The Midnight Ride
By
Charles L. Lunsford
All Rights Reserved
On November 7th & 8th, 1964, I was entered in a rally sponsored by the Albuquerque, New Mexico chapter of the Sports Car Club of America, called “The Midnight Ride.” I was driving a 1961 Austin-Healey 3000 at the time, and engaged a close friend to navigate for me. Those were the days of stop-watches, and not very accurate trip odometers, and nobody but the very wealthy could afford a Curta “Peppermill” calculator so my navigator was liberally supplied with paper and pencils. He would need them for this over-night rally.
The rally instructions handed out before the start told us the route would start at a point on U.S. Route 66, at a point in what is known as Old Town. It would proceed west on 66 crossing the Rio Grande, to a boulevard leading north out of the city, and joining with U.S Route 44 to the northwest. We knew the rally would end early the next morning at Los Alamos in the Jemez Mountains, but we weren’t given details of how to get there. Those instructions for each leg would be given out piecemeal at the start and at each checkpoint along the route. The rally masters had provided a short-wave radio, tuned to WWV on 500 kilocycles, the National Bureau of Standards radio which broadcasts the exact time every five minutes, and we all adjusted our watches to the time being used by the rally masters. A drawing was conducted to establish the order in which we would start. I drew number two.
At promptly 10:00 pm, the first car in the rally left the starting point, I followed him one minute later the other entrants followed us at one minute intervals on the official timer’s watch. There were about 30 cars entered in the rally and the speeds were relatively slow until we worked our way out of the city and turned to the northwest on the open highway. There was very little traffic at night in those days, and I could see the tail lights of the first starter one minute ahead of me, and the headlights of the following entrants in my rearview mirror spread out like the lights of a train following me through the night.
I had supplied my navigator with Larry Reid’s Rally Tables nicely laminated in plastic, giving distance and time information in miles and hundredths of minutes and a matched set of Haeuer stop-watches, calibrated to read in hundredths of minutes, mounted on the dash in a neat little thingy I invented using parts of an old bamboo slide rule. With the flip of a lever, the navigator could stop one watch and start the other at the same instant as we changed speeds or checkpoints on the legs of the rally. Along with pencil and paper, that was just about as high tech as anyone in rallying could do at the time.
Out on the highway, I could relax a little. My navigator was filling endless pages of paper with calculations, diligently poring over the alternating watches, rally tables and the general instructions and rules. All was going well—we seemed be navigating on time for the first legs, and we were now some 40 miles into the rally, driving through a very rural unpopulated area with little or no traffic on a dark, moonless night.
At this point, I began to slowly overtake number one up ahead of me, which told me and the navigator that either the car in front had made an error, or we had made an error. If we were both doing it right, he should stay one minute ahead of me—the instructions for the rally, speeds, times, turning points, etc., were the same for both of us, but somebody was wrong. There was no question I was overtaking him.
The rule in those days was not to be influenced by what the other rally cars were doing. One had to do one’s own navigation and trust the result. It was also inadvisable to argue with one’s navigator unless one was absolutely sure—not to mention the driver was supposed to be paying attention to the road, thereby avoiding things like ditches, trees, bushes, abutments and guard rails. My navigator smugly assured me we were correct, and we soldiered on. In short order, we passed the number one starter and now we were the first car in the long string of headlights. There were some minor speed changes—the kind of which rally masters are so fond:
“At 5.73 miles from the last instruction, change speed to 43.26 MPH.”
More eyeballing of the stop watches and more scribbled calculations in the no light conditions of the Austin-Healey. For those of you who haven’t tried it, it’s impossible to drive at exactly 43.26 miles per hour. One is lucky to be within three or four mph, so what we did was look up in the tables how long it would take to drive a given distance at that speed, check the watches for actual time and calculate the error—plus or minus—and try to make up the difference on the next leg. It wasn’t very accurate by today’s standards, but it was the best we could do at the time. My hundredths of minutes stop-watches were the envy of everyone except the few who owned a Curta calculator.
Somewhere near 60 miles out, we came into the first open checkpoint at a little town with the unlikely name of Cuba, New Mexico. At this checkpoint the timers were stopped, we were given coffee and a snack and a time for departure on the next leg of the rally. This rest stop also allowed my navigator to empty the back of the Healey, now overflowing with discarded crumpled paper containing his scribbled calculations.
We departed the checkpoint in the same order in which we arrived, which meant any error from the previous leg was carried into the second leg, so we knew if we had been in error in overtaking the first car on the previous leg, the error would go with us into the second leg. My navigator again assured me we were correct and on time and at the timers signal we departed as the first car on the second leg.
This leg headed east from Cuba, and a look at a map will show that the road snakes through high forest country, and a fork in the road can lead either to a lake in the north central part of New Mexico called El Vado Reservoir, or the fork leading directly east ending in the Atomic City of Los Alamos. We didn’t have a map, had not been on this road before, so we didn’t know about the upcoming fork.
The night was very dark on this smooth paved road in this semi-wilderness and once again I could see the string of headlights spread out behind me at one minute intervals. The speed was about 45 mph, but the navigator told me his time calculations had us about 27 seconds late, so I sped up a little to make it up. The little extra speed was no trouble on this good road.
About 15 miles into this leg, we came to the fork in the road. The original road extended straight at the fork, but was unpaved from that point. The pavement followed the fork to the right and since the rally instructions did not specifically tell us to turn at this point, we continued onto the unpaved road— straight ahead. I soon found the road to be badly rutted frozen mud, the navigator and I were being bounced around and the underside of my beloved low-slung Healey was taking a beating. I tried driving up on the shoulder to keep from tearing the bottom out of the car and asked the navigator to check the speed instructions as I didn’t think the rally masters would ask for a speed like this on this road condition. He agreed and checked everything, but could find nothing to change the speed and there was nothing to do but press on as best we could and I tried valiantly to maintain the 45 mph without damaging my precious Healey. As I motored farther up this terrible road I could see the string of headlights following me, and now I could see some of the bouncing and jiggling as they too, tried to negotiate this awful road.
I finally had to slow down and I told the navigator again that I couldn’t believe they would ask for that speed on this road. Something had to be wrong. He continued to study the instructions and rules and finally he found it. “Eureka!” (or words to that general effect) he said. “I’ve found it.”
The general rules in the instructions given to us before the start, not the leg instructions, clearly stated the entrants were not to leave the pavement at any time, unless specifically told to do so. There it was. Nothing on the leg sheet said anything about leaving the pavement, and it quickly became apparent my error was in continuing straight onto the unpaved road. “Turn around,” said the navigator. “We have to go back to that fork in the road.”
I swung a quick one-eighty and we began to pass the string of headlights going the opposite direction. I was too busy driving, missing ruts and the other cars to see if anyone followed me, but it was apparent to the navigator and me the error was at that fork in the road. When we got to the fork and were back on the pavement, I asked the navigator how late we were on the leg. He just shook his head and told me to drive as fast as I could until he told me to slow down.
In those days, unlike European Rallies, American rallies had penalties for being early which were twice the penalty points for being late—the theory being that no one would try to drive unsafely. They were time/distance events, not races. Yeah-Right.
So, secretly having always fancied myself no less a race driver than Nuvolari reincarnated, away I went, driving on sight to my limits and grossly overdriving the headlights on a secondary winding mountain road I had never been on before. When I was young, of course I thought I was immortal. I would query the furiously scribbling navigator from time to time, but all he would do was implore me to go faster. He had his head down in the calculations and the rally tables and therefore, may not have appreciated in how much danger he was during that wild ride. He had estimated the off pavement error had put us about 35 minutes late when we got back on the pavement, and after what seemed an age of hair-raising breaking and accelerations using a good portion of all the Healey had to give, he gave me a count down at the end of which I stomped on the brake and we returned to the assigned leisurely speed of 45 point something-something mph. About 30 seconds later, we passed by a hidden checkpoint, but as we went by and waved to them, the navigator said he thought his calculations were correct and we were on time as we should be. We would have been disqualified had we passed that checkpoint at the speeds I had been driving shortly before. At no time had I seen any headlights following me.
We motored on through the night, seeing no traffic in either direction, methodically obeying the rest of the instructions for the rally, passing another hidden checkpoint, and arrived in Los Alamos about dawn where the final checkpoint timed us in and the rally was over. They had a big buffet breakfast spread out in the local community center, but there were only two rally teams there. Myself and my navigator, and another couple who drove a Jaguar 3.8 sedan. He was some sort of rocket scientist for the Atomic Energy Commission, and he had built a crude computer in the Jag located in the trunk. He navigated from the back seat and his wife drove. He had fitted the car with a big, old fashioned aircraft radio compass on the dash, he could feed the speeds into the computer and all his wife had to do was keep the big compass needle pointed to zero degrees. This man and wife team could do rallies with zero error, almost unheard of in those days. The club put them in their own class as none of the rest of us had access to their equipment. They were not eligible for trophies and just did rallies for the fun of it.
The rally master who preceded the course, the Jag couple and my navigator and I waited for over an hour until it became apparent none of the other cars were going to show up. Finally the other rally master who followed the last car, to help in case somebody broke down, showed up and informed us that every other car had followed the unpaved road until it ended at El Vado Reservoir. When they discovered the error, there was no chance to make it up and they all went home. He said there was some rather colorful profanity directed at the crew of the white Austin-Healey with the red side-stripe which led them up that road and which they had passed, furiously going the other way on the ruts. The navigator and I were awarded the trophy for first place with an error of about six minutes late at the final checkpoint—good navigating for the time. There were no other places awarded. The Midnight Ride graphically proved the rule about doing one’s own navigation and not following someone else who may be lost.
Chuck Lunsford
Albuquerque, November 16, 2004
