In a Classic Vermont Mountain Road Rally, Winning Takes Precision and Smarts, Not Speed 

click to enlarge

• Courtesy Of Shoot For Details/Gary Hamilton
• A competitor in the 2022 Great American Mountain Rally Revival

Picture a motorsport in which a 1953 Volkswagen Beetle can smoke a 2018 Porsche Boxster. But to do so, the VW Bug doesn't need a driver who can deftly corner hairpin turns so much as a navigator who's quick with a road map, a stopwatch and a calculator.

In this competition, finishing first can be a disadvantage, and speeding can get a team disqualified. In fact, sometimes a driver's best maneuver is to wait at a stop sign for 10 seconds before moving on.

Welcome to the sport of road rally, where brainpower can beat horsepower and the fast often fall to the fastidious. And whatever you do, don't call it a race.

This week, 20 teams from around North America are coming to Vermont to compete in the 2023 Great American Mountain Rally Revival. The three-day, 400-mile competition takes place entirely on open public roads throughout the state, starting and ending each day at Bolton Valley Resort.

While the "rally" in the name may evoke images of muddy, turbocharged Subarus sailing through the air — that's a different motorsport, called rallying — spectators at this event shouldn't expect to hear engines revving or tires chirping. Competitors' cars, many of them classics from the 1950s, '60s and '70s, only drive between 25 and 42 miles per hour and are never supposed to exceed posted speed limits. Teams meticulously follow driving instructions that take them through farmlands, dirt roads and steep mountain passes. Their goal is to arrive neither early nor late, but exactly on time.

click to enlarge

• Historical Photo Courtesy Of Gary Hamilton
• Rallies in the 1950s were labor intensive, requiring scores of volunteers at checkpoints along the route to time competitors.

"This is about precision driving," said Gary Hamilton, cofounder and rally master of the Great American Mountain Rally Revival. Except for one participant this year who used to drive a taxi, competitors generally aren't professional drivers, Hamilton noted, but "people who have cool vintage cars who don't want to just park them in a field and do a show. They want to drive these cars."

Here's how the rally works: Months in advance, organizers map out and time each day's route with interesting and challenging roads, then create different types of instructions for teams to follow, which are given to competitors shortly before the rally starts each morning. Teams leave one minute apart at precisely recorded times.

Each team consists of a driver and a navigator, the latter of whom reads and interprets the instructions for the driver throughout the day. Drivers may be directed to, say, follow Route 2 for 10 miles at 32 miles per hour, then reduce the speed to 27 miles per hour before turning left onto Lime Kiln Road. Sometimes the instructions are written out; other times they're just a map or illustration with arrows, or a combination of the two.

At locations unknown to the competitors beforehand, the cars will pass a checkpoint, where the timed portion of the rally, called a regularity, begins. During each regularity, the teams must complete this interval of the trip in as close to a predetermined time as possible.

click to enlarge

• Historical Photo Courtesy Of Gary Hamilton
• Competitor plate from 1954

Throughout the day, a team will hit eight to 15 such regularities, whose times are automatically recorded with a GPS-enabled smartphone app in the car. For every second the car is either too slow or too fast in completing a section, the team gets assigned one point. As in golf, the team with the fewest points at the end wins.

"It's a team effort," Hamilton said. "The navigator is really the one who has to have their thinking cap on."

Indeed, while the concept may seem straightforward, doing well requires more than not getting lost or encountering mechanical problems. It's critical that teams read and interpret the instructions as accurately as possible.

Sometimes the instructions include a directive, such as requiring drivers to stop at every covered bridge and wait 20 seconds before proceeding. Other times, teams must remember a prior directive from miles earlier, such as not changing road surfaces from pavement to gravel, even if that's where the map seems to point.

click to enlarge

• Courtesy Of Shoot For Details/Gary Hamilton
• A competitor in the 2022 Great American Mountain Rally Revival

"We don't try to trick people. It's not our intention to get them lost," Hamilton said. "But if somebody isn't paying attention, they're going to make a wrong turn."

If they do, the team must backtrack, calculate how much time they lost, then figure out how to make it up. Invariably, fixing errors requires doing math on the fly. But aside from having a stopwatch and calculator on board, teams aren't permitted to use advanced technologies. These include GPS mapping programs as well as rally computers that can calculate distances down to 1/1,000th of a mile and automatically adjust the car's speed.

"It's like a chess game, without the time to figure out the correct move," said Tim Winker, of Twig, Minn. A rally enthusiast since 1969, Winker, 71, has competed in the Great American Mountain Rally Revival three times. This year, he'll be navigating for driver Bruce Billing of Cape Neddick, Maine, in a 1969 Saab 95.

Though the sport of rally originated in Europe, the Great American Mountain Rally Revival has its roots in New England in the 1950s — hence the "revival" in its name.

click to enlarge

• Historical Photo Courtesy Of Gary Hamilton
• Map of the 1955 rally route

In 1953, a group of mostly Jewish businessmen, all sports car enthusiasts from New York City who'd been excluded from other car clubs because of antisemitism, formed the Motor Sports Club of America. They organized their own hill climbs and other races, many of whose participants had been American soldiers introduced to European sports cars during World War II.

On Thanksgiving Day 1953, the club held its first Great American Mountain Rallye, adopting the traditional European spelling for the sport. The rally took three to four days and covered 1,100 miles. It began in New York City, ran north through New Hampshire and Vermont, crossed the Canadian border at Alburgh, then returned through the Adirondacks to a finish line in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Sixty teams competed the first year, at least half of which were from Europe. The rallye was held four times in the 1950s, and while the routes always changed, "They hit Vermont hard every year," said Hamilton, who's acquired original documentation, maps and photos from the 1950s events. Because rallies were always held Thanksgiving week, drivers frequently encountered bad weather and muddy or snow-covered roads, especially on the Lincoln and Appalachian gaps.

In those days, every competitor received a 1953 Mobil Oil map, the old-school paper variety that were handed out at gas stations. Typically, it took two maps to cover all the routes, Hamilton said, and the instructions specified that no roads could be used that weren't on the maps. Competitors drove 24 hours a day, often using flashlights in the car to navigate at night.

Checkpoints were staffed by timekeepers who parked on the side of the road with stopwatches and time cards. But unlike today's rallies, Hamilton noted, the speeds that those drivers were directed to follow were "quite brisk." Suffice it to say, posted speed limits were frequently exceeded.

click to enlarge

• Historical Photo Courtesy Of Gary Hamilton
• In the 1950s, the Great American Mountain Rallye was held Thanksgiving week, when inclement weather often forced organizers to find alternate routes.

The last Great American Mountain Rally was held in 1956. In 2018, Hamilton and a friend, Steve McKelvie, a rally enthusiast who competed in Europe, resurrected it. After McKelvie died unexpectedly in January 2019, Hamilton, a sports car enthusiast himself, decided to keep it going.

Among the many challenges teams face is that the rally, held midweek, happens on roads that are open to other traffic. Cars inevitably encounter obstacles that slow them down and throw off their timing.

Jeff Hassenfeld has learned to expect the unexpected. This year the 63-year-old from Selkirk, N.Y., will compete in his fourth Great American Mountain Rally Revival. He's driving a 1972 BMW 2002 with his navigator, Don Marr, of Seattle, Wash.

Once, Hassenfeld came upon a backhoe whose operator had stopped in the middle of the road to talk to a driver going in the opposite direction. Another time, his car was passing a horse farm at 25 miles per hour when a rider lost control of his horse, which bolted in front of the car. Fearing he'd hit the animal if he slammed on the brakes, Hassenfeld drove onto a neighbor's lawn instead.

"We maintained our speed and didn't hit anybody," Hassenfeld said. "Even at those low speeds, it's still really fun."

The Great American Mountain Rally Revival may not give spectators the adrenaline rush of a Formula 1 or NASCAR race, but antique car buffs will relish the vintage vehicles. This year's field includes a 1930 Chrysler C70 Roadster, a 1959 Jaguar Mark 1 and a 1953 Sunbeam Alpine. The last of those is almost identical to the car that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly drove in Alfred Hitchcock's 1955 movie To Catch a Thief.

click to enlarge

• Historical Photo Courtesy Of Gary Hamilton
• Competitors in the 1955 Great American Mountain Rallye arriving in Lake Placid, N.Y.

The '53 Alpine has its own history with this rally. As Hamilton noted, in 1953 and 1954, Rootes Motors, an English auto manufacturer, sent its rally team to the U.S. to compete with the same model. This year's Alpine, which is being shipped to Vermont from California, will be driven by Jim Pohl, with his wife, Joyce Mordenti, as navigator.

Perhaps because many people's earliest memories of driving and navigating were formed during family road trips, it's not surprising that a number of the competitors are related. This year's teams include siblings Scott and Lisa Rabideau, driving a 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300D; Susan and Carl Fernyak, another sibling team, driving a 2018 Porsche Boxster S; Ed and Doug Sain, a father and son driving a 1995 Toyota Celica GT convertible; and Paul Joubert and Beverly Hand, a couple from Canton, Mass., driving a 1965 Oldsmobile 442. According to the couple's bio, this is Joubert and Hand's second rally together, which they're doing "just to test the marriage again!"

Clearly, some competitors are in it to win, while other simply enjoy adding a challenge to a scenic drive.

"You have to concentrate so hard on what you're doing that it blocks out everything else," Hassenfeld said. "The day flies by because you're so in the moment.

"We're doing this really cool, different thing with really cool cars," he added. "For me, it doesn't get much better than that."