General Comments

We hope you all enjoyed the event. Having gone through all your comments raised on the route card solutions and the forum, a few general areas, in no particular order, may benefit from some explanation:

1) The introduction of AutoP(i)lot has made it easier for you, the competitor, to plot the route without having to identify a hundred or more points on the map, like you did on the last event, or having to count churches and parts of letters crossing roads like you did a couple of years ago. However, this has raised other issues. For example, AP knows which roads / streets are one-way - you can't see these at the OS 50,000 scale level.

2) The mapping software does not include all white roads, or, indeed, full lengths of all white roads, requiring you to manual mark your route by switching AP off. This causes issues for the organisers too, as a route that looks like a nice plot on the map becomes unworkable as far as AP is concerned. Many re-routes from the intended route , prior to publication, were therefore required, and unfortunately, the odd one crept through to the event. This was also brought about by our wish that much of the plotting could have done off a printed map, rather than having to stare at a computer screen all the time.

3) AP relies on the geocoded points from Google Maps, and sometimes these are wrong. For example, occasionally there is a rogue point which causes the route between your marked points to invisibly backtrack on itself. Normally this is not a problem unless this occurs near a PC which can result in an erroneous approach or departure. Several PCs had to be moved during the event to overcome this. We'll look at ways of programming round this or just be more diligent on the location of PCs.

4) The event was designed such that you had to progress through the Route Cards in order, just like you would do on a proper rally. So, if you got stuck, you had to cut your losses and move on to the next section - again, just like you would do in reality. This also helps to space out the inflow of results to the organisers, rather than having a great rush of solutions at the end of the event.

5) The time delay in responding to queries can be too long for some of you. Sadly, we cannot operate a 24/7 call centre service based in foreign lands, and some queries require route card and technical application investigation to solve.

6) You are all very able competitors, and route cards have to be set to achieve a sensible result, and to stretch your capabilities. On this event, there is no doubt that a good result was obtained as one competitor ended up with a score of zero! Even the hardest route cards were cleaned by many of you.

7) You were introduced to solving route cards as "Regularities" and hope that you enjoyed this. This area stills needs further development to generate a better spread of penalties.

8) If you have any ideas for improving the format or methodology of the event, then we would very much like to hear from you. In particular, with regard to "Regularities", the route cards could be made less difficult if we can make this work nicely. Only RC10 really generated the right result and look how much work you had to do. Nevertheless, we think the experiment was worthwhile.

9) We think the "Re-Do" facility ought to be revised to limit the number of re-tries you can do. Some competitors were re-submitting every few minutes as they kept tweaking their route until they got it right. Not as intended and this clogged up our inbox with literally hundreds of redundant solution emails.

The results are now provisional and you have until 13:00 on June 8 to raise any issues. Please ONLY raise these via the new topic POST PROVISIONAL RESULT QUERIES HERE on the forum.

Many thanks for your support.

Chris Towers (& "Crow")
June 1, 2012 @ 13:00

RESULTS ARE NOW FINAL

The links below will take you to the Route Card master solutions (click on the blue circles for PC numbers).

ROUTE CARD SOLUTIONS:     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9     10     11     12