For most people, motorsport means strapping yourself into a car and driving as fast as possible over set course, the fastest competitor being the winner. However, this is not the only form that motorsport takes. There is another discipline which involves fast thinking more than fast driving, a discipline which was in fact the precursor to the modern day rally. This discipline is Trialing.
The basic idea behind a trial is to follow a set, correct route at the correct speed. The trick comes in the fact that the instructions (the "CRI's") which are handed out by organisers for you to follow are faulty, and while following these CRI's will enable you to reach the finish, it will not be via the correct route. Instead the competitor must apply a set of rules while following the CRI's to enable them to find the deliberate mistakes ("traps") and follow the correct route.
Where do you find out what these rules are? The rules for trialing are set out in Appendix 5, Schedule T of MotorSport Manual 27 (starting page 215), but unless you are confident in jargon and want to have your head put into a spin I would suggest that you give it a miss at this point and just read on. The other place to find the rules for a particular trial are in the Additional Supplementary Regulations ("ASR's") for the event. These tell you what you should do when encountering particular situations, but beware, the ASR's may themselves have traps for you to find. Confused yet? It isn't quite as bad as it seems, you just have to apply the golden rules of trialing: (1) always use your commonsense, and (2) always take any instructions given literally.
Okay then, how does the organiser know that you have followed the correct route? They could put an impartial observer in each competitor's car, but that would be impractical. Instead the organisers put a set of signs ("checks") at intervals along the correct route which the competitors must spot and list on a sheet in correct order.
As alluded to at the beginning of this article the fastest competitor will not necessarily be the winner. The winner will be the competitor who has stayed closest to the required set speed and followed the correct route most closely. To work out who has succeeded in doing this the best, penalty points are handed out for being late or early to specified points along the route and for missing out checks. Generally the following penalties apply:
| Early or late arrival at a time check (by more than 30 seconds) | 1/10th point per second, up to a maximum of 180 points (ie: 6 points per minute) | |
| Failing to pass and/or list a check in the correct order | 60 points |
As you can work out, the penalty for missing one check is equivalent to being about 10 minutes early or late to a time check, and you can only lose the equivalent number of points to three checks regardless of how early or late you are. In other words, timing is important, but not as important as finding all the checks. There are other penalties which you could incur but are reasonably rare in basic club trials. These are listed on page 230 of MotorSport Manual 27.
Has all this put you off yet? I hope not, because trialing can be a very enjoyable discipline of motorsport to compete in. Read on and you can find out a bit more about each aspect of trialing.
Introduction | En
Route | Traps | Example One | Example Two
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