The spirit of rally in a musical world
I have always struggled to come to terms with competitions. Surely I like Ralliart a lot and their slogan back then was 'spirit of competition'. That hasn't made competition easier for me to accept nor has weakened my interest in MItsubishi rally cars.
And of course rally in its modern forms is a collection of competitive sports. So I need some figureing out. I need to figure out the reasons for my dislike for competition, my passion for some of those competitive sports, and my lack of passion for some others.
Rally, or more specifically, modern special stage rally, is a form of time attack racing. And the reason I place it on the less competitive spectrum of racing is due to the fact that participants don't directly drive against each other simultaneously. The asynchronous nature really takes out a lot of the competitiveness.
Not completely though. And I don't think it's ever possible to shun competition completely. Similarly do I view violence and conflicts: they will always be there, just against different targets and in different magnitudes. Actually I would consider the terms competition and conflict interchangeable to an extent, with violence being an option to implement, competition, conflict, war, fight, struggle, whatever name that concept bears.
In my opinion much of the competition in rallying is not directed against fellow competitors. There's more primal struggle against the road, the weather, the sunlight or the lack of it, the elements. A competition against the less animated environmental aspects of the world.
One thing I realise about such a competiton is how difficult it is to declare a winner. For rallying, we can have a rulebook that basically says, 'the fastest bloke is the winner'. But that's the rule for the inter-human competition. And inter-human competitions can have rules and thus winners is because all participant are human, and they will conform to the rules. Just a side note, I'm not xenophobic, so any alien or probably intelligent robot who wants to play by human rules is considered human as well here.
But there is much more that doesn't give the slightest fuck to human rules.