Compare and contrast - car time/speed/distance rally and bike backcountry regularity raid.
- Jonathan Binnington
- Jul 20
- 7 min read
This post is intended to outline and explain the important similarities and differences between the established car version of Time Speed Distance regularity rally and the developing motorcycle version, mostly for the benefit of car crews looking to “switch codes”.
There are obvious similarities and differences that require little explanation. There are also significant differences that are less obvious and will generate confusion and frustration if those switching from cars on tarmac to bikes on gravel have to work out the significances by trial and error. The intention here is to shorten the learning curve.
Statement of fact:
Rallyraid motorsport in urbanized European and North American countries is difficult (if not impossible) to organise and stage for the following reasons: land and property ownership, habitation/population/legislation, crowd and spectator control.
Rallysport, by definition does not take place over controlled circuits in closed areas of land upon which many other forms of Motorsport are run.
Full-bore, speed and race events do not mix with habitation and occupation.
It is pointless to search for potential venues for Rallyraid events where none will be found and it ever has been thus….
….Which is why Regularity Rally as a motorsport genre was developed.
Note for the uninitiated.
Regularity Rally synonym: Time Speed Distance (TSD) rally. For motorcycles riding rough roads, “Regularity-Raid” is a term which has been coined.
None of these are to be confused with Tarmac rally, which is a speed event over paved roads.
Contrasting Hierarchies of Principles
Car Regularity Rally is a highly developed, precision motorsport that has evolved a hierarchy of principles that frame the “sport” within the boundaries imposed by the “field of play” (public highways).
Listed in order of importance, most important first they are…
Staying on time. The event is primarily a test of managing the speed of the car, while
Staying on the route. Decoding the roadbook direction instructions which are sometimes cryptic, while
Driving the car. The routes follow roads which are intended for automobile traffic.
The assumption is that the driver of the car is a competent private motorist.
Backcountry motorcycle Regularity-Raid is an emerging motorcycle motorsport genre, developed to provide an experience as close as possible to motorcycle Rallyraid while staying with the boundaries of legal, private motoring. The hierarchy of principles are somewhat different to the car version of this motorsport as a reflection of the different capabilities of off-road motorcycles and the environments they are ridden in.
The hierarchy looks something like this…
Stay on the bike! Motorcycling is a high-skill activity. We do these things not because they are easy but because they are difficult…. (ahem)
Stay on the road! These are not ordinary roads. We are not ordinary road users. We go where few others can!
Stay on the route! An essential part of the sport is reading the roadbook and using the navigation tools (compass, odometer, speedometer and clock) to successfully navigate.
Stay on time…. The event is designed to make consistently low time penalty scores impossible to make (rather like some higher education exams). The winner is the rider with the lowest scores, not the rider with zero scores.
The assumption is that riders of road legal, backcountry-specific motorcycles are competent off-road riders who have practiced appropriate skill and ride these terrains as recreation at other times.
Basic event principles. Cars and bikes alike.
Set a course over public “rights of way”
Stipulate conditions that require the course to be driven/ridden in a manner that doesn’t break motoring laws
All vehicles are to be “road legal”
All riders/drivers are to be licenced and insured as motoring public road users
Develop a system that monitors riders and drivers behaviour over the course
Develop a measurement system that enables competition scoring
Use a notation system that describes the route by a method other than following a map - a roadbook comprised of road junction sketches (tulip diagrams), compass headings and distance travelled measurements.
So far, so good. This is where the similarities end though. I’ll start with the obvious differences….
Car vs. Bike (Der!)
Driver and navigator crew vs. Multitasking rider
Easily driven paved roads vs. Backcountry gravel roads that may be (probably are) “challenging”
The first two points are blindingly obvious and don’t require much explanation.
The third point does require some explanation if you are not a regular traveller of the hinterlands. The backcountry gravel roads are primarily built by the logging industry for the extraction of cut timber. The vehicles used by industry are not your usual road-going cars and light trucks. They are probably more closely related to military vehicles, heavy all-wheel drive semis (articulated lorries) and track-laying vehicles of one description or another.
In British Columbia, these roads are often given the destination of Public Highway.
As such, these roads are not built for speed, they are built for one purpose - getting industrial vehicles in to an area in order to get “product” out, and are built at the minimum cost required to get that job done. The roads are built of compacted blast-rock (typically granite-like rocks on Vancouver Island), sharp angular gravel ranging in size from 4 inches down to grit. Highly abrasive and not kind to soft rubber street tyres.
These roads would be car-breakers, especially if driven at anything greater than a walking pace. For nimble motorcycles with up to 30cm of suspension travel and of course single wheel track, it is reasonably easy to ride at street speeds.
This leads on to…
Speed principles
Speed (and distance) measurements
Ambitions of precision
Time measurement
One of the fundamentals of driving a car TSD rally is that the driver endeavours to drive each leg at the speed indicated in the roadbook as a steady speed.
There are a number of ways event organisers attempt to monitor the consistency of speed, by using a GPS monitoring system to register real-time, moment by moment speeds or by having unannounced time controls along each leg that monitor in-leg speeds. It is (reasonably) easy to drive a car at a constant speed over paved roads. Stopping for road junctions adds some complications that the navigator with a stopwatch can overcome.
Given the fact that car TSD events are held over roads that can be expected to carry non-event traffic and that traffic may impede the progress of TSD traffic, crews may be allowed to claim “time allowances” to offset any time lost by getting caught up in other people’s journeys.
In contrast, backcountry motorcycle rallies have well defined starts and ends to each route leg but the terrain between the start and finish can vary greatly making it intentionally impossible to ride at a constant speed. Riders know (can work out from the roadbook) how long each leg is and they know what the average target speed for each leg is. They can also expect some portions of each leg to be sufficiently difficult for it to be impossible to ride at the target average speed and other portions of the same leg can be ridden at speeds above the target average speed. The rider then has the task of managing their speed so that they reach the next Time Control at the target time.
This speed management can be achieved by either a seat-of-the-pants estimation of time spent at less than the set speed compensated for by exceeding the set average for sufficient time to offset the slower speed…
Or
By way of a dashboard mounted clock running to internet time, complex mental arithmetic can be carried out to calculate times and speeds over distances. This isn’t meant to be easy!
Of course this all hinges on distance measurement.
The car people have a choice of established classes that use a range of different odometers with different degrees of precision, and one of the jobs of the navigator in the car is to make distance adjustment calculations to inform navigation decisions. One of the preliminary jobs on a car TSD is to drive the “calibration” leg to work out the adjustment factor to get the car odometer to agree with the roadbook distance measurements.
In contrast, the bike people make use of a GPS odometer which features as one of the functions of smartphone rally roadbook reader apps. Catch is, they are never as accurate as riders hope they should be. The empirical solution to this wandering odometer issue is to reset the odometer every time a “waypoint of significance” is encountered - an obvious road junction, a bridge or some other impossible-to-mistake landmark.
As an aside, the root cause of the GPS odo inaccuracy remains uncertain, although trials with remote GPS receivers feeding data into smartphones will be conducted to determine whether the GPS accuracy of smartphones is improved.
Car TSD courses are set using (usually) highly calibrated, accurate and precise odometers capable of measuring to within feet per mile - say one part in a thousand.
Odometers of such precision and accuracy do not exist for motorcycles. Instead roadbook distances are calculated within GIS (Geographical Information System) computer apps that use geometric calculations to deduce distances between waypoints. These measurements are never quite as accurate as those obtained by precision wheel-driven odometers. But, there is no alternative for bikes - yet…
While car crews have the opportunity of driving a “calibration leg”, bikers have to reset their odometer to the roadbook distance every time they pass an incontrovertible landmark. In some ways the distance-measuring task for bikers is simplified as there are not continuous calculations required to correct the car odometer to the roadbook data.
Ambitions of elapsed time-in-leg precision.
Combine varying speeds in legs with challenges posed by mental arithmetic calculations while riding a bike over difficult terrain while decoding a roadbook without the aid of an “average speedometer” and it is easy to see where fairly large time penalty scores come from.
The intention in the motorcycle version of this sport is that riders will generate fairly large penalty scores. If you are accustomed to scoring low or zero scores in cars, do not be upset if your scores on bikes runs to several thousand seconds over a three day event.
A 3000 TP score is of course 50 minutes, spread over 500 miles and 50 timed legs works out to 60 seconds per leg, which would probably be good enough to win the event!
Tie breakers will definitely not be needed.
It is inevitable that different roadbook writers have different styles and ways of expressing instructions. There is perhaps more standardization to car TSD roadbooks compared to those written for bike events, given that many more examples have been written by many more authors. This is of course a developing topic.
Also, given a entry of a given number of cars in a field takes up more room in car parks than the same number of bikes, the organisation of car event starts and restarts need to be much more orderly making bike starts appear chaotic and a little “rock & roll”. In practice, riders know what is expected of them and follow the instructions given without breaking down into chaos.
The take-home message is motorcycle TSD Regularity Raid is a motorcycle motorsport in its own right, related to car versions of regularity rally but with its own unique features and style.
If you ride an off-road bike off road, you might like to give it a go!
JDB 20/7/25
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