Hero expands rally road book navigator challenge

• Hero Rally Life Navigator initiative shows people how to read a rally road book

• Virtual challenges on the website are designed across actual rally stages

• The fourth challenge is scheduled to take place on May 23-24

Last month, the Hero MotoSports rally team introduced the Rally Life Navigator, a digital initiative designed to introduce enthusiasts to the road-book navigation aspect of rallying. The manufacturer has also said that since the initiative began, over 1,000 people have participated in it.

How does it work?

The experience is open to everyone and all it requires is for you to register on the website and download Google Earth, which you will be using to plot your road map. One part of the software’s layout comprises a road book on the left side, which looks exactly like the one you would find on a rally motorcycle. The road book includes distance and a compass reading, pictograms that depict the terrain and verbal prompts. Meanwhile, the right side of the window displays the actual terrain, courtesy Google Maps. Your goal is to read the road book and plot your course on the map, from start to finish.

The website also offers a bunch of tutorials that will familiarise you with how to read the road book and on how to go about plotting your way through the region.

What makes this even more interesting is that Hero has been conducting competitions where contestants are to plot their rally routes on the map and submit them. The results are based on accuracy and time taken to complete the challenge.

The best part is that the challenges are all based on actual rally destinations. For instance, in the first three challenges, participants virtually navigated through 89km of the Dakar 2017 route in Paraguay, through Morocco for the second challenge and through 92km in the dunes of Jaisalmer with multiple stages of The Desert Storm Rally for the third challenge.

Hero has just announced that the next challenge has been scheduled for May 23-24, 2020. So if you’d like to give it a crack, go ahead and register on the website.