at legal speeds). It's affordable and fun, as well as being a test of stamina. Over all, a great way to beat the winter blues if you're a car enthusiast.