Have you wanted to try a club rally but didn’t know what to expect? Maybe the idea of driving 50 or 60 miles at 25 mph and feeling like a road hazard just doesn’t sound that appealing to you. Perhaps gimmick rallies just don’t sound like that much fun. Are you tired of watching David and Michaela win? Have I got a rally for you! At least I can promise that David and Michaela won’t win it.

This will be a sneak preview of the Abingdon Trials Double Twelve, sharing many of the same concepts and scoring. No, it will not take you two days; Mike would only let me have four hours. This will be a map rally with more checkpoints than there is time to hit. You will have four hours and 160 miles to visit as many checkpoints as you can. Which checkpoints you visit and the route you drive are entirely up to you. I will give you an official State of Illinois highway map and all of the checkpoints will be on the Chicago and Vicinity map. I have taken a picture of a sign at each checkpoint. Each picture will have part of the sign covered with a red rectangle. There will be two blanks for each picture, one to write down the words that have been covered in the picture and one to identify the checkpoint. Scoring for this rally will be weighted according to how many cars visited each checkpoint. You will get one point for each checkpoint you collect as well as one point for each team that did not collect it. If there are ten teams participating, then a checkpoint that all ten teams got is worth one point to each team because there were zero teams that did not get it. A checkpoint that only one team collected would be worth ten points to that team. So, should you try to collect as many close checkpoints as possible and hope that everybody else is skipping them? Or should you concentrate on hitting the ones further away? What a quandary!