Question: What do you do when you’re 15, about to embark on qualifying for your all-important driver’s license and need some 50 hours of real-world, behind-the-wheel experience in a vehicle with a responsible, licensed adult in the passenger seat?
Answer: You run SCCA® RoadRallies.
And that’s exactly what Central Illinois Region’s Lucy Schnippel has been doing this spring.
To date, Lucy, 15, with her dad, Kurt Schnippel in the navigator’s seat of the family’s Chevy Silverado, has run five RoadRallies since the beginning of the year, four Regional events (hosted by Southern Indiana, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and St. Louis Regions) plus Milwaukee Region’s award-winning Roads Scholar National Course Rally, which, according to the pair, was a huge step for them, having never run a National RoadRally, or even an SCCA Course rally, save for St. Louis Region’s Saturday afternoon Rally School #2 just a week before Roads Scholar.
Altogether, Lucy has logged more than 20 hours of RoadRally competition that applies to her required 50 hours of on-the-road training. (More rally time is anticipated, too, Lucy says, adding that she completed the classroom portion of her training last summer.)
“Definitely,” rallying is making her a better driver, Lucy says. “It makes you think, and it puts you in weird situations that you normally wouldn’t get into. So, down the line, if I get into that kind of situation again, it won’t be a big deal because I’ve encountered it before, and I’ll know what to do.”
Plus, she adds, “It’s fun – and it creates memories.”
The topic of RoadRallying arose in the Schnippel family last fall as Lucy was approaching her 15th birthday and had finished her eighth year of being part of a traveling youth softball team.
“After softball was done, I asked my dad, ‘Can’t we do something else?’” she recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s do rallying.’”
RoadRally, it turns out, was not an entirely alien idea. Lucy is a motorsports fan (F1, MotoGP, WEC, IMSA), and before the advent of herself and her older sister, Kayla, dad (Kurt) and mom (Peggy) rallied together, with Peggy in the driver’s seat. “Our last rally together was the Johnny Appleseed in 2004,” Kurt explains, “when Peggy was pregnant with Kayla.”
For Kurt, RoadRallying with Lucy is more than helping his daughter qualify for her Illinois operator’s permit or simply refreshing his navigator skills, it also is an asset in building a father-daughter relationship. “You must focus and communicate. You must talk to one another,” he says, “and this is good.” This applies, not only to the RoadRally itself, he adds, but to the entire road-trip weekend. (With Lucy, he agrees that also it is “the memories you create.”)
(Lucy Schnippel, with her dad Kurt in the navigator's seat, use the family's pickup to compete in SCCA RoadRallies.)
How have the pair been doing in the RoadRallies themselves? Well, Southern Indiana’s Terry Davis Rally on March 17 was an, ah, “learning experience,” they report, laughing. Milwaukee Region’s April 7 Spring Scamper was a first experience with a large field (29 teams); Indy’s Dogwood Days on April 27 netted them a first win; St. Louis Region’s Rally School #2 on June 1 offered an introduction to Course rallying, as well as an opportunity to test their MoJo TSD Navigator app; and Milwaukee Region’s Roads Scholar on June 8 proved they could run a classic daylong National and do well.
“We had been warned that it was going to be really hard for us,” Lucy says about Roads Scholar, “but it wasn’t as hard as we were told. We liked it, and we had a good time.”
So, what’s next for Lucy? Well, more RoadRallies, of course, she says, also her junior year in high school where she’s a member of the tennis team – then maybe, just maybe, down the line, “an F&C license.”
All of that in addition to obtaining that coveted driver’s license, of course.
Photos by James Heine
