Did you get bitten by the motorsport bug after DTS or f1 fandom in general and now you want to watch more cars driving around? You should consider rally! It’s fun! I don’t hate any of the drivers yet! There are narratives! Let me tell you all about it! With words and pictures!
Awkward Memorial Preface
What is rally?
Driver/Co-driver Dynamics
Hyundai
Toyota
M-Sport
WRC2
Other People
This multi-part primer aspires to the era of livejournal canon primers with the hopes of there someday being multiple pages of fic in the World Rally Championship RPF tag on ao3. I started following the WRC this year, in the middle of Rally Sweden. Since then I semi obsessively watched all of the event highlights available on WRC+, which goes back to 2014. I’ve gone onto some weird Instagram spirals and learned very many facts. But I’m still new to this, and this primer is definitely a work in progress, and I would love for people who know more than me to come into my inbox with contradictory opinions and things I should know.
It was suggested that I start off by explaining why I think rally is cool, because I DO think it’s SO COOL. That's below the cut.
I started watching the WRC in the middle of February, and it’s May now, and I watched SO MANY HIGHLIGHTS, and have written 20k about these dudes being married in space. It’s taken over a big chunk of my brain, and I’m really happy about that! It’s fun!
I said I didn’t hate any of the drivers kind of flippantly, but that’s true, and really refreshing. The driver I like the least it’s because he’s annoyingly good, and I have both respect and fondness for him. There’s a lot of camaraderie in the WRC. They aren’t racing wheel to wheel, which means it’s a different sort of competition, it’s all down to your abilities and the conditions and the reliability of the car, not what the other guy does. It’s not as glamorous as F1, they’re out in the middle of nowhere driving narrow mountain roads.
Which — I think it’s just really nice to look at. It’s fun to watch cars slide around through really beautiful scenery. Rally at its best is beautiful on a cinematic level, which is a corny thing to say, but also true. I’m not a car fucker at all, but getting to see rally cars jump is amazing.
I like that it’s kind of DIY — it’s way more professional and organized than it used to be, but they still have to fix the cars themselves if there’s a problem, they’re getting muddy changing tires on the side of the road.
Trying to explain what makes rally so interesting I am going to defer to nine time WRC champion Sebastien Loeb, who has done all different kinds of racing, but says that rally is his favorite because as a driver it’s the most enjoyable amount of knowledge to have. In circuit racing the driver learns the track, Loeb thinks it gets boring. In something fully off-road the driver doesn't know what’s off the next hill, and can never push to the maximum because there's too much uncertainty about what you’re driving into. Rallying you know the road a bit, you have an idea of what comes next, so you can make an informed decision about how hard to push, but you’re never sure enough to be fully comfortable. Rallying is a combination of intense planning and dealing with the unexpected, which creates a really exciting competition to watch.
I went for some highlights on youtube to tempt you into paying attention, and couldn’t find the ideal compilation, but here are some things to try!
This video is a collection of dramatic moments from 2022.
This is just 35 minutes of cars going by without any commentary. I did not watch all of that, and don’t think you should, but give it a try!
Okay so I made a list of 30 (well, 29 actually) prompts I am releasing into the wild. The point of this is that at least one of the participants are not having a good time.
It has 30 prompts for November but feel free to write and post whenever, but please add the tag #No one nuts November or #NoonenutsNovember wherever you post. You do not have to @ or credit this blog if you use any of these prompts.
(Text version under the cut)
1. Safeword
2. Sub/dom drop
3. Loosing intrest halfway through
4. Trying something that doesn't work
5. Medical emergency (bonus points: it happens during bondage)
6. Bad/failed orgasm
7. Should have safeworded
8. "Wait, it's not supposed to hurt?"
9. "Let's never try that again."
10. Sex so bad they break up after
11. Realistic shower sex
12. Incompatible kinks
13. Threw up on that thang
14. Can't get hard/wet/aroused
15. Says wrong persons name during sex
16: ugly crying/overwhelmed
17: "I remembered you being better at this"/"I'm not impressed."/"I've had better."/"You're not hung chill"
18: Allergic reaction/cut off circulation
19. Dirty talk/degradation gets too real
20. Ignored/missed a safeword
21. Random horny confession that kills the mood for the other person/people
22. "No really, that's not going to fit."
23. Fire alarm goes off/interrupted by a third party
24. Pushing themselves into sex they aren't ready for
25. Sex toy gets stuck
26. Only one person having fun/agreeing to boring sex
27. Couple brings in a bad 3rd
28. Sex in a bad location
29. Sex so bad it kills you/one of the participants dies
"When you’re in a fight as bitter and as important as this one, against an enemy, so much bigger, so much stronger than you - well. To find out that you have a friend you never knew existed - It’s the best thing in the world."
It's perfectly natural for autists to like trains because trains are like our older brothers, to whom we can look up. Trains are big and strong creatures; unstoppable and proud, but they are elegant and logical. Not human but like humanity they are higher than beasts. The train is like a stoic sword hero who does what must be done and whose will must be respected, for his course cannot be altered. A train is an adult man with asperger's who has a job. And he's faster than everybody. I could be like him some day.
One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.
