CEDAR BLUFF — Wayne Hensley, 68, emailed the organizers of Rally US on Tuesday evening with his drive time from his driveway to a restaurant in Alcoa, 24 minutes 18 seconds, and asked where it would be posted.
Hensley has eaten breakfast at the same booth in Alcoa with four former co-workers since 2019. He leaves at 7:10, takes Pellissippi Parkway to Alcoa Highway, and stops the stopwatch on his phone when he turns the car off. He read that Rally US will run timed stages and thought the organizers might want something to compare theirs against.
The reply came Wednesday morning and thanked him for his interest in attending as a spectator. It came with a spectator guide and a coupon for ten percent off a souvenir cap. Hensley printed the guide and went through it twice. There was no place in it for a time.
“I figured the subject line got cut off on their end,” he said. “So now it says ‘Stage time,’ with the date, because they probably get a lot of these. And I put the bus in the body. There was a school bus on Pellissippi that morning and I left that out, and I don’t want them thinking it’s the road.”
His wife, Joyce, said she has told him the first email went to a general address. Hensley said he understood that, but it was the address on the website.
He plans to send a time every week through August. The cap coupon is in the glove compartment with the oil change receipts.