My involvement as a competitor and director of the Alpine Rally spanned the period during which it evolved into a true special stage event, somewhat in parallel with the evolution of most major rallies during that period. While director, I can claim to have introduced a number of important innovations, some of which persisted into the future with the Alpine and other events.
The 1973 Alpine Rally was the last to be directed by the inimitable Bruce Ford, who I believe had directed most of the Alpine Rallies since the early 1960s, together with other Alpine stalwarts such as Tony Theiler and Ian Wilson. Some of Bruce’s earlier events were not only long and arduous treks through the Victorian Alps, but often involved map reading. All were, of course, timed to the minute. By the early 1970s the Alpine had started to use the myriad of roads in the various pine plantations around Bright, Myrtleford and Beechworth, including some considerable daylight sections.
The 1973 Alpine was also my first. I competed with David Bond in the Mk II Cortina. This was when the Alpine fully adopted Bright as its home, with all three divisions starting and finishing there. The Saturday and Sunday daylight divisions comprised many spectator friendly stages in the nearby pine plantations. The two daylight divisions were similar (much of Sunday was the reverse of Saturday), with 3 stages in Two Mile Creek Plantation, 4 in Ovens, and 6 in the Merriang, Hurdle Creek, Running Creek Plantation complex. Sunday had a final stage in Two Mile Creek I believe. The long night division went via Mount Hotham, the Dargo High Plains, across almost to Buchan, up the Timbarra plains towards Omeo, eventually returning to Bright again via Mount Hotham. It was a classic Alpine! Being held traditionally on the last weekend in November, it was also hot, dry and dusty, and amazingly, those hot, dry and dusty conditions persisted for every year through until 1979. Unfortunately we lost a wheel early in the event, on the transport from Bright to Ovens. The car was fixed but we had to skip the stages in Ovens and head straight to Merriang. We did the rest of the event. The night stages were indeed long and demanding and the Sunday stages were terribly hot and dusty.
David Bond and I in the 1973 Alpine
In 1974 I offered to help Frank Kilfoyle run the Alpine. I was only 19, but did much of the surveying of roads at Easter, mostly up around Tallangatta and Koetong Plantation to the east. The event followed much the same formula that Bruce Ford had established the previous year, namely a Bright base, daylight plantation stages Saturday afternoon and Sunday, with a long night loop out into the ‘real’ Alps. To be honest, I can’t remember which plantations were used when but I vividly recall the night loop because David Bond and I were Car Zero in a bog standard Lancer with Colin Bond chasing us all night in the Torana XU1. It was a long transport up to near Tallangatta, then a sequence of lovely stages around Koetong, down through the rugged country to the south through Cravensville to Mitta Mitta then down the Omeo Highway and up the high plains road to Rocky Valley Reservoir, just short of Falls Creek. C Bond eventually caught D Bond at Glen Valley and we let them out first on the last competitive!
I returned to competing with David Bond in 1975, which was directed by the laconic Geoff Schmidt and a growing band of helpers that formed a core of the Alpine organisation for much of this period. Geoff broke somewhat from tradition by starting in Albury-Wodonga and ran some nice daylight stages through the native forests to the north of Beechworth, the Stanley plantation and through to the traditional Bright base. The night loop was another long and arduous affair, in fact I reckon it was even longer than the previous year! We did Trappers Gap to Mitta Mitta, a loop to the north east up Mount Benambra Road which Schmidt appropriately called ‘the back of God’s head’, then down the Omeo Highway to Omeo, including the diversion onto the Bingomunjie loop and a beautiful section of the old highway south of Omeo. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a further loop of stages to the south east as far as Mount Elizabeth and back up Angorra Range Road and over Mount Delusion. I think we may have actually transported back over Hotham. The Sunday daylight was mostly in Merriang. Again, it was hot, dusty, long and rugged. Our run it that event is described here.
David Bond and I starting Stage 1 of the 75 Alpine (Photo: Jim Leppitt)
You’ve probably got the basic idea by now that nobody ever slept on an Alpine. I can’t recall the competitive distance but these events must have been around 1000 competitive kilometres, three times an average 21st century WRC event. But then again, there wasn’t nearly as much transport (liaison)! The Alpine had also been the final round of the Australian Rally Championship in most years since its inception in 1968 (except 1971 and 1972). In 1976 the Light Car Club of Australia, the organisers of the Alpine, decided to take the event to the next level, international status, and not part of the ARC. There were visions of the event achieving the kind of status achieved by the International Southern Cross Rally. In any case, the Alpine was so popular that by the mid-1970s it regularly attracted a field of 100 cars (and generally 100 was considered the limit). I was appointed Director of the 1976 Alpine and held that role for three years.
With the Alpine’s new international status, I wanted to try some new ideas, building on the fantastic work of Bruce Ford, Frank Kilfoyle, Geoff Schmidt, as well as perennial helpers Ian Wilson and Course Checker Robin Sharpley. The great shortcoming of the big long night loop through the Alps was that spectators were not catered for, and by now, thousands of spectators were coming to Bright to see the Alpine. So in 1976, while sticking with the tried and tested Bright base, I ran the night loop through the native forests north of Beechworth and the nearby Stanley pine plantation. Some rarely used roads such as Mount Porepunkah linked the route back to Bright. In fact, if I recall correctly, the Saturday daylight stages ended in Wangaratta for a service and meal break. Sunday was the now traditional Merriang, Running Creek and Hurdle Creek stages to the south of Myrtleford. The event was still hot, dry and dusty, almost as long, but perhaps a tad less rugged. It was also still timed to the minute and that was becoming problematic as the gaps between the top competitors were often a handful of seconds and who won often depended more on the luck of the clock.
Presenting Wayne Gregson at the finish of the 1976 Alpine [photo: Ken Cusack]
Now as I’m sure you can immediately see, this event was just not long enough, and besides, a true international event was expected to be at least three days, not just two. So in 1977 I decided to start in Melbourne (at Government House) on the Friday afternoon and transport up to the south end of the Strathbogie Ranges, just past Bonnie Doon on Lake Eildon. We ran a series of stages through the Strathbogies, Warrenbayne plantation, Reef Hills and a lengthy transport across through Milawa and in the back end of Hurdle Creek for a late night run through Merriang. After the midnight or later arrival in Bright the event re-started on Saturday morning and followed a rather similar format to the previous year with daylight stages in the nearby plantations, night stages around Beechworth and back through Mount Porepunkah, and the traditional Sunday in Merriang. My focus was very much on making it as spectator friendly as possible. Sunday included a “spectator way” right through the Merriang and Running Creek Plantations, with a choice of numerous spectating locations. I think 1977 was also the first time I used the Braithwaites Plantation right next to the Ovens Highway out of Porepunkah and I think it was the first time I used the run through the Porepunkah Plantation, with the natural spectator amphitheatre in the old quarry, as the final stage of the event. If I recall correctly, 1977 was also our first use of tulips in the route instructions, and I believe we used quarter minute timing (which seemed like a good idea but it was a nightmare for the scorers). There is a Channel 9 video of the 1977 Alpine around somewhere and it's worth a look (it used to be on YouTube but seems to have been removed).
For my last Alpine as director in 1978 I wanted it to be even bigger and better, with considerable sponsorship from Repco who would put their name to the Round Australia Trial the following year. And whilst it was in some ways bigger, it was actually shorter than previous editions with a greater focus on shorter spectator friendly stages and an earlier finish on the Sunday. I believe we secured permission to use second timing and certainly the route instructions were fully tuliped. I also introduced a maximum penalty system rather like the WRC does now, except that you could just take a maximum on one stage (typically about 5 minutes) and then continue on the next stage and still be in the running (I believe this is similar to the modern day Classic Alpine). It worked OK but we had to get the target times correct (this was before we just took the total elapsed time as the time penalty) otherwise it was possible that most competitors took a maximum. In retrospect, the maximums were probably a bit too small. However, it meant that a crew that had a mechanical problem, or indeed a crash, had the chance to not only stay in the event but to limit their losses to a handful of minutes. This benefited a few crews, most notably Peter Brock in the HDT Gemini with my brother navigating – they speared off at a spectator point in Ovens on the Saturday morning but recovered well to take a solid place at the finish. Another innovation was the use of road closure officials as judges of fact such that any departure from the rally route (short cutting) would be caught and penalised without the need to actually stop at passage controls. So the 1978 Alpine had no traditional passage controls, which removed another source of potential unfairness for competitors in what was now a fight to down to the second.
The 1978 start was slightly earlier with a Bourke Street Mall ‘rally show’, although we only did this for the leading cars – maybe 30 or 40 – we simply could not fit the entire field of 100 cars in the Bourke Street Mall. The rest assembled up at Greenvale Reservoir to the north of Melbourne. A long transport took crews up to Reef Hills near Benalla for a few daylight stages. The night run to Bright used Flagstaff Road south of Beechworth then several stages in Merriang/Hurdle Creek before using Eurobin Gap and Mount Porepunkah. The Saturday format was mostly new after starting with three stages in Ovens plantation. From there I had them do a lovely series of loops through Stanley Plantation. My goal was to maximise spectator access and to have spots where spectators could see cars several times from the same location. One of my favourite spots was on Hillsborough Road east of Stanley where the cars passed through the spectator point three times at what was essentially a seven way intersection. Before lunch I added a challenging new section over Mount Baranduda (my comments in the route instructions said "Frankly, a treacherous stage") before a service break in Albury and a run around the Hume Weir race circuit. In the afternoon the event headed east to the Koetong plantation that had not been used since 1974, but this time in daylight. Again, I utilised tracks alongside the highway allowing easy spectator access. After a service and meal break we used a shorter and less arduous set of night stages back to Bright via Cravensville, Trappers Gap, and the first ever use of the bitumen over Tawonga Gap, but I had to neutralise the Tawonga Stage after the first 20 or so cars as we didn’t really have permission to close it. We tended to push the envelope a bit in those days and this was one example where I had not thoroughly thought through just how we could make that work. The Sunday stages were mostly in Two Mile Creek as well as some nice spectator stages along side the Ovens highway at Braithwaites plantation and on the Back Bright Road in Porepunkah Plantation. There were 43 special stages totalling 561 km together with 602 km liaison (of which 177 km was from Melbourne to the first stage). Stages and roads were only ever used once, with a small exception of a couple of roads in Porepunkah Plantation. Thanks to Ross Runnalls I have been able to obtain the original route instructions and have plotted the route here.
I had a fabulous run with the Alpine and was absolutely blessed with good weather. Sure, we had some terrible weather in the lead up to the event, during which I regularly got stuck in out of the way places, as is described here. But despite wet weather in the lead up, every event was dry, hot and dusty. I felt for Stuart Lister when he took over in 1980 I think, and had at least one wet Alpine, which was a nightmare of re-routing and rescheduling during the event. The Alpine continued as an international event for a further three years before returning to be an ARC round in 1982.
