TSD Rally Home of the Pacific Northwest
Join us Friday the 12th for If It Looks Like A Duck.
This is a traditional Friday Nighter beginning at the Eastgate Park & Ride, 14200 SE Eastgate Way in Bellevue. Registration opens by 6:45pm and cars begin to depart at 7:30pm. Finish is 10pm in the Issaquah Highlands. The rally is slightly more than 2 hours in length and sunset will be after 9pm. All cars should reach the finish before dark unless there is a particularly large turnout.
Just under three weeks to the NWRC June Friday Nighter on 6/12/26. Join us for If It Looks Like A Duck, presented by FOOTZ. This is the third event in the NWRC 2026 Championship.
Registration opens at 6:45pm in the NE corner of Eastgate Park&Ride. The entry fee is $30, cash only. Q&A meeting at 7:15pm. Cars depart beginning at 7:31pm.
Scoring will use the Richta GPS Checkpoint system, so be sure you have the app loaded on your smart phone. Checkout the Documents section of this site for the Richta introductory guide and also grab the NWRC General Instructions. There are no changes to the Generals for 2026, if you have a 2025 copy.
Six days out. The NWRC Friday Nighter season continues with “Duck Around & Dine Out” on Friday the 12th.
Will Fall approaching fast, I felt it was worth another run over the DADO course to review visibility and traffic conditions. Past the odometer check the initial legs run on narrow roads with substantial tree cover. By the time I got to the Snoqualmie valley it was quite dark. Can’t blame a cloudy sky because the Harvest Moon was out on prominent display.
It’s interesting how different some roads look and feel when illuminated by headlights instead of the sun. Areas that felt open and plagued by a low speed limit during the day became more challenging. Likewise, areas where CASTs were set low to account for other road users were now empty.
As a result of last night’s review I made a few adjustments and the necessary updates to instructions, calculations, and checkpoint slips.
Some new details about the September Friday Nighter:
The event is trying two new things.
Most Friday Nighters have leg #1 begin at the Park&Ride and end at a timed checkpoint by having the odometer check (a transit) and the competitive portion (a regularity) stuck together as one leg. The downside to that method is when a team of first-timers don’t realize they should stop at the end of the odometer check. To help prevent this common mistake DADO will have a RESTART at the end of the opening transit zone.
Off-course markers used to be a common way to advise teams they had wandered off the planned route. The markers were typically a placard with a red X. They suffer from many limitations. There must be a place to put up the marker. That place needs to have room for the pace car to stop and put up the marker. It needs to actually be seen and recognized by the lost team. It does not provide any clues about how to find the correct route and needs to be retrieved when the event is over. DADO is going to try using geo-fencing. A quantity of Richta route controls have been strategically placed to stop teams from wandering outside of the rally boundaries. The control slip for these will identify it as an Off Course Marker. There is no penalty score for finding the marker. If you encounter one, I’d definitely like to hear your feedback about this experiment.
Like “Just Redux” in June, each timed section will begin at a RESTART. Using a RESTART on each leg helps maintain car spacing. When you reach a CHECKPOINT open the control slip (by tapping it on the displayed list). The slip will tell you what NRIs to execute to reach the next RESTART where you will get your restart time.
I hope you’ll be there on Friday.
(pictures courtesy of N. Hightower)
Rallymaster (and NWRC President) John Humphrey writes:
First, I would like to thank Mike Daily, our NWRC Vice President for all his help in measuring, pace assistance, scoring, and trophy making. Secondly, the world is an imperfect place, which brings us to rally night. I had a premonition the night before that there would be a ‘road closed’ on the rally. I attribute this to my Native American ancestry. I was so taken by this thought that I wanted to drive the course on Friday before the event but didn’t have the time due to other priorities. And, finding an impaled dead bat (most likely collected during our rally checkout) in the grille of my X3 at rally registration was confirmation of an imperfect night ahead.
My premonition was right as there was an emergency road closure for a bridge repair on SE 156th ST which was announced late Thursday 9/7 and effective Friday 8AM 9/8!! The Leg 1 Checkpoint was on that road. This forced us to throw Leg 1. Mike, on the fly, figured out how we could potentially save Leg 2, but several cars were already beyond the selected restart point. Hence, Leg 2 was thrown also!!
We did send out Broadcast Messages however at the end found out, that due to the differences in Android/iPhone functionality/behavior and the issue of gaps in cellular coverage for the variety of open vs. wooded vs. commercial areas we drove through, not everyone received the messages in a timely manner or at all.
I hope you were able to view all the wildlife that SE King County has to offer – a small posse of Elk (12?) between NRI 35 and 36 (258 AVE SE); a jogging coyote after NRI 56; and ‘observing raccoons’ watching us near NRI 69 and NRI 72!! Fortunately, the suicidal deer encountered on checkout just after NRI 56 were no shows!!
Anyway, despite the turn of bad luck for Legs 1 and 2, I hope you enjoyed the balance of the rally.
Greg Hightower is the Rally Master for October and I know he will have an entertaining rally for all of us!!
Again, thank you all for attending and understanding that life happens.
JRH III