REVIVAL OF THE RALLY
Great American Mountain auto competition will return this fall
Two mouthfuls of gum and enthusiastic chewing: That’s what Peter Bullard and George P. Fogg III were hoping would allow them to avoid disaster on the 1955 Great American Mountain Rallye Automobile Endurance Run.
The rally (called a rallye back then) was a roughly 1,200-mile, three-day competition to gauge driving and navigational skills as well as a car’s mechanical robustness, which was not a given almost 70 years ago. Not long after the first cars came the first car races and then rallies such as this one, which has been revived recently and will return this fall.
The 1955 route was to follow some of the steepest and most remote roads in New England, all of which organizers hoped would be covered in snow or smothered with mud. Bullard and Fogg’s car was among five dozen or so that left New York City that November day.
“We were hot to trot,” said Bullard, now 90 and living in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Not even his wife, Joan, who was still in a hospital five days after giving birth to a son, stood in his way. She urged her husband to go.
However, the hot-trotting was endangered. The oil pressure in their 1953 Jaguar XK 120 Coupe was dropping. The team spotted a gas station, slipped into a bay and quickly pulled the door down.
Because reliability was a part of the test, the organizers put seals on the hoods; breaking them would mean a penalty. But in the long tradition of motor sports chicanery, Bullard and Fogg had previously reworked their hood so it could be opened without breaking the seals. The next step was jamming that wad of gum into a hole, adding oil and hoping for the best.
Then, they were on the road again. The goal was to go from checkpoint to checkpoint, averaging specific speeds. Those speeds were always below the posted speed limits, but that could be challenging because of factors like the weather, the dark or road conditions. Arriving early or late would result in penalty points.
Fogg drove. He was an experienced racer from Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and his job was to
cope with the blind corners, slippery surfaces, poor visibility and bad things that can happen when the laws of physics work against you.
Fogg loved driving, and Bullard had a romance with numbers. In addition to following the route, he had to figure out how long it should take to cover distances at the constantly changing prescribed speeds and how to compensate for things like slowing at a tight corner or in heavy snow.
“I was good with slide rules, pencil and paper and really enjoyed it,” he said.
The first Great American Mountain Rally was organized in 1953 by the Motor Sports Club of America, which was founded by Robert S. Grier and based in New York. The rally was also sanctioned by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, a prestigious European motorsports organization. This was the federation’s first rally in the United States, which would have carried a lot of weight with the fledgling motorsports community, said John Buffum, an internationally known rally champion in Colchester, Vermont.
The event was held for four years and attracted world-class drivers. In 1956, Juan Manuel Fangio — considered by many to be a racer without equal — waved the cars off in New York. In 1954 Stirling Moss, a British racing icon, entered driving a Sunbeam Alpine. A year later, he would win the Italian Mille
Miglia race, covering 1,000 miles of public roads at an average speed of 98 mph.
Moss’ teammate, in another Sunbeam Alpine, was Sheila van Damm, described by The New York Times as “the top British woman in auto racing in the 1950s.”
The rally always started late in November, increasing the chance of bad weather. In 1954, there was mud and snow, van Damm wrote in her book “No Excuses.” In Vermont, a dirt road was a “quagmire,” she wrote, and her co-driver, Anne Hall, “popped out and stood on the rear bumper, bouncing up and down to try and give the wheels some grip.” Van Damm also competed in the 1953 event, which had such good weather that she complained it was not challenging.
Bad weather could, indeed, be trouble, Bullard said. In 1956, he and Fogg were stopped in their rear-wheel drive 1957 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider at the bottom of a steep, narrow Vermont pass, the Lincoln Gap. They were putting on chains when a Saab 93 puttered up. Saab wasn’t selling cars in the United States, but the automaker entered the rally anyway. The 93 was the ultimate in quirky: a bulbous nose, front-wheel drive and a three-cylinder, 33-horsepower engine.
The Saab driver looked up the mountain road and then turned the Saab so that the rear was impertinently pointing up the hill.
“I knew what they were going to
do,” Bullard said. By going up backward, the Saab would have the best traction because the full weight of the engine would be pushing down on the wheels with the power.
“We were boggled they felt they could handle it without chains and backwards at a fairly high speed,” Bullard said. “It was just wonderful to see.” The driver, Bob Wehman, and the navigator, Louis Braun, went on to win, a victory that helped launch Saab in the United States.
The Great American Mountain Rally Revival was held again in 2019, canceled in 2020 because of COVID-19 and run again last year. It’s now scheduled for October, roaming roads in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. There is no longer the bad-weather, do-ordie element because few owners of vintage vehicles are willing to jeopardize them. There are other events that involve tours with participants simply and calmly following a route. But the pressure of following the route, coping with the unforeseen and being on time makes the mountain rally more demanding and interesting, said Tim Winker, a rallyist from Saginaw, Minnesota.
“We get to drive our cars. We like the history of it,” said Carl Helmetag of Riverside, Rhode Island, who has participated in all three revivals, most recently driving a 1970 Volvo 121 Amazon. “It’s a community that enjoys keeping these cars on the road.”