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Jonathan Fahey and Michael Maiello8/12/2002 @ 12:01AM

5,000 Miles--Or Bust

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Two weeks before the start of the semi-annual Alcan 5000–a nearly5,000-mile road rally that begins Aug. 14 outside Seattle, then stretches up to
the tail of Alaska, cuts through the forbidding Canadian Yukon and finallyends eight days later outside of Calgary, Alberta–we were naive enough tothink we could actually win the thing.
We’d been promising friends that we’d bring the Alcan trophy back to theForbes offices, maybe even for display in the Forbes Museum.
Then we thought it might be a good idea to figure out what, exactly, it was wehad entered.
That’s when it hit home. We weren’t going to win.

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5,000 Miles--Or Bust - Forbes

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1974. We asked him what we had to do to win.

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$10,000“Don’t worry about that,” he said, cracking up on the other end of the line.
“You’re not going to come close.”
Ha! Did he know he was talking to two people who have had their driver’s
licenses for a combined 28 years?
“The guys you’re competing against have been rallying for 30 years,”
Schneider replied dryly. We still had no idea why experience would matter somuch, until Schneider spelled out the way the Alcan works.

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You see, a road rally is not a race–it’s not about who goes fastest over a
stretch of road, and dirt and gravel and snow, all of which we should expect
to encounter. Instead, it’s who makes it from one checkpoint to the next
closest to an allotted amount of time. And the point system works like it doesin golf: The lowest score wins. For example, if you’re supposed to arrive atpoint B at 5:00:00, and you arrive at 5:00:00, you get zero points, and you’reking of that leg.
Arrive at 5:00:01, you get one point for being one second late, and you’repretty good. If you arrive at 4:59:59, you get one point for being one second
early, and you’re pretty good, if a tiny bit antsy. If you’re human, and youcome in at 5:01:00 or 4:59:00, you get 60 points.
So how tough would the competition be then? After all, maybe everyone is aminute or two late or early? And then just because the Alcan rally will
include 100 or so checkpoints over the course of nine days, the winner could
have a score of 6,000 or so, right?
Not exactly.
R. Dale Kraushaar R. Dale Kraushaar , 59, a former Marine who ran his first
rally in 1962 while stationed at Camp Pendelton, and who now makes hishome in Fountain Hills, Ariz., won the last Alcan rally with a score of 72.4. Inother words, Kraushaar averaged less than a second’s deviation per
checkpoint. And just to rub it in, that Alcan rally was held in the winter andwent all the way to the Arctic Circle at Prudoe Bay, where the standing
temperature was minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
OK, so we weren’t going to win, but that hasn’t deterred us. And we don’t see
any reason it should deter you, either. After all, there are dozens of rallies ofthis sort (held for regular Janes and Joes like you and us) worldwide, andhow are you going to get good at this sort of thing if you don’t try?

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Good question. Turns out, not that much–and quite a lot. But to get moregranular, have a click or two below. And be sure to follow our dispatches on
Forbes.com’s Lifestyle section starting Tuesday, Aug. 20. And who knows, wecould somehow win, right?
Well, maybe we could take second.
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The Grind

The reason we chose to enter the Alcan 5000 in the first place is that you
don’t have to be a professional driver or have an elaborate support crew, likeyou would in the mold of the storied Paris-to-Dakar rally. At Alcan, at leastin the summer, there’s some hope for the everyman driver who doesn’t wear
the colors of a big-budget automaker.
“It’s an adventure,” says rally founder and organizer Jerry Hines Jerry Hines. “It’s a return to the kind of rallying done at the turn of the century. The3 of 12

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in the 1970s, where they would drive for a day or two straight, then socialize
for a day, then get back on the road.

Still, the day-in, day-out grind of eight to 14 hours behind the wheel or in thenavigator’s seat won’t be easy, even though we won’t be competing in thetoughest division, where you’ll find Class I drivers like Kraushaar. Racers inhis section hook up a computer to their odometers that measures distance tothe 1,000ths of a mile and a fancy clock that measures time to the 1,000thsof a second. The computer constantly recalculates exactly how fast the drivershould go to make it to the final checkpoint within the allotted time. A goodrally computer can cost between $500 and $3,000.
By the way, there are separate classes for vintage cars, motorcycles, SUVs
and even casual “tourers”–those in the last category don’t even want to keepscore.
We’re entering the SOP class, which stands for “seat-of-the-pants.” We’reallowed only a calculator and a good watch. That’s the way we like it, seat ofour pants.
As for the actual competition, there are about 100 checkpoints, like wealready said. Once or twice a day, the 16 auto teams and the eight motorcycle
entrants in our class will compete in “time-speed-distance” events, where wewill have to make it from point A to point B in a certain amount of time,
while traveling past checkpoints at predetermined speeds.

The Vehicles

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Kraushaar is lucky, he’s sponsored by Subaru , but even so this isn’t a fully
professional rally. At Alcan you do have to be your own mechanic (seeMechanical Support), and you can’t depend on either a team or aprofessional “wrench” to help you out. Meaning, even if you do have a vehicle
sponsor, you still have to drive and keep your machine running.
As for the cars themselves, all of them–no matter the class–have to be street
legal. That’s the only restriction. That might mean you’d want special tires
and undercarriage protection, as well as some timing or engine
modifications, but naturally that depends on your section. For us, whatmatters is that we’re not made of gold. We’re driving a sturdy anddependable Volvo XC 70 wagon, which had stoneguards added and off-roadtires mounted, and are trying to prove against all reason that anyone canwin, er, finish this rally in a car he doesn’t mind having dinged by flying
rocks or soaked in mud.

Provisions And Lodging

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The good part of rallying on most of this continent is that you often get tostay in inns with real beds. For the Alcan that might vary from the proverbial“bed-over-a-bar” in Hyder, Alaska, to the downright plush Yellowknife Inn,in Yellowknife, Canada, but the point is that nowhere will we be pitching atent and building a fire after a hard day of driving.
As for provisions, we will be packing a fair amount of food. Since Schneider’sadvice was to “Never, ever pass a gas station; always be full, because there
are long stretches with no stations,” we figure, if nothing else, we can rate thequality of beef jerky as we travel north. As for predators–no, not otherdrivers, but grizzlies and such–we thought about pepper spray but wereafraid we might accidentally (or on purpose) wind up using it against eachother.
Of course, if it were you at the helm, dear reader, you might want to packlarge quantities of Red Bull, Gatorade, Vivarin, special clothing, insect
repellant and perhaps a pistol or two, but come on, how sporting would thatbe?

Mechanical Support

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winning as do sponsored teams, because Hines put limits on the amount ofequipment and support each team can have (no onboard fuel cans, only six
forward-facing lights, etc.). Also, the rally doesn’t go through any large
towns, where teams could make repairs and adjustments on the fly.
We’re carrying a full-size spare, a fire extinguisher, road flares and a two-way
radio with which all entrants will be equipped. We also know where all theVolvo dealerships are along the route (that’d be precisely two), and as a
backup, we have a list of the locations of the nearest Ford dealerships as well.
A major problem might keep us out of medal contention, but then so might
our driving acumen. In any case, the former is an issue that might plague anycompetitor in any similarly formatted rally. Let’s just skip the latter issue,
shall we?

The Participants

As you might anticipate, these kinds of competitions attract obsessivecompulsives of every age and national origin. Personality disorders aside(why are we doing this again?), some notable participants include Walt

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Alex Millar and Shona Williams Shona Williams of Red Deer, Alberta, whoare driving an original Mini Cooper S; and two former national rallychampions, R. Dale Kraushaar R. Dale Kraushaar and Gary Webb GaryWebb of Mohave Valley, Ariz.

We won’t even get into who would want to drive a motorcycle for ten hours aday for 5,000 miles.

Other Rallies

Before signing up for a 5,000-mile trek through the wilderness, you mightwant to find a shorter, more local rally through civilized terrain by checking
out the Web site for the Sports Car Club of America (www.scca.org), whichlists a lot of national events. We decided, in pursuit of “seat-of-the-pants”
authenticity, to test our mettle at Alcan (www.alcan5000.com).
But rallies are staged worldwide and, in fact, can be a way to see a country ina fashion you’d never expect and to rub shoulders with people from all over,both other contestants and locals.

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as vintage racing and rally cars. The journey travels 1,300 miles, beginning in
Edinburgh, winding through Argyle, the Southern Highlands and Oban aswell as the Isle of Skye.
The same organization, Historic Endurance Rally Organization, or HERO
(www.hero.org.uk), sponsors an Arctic Rally; a Portugal Rally; an amazing,
20,000-mile, London-to-Sydney rally in 2004; and one from Germany toEgypt next year, called Trial to the Nile.
Like we said, this is a great way to see the world. Just don’t be more than asecond late, OK?

See Also:
Rally Merchandise Clothing

NFL Rally Towel

Rally Armor

Rally Racers

Rally Tyres

Rally Auto

Off-Road Rally

Rally Suspension

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