Mark me down as that fool then John. I reckon it would be easier to teach someone how to type a few letters into a keyboard then it would be to ride a motorcycle well. You need a licence to ride a bike, and you need to demonstrate your competence to an accredited examiner; even the vrblly chillanged cn by n uze a smrtfone.
Having been on the admin side now for two rallies, one using digital cameras and bits of paper, the other by smartphone, there is no competition. Last years was 35 hours of mind numbing boredom followed by 3 hours of mayhem. Let's be honest, riders have been taking the piss for years. Appalling photographs, sloppy paperwork, in your face intimidation of the scorers, no consistency, it had to come to an end.
This years rally was an experiment. The tests that I had made, and more importantly the final one performed by Phil, demonstrated that it ought to work, but the proof would come from the rally itself. Having been subjected to many months of negativity I was preparing myself for the fact that it might not work as well with twenty five riders on the road. As it turned out, it worked fine. An email would arrive, I checked the data in the subject line, reviewed the photo, and marked the scoresheet accordingly. Bob Stammers would then update his wonderfully flexible scoresheet. One person judged the entire event, me. There were no queues, no hanging around, dinner and presentation times were all arrived at on schedule.
From the moment that the smartphone nature of the event was announced there was an appreciable undercurrent of dissent amongst the established riders. Some registered it by not entering, armchair riders spoke about in terms that would make you think that four horseman of the apocolypse had arrived at their front door, whilst people like your goodself John expressed their distaste for the idea. I've already argued the point that there is and has never been a 'classic' version of the long distance rally, it changes. GPS's were embraced whole heartedly, as were digital cameras, so there is no precedent for staying in one place. The one thing that I was not sure of was, would it work in practice, was the phone coverage good enough to make this feasible?
Since the rally I have taken a look at the winner's data. Robert picked up 35 bonus locations in the north of England and Scotland. He sent an email to start and finish his rally, plus there were the three supplementary bonuses (X1, X2, X3). In total Robert sent 40 emails, of which 37 arrived without any timelag from what was entered in the subject line. In between all of this mindless facebooking and snapchatting Robert was able to ride for 1554 miles. One email (Ribblehead) experienced a 7 minute delay, another (St Drostans, Aberdeenshire) had a three minute delay, and at Carlisle there was a one minute delay. By my reckoning we have a 'within one minute' transmission success rate of 92.5%. Other users may have experienced better or worse rates. I haven't, and I'm not sure that I will, checked every riders email record to see what the success rate averages out at.
So by any measurable terms the 2018 rally was a success. What I can't change however is opinion. You like Triumph's, I don't. You like green, I prefer red; you can see where I'm going with this I'm sure. What is now unarguable, and not a matter of opinion, is the fact that running a rally on smartphones works in this country. So a big thankyou from me to everyone who took part in the experiment.