A HISTORIC rally returns to the Mallee from tomorrow, with classic cars
navigating Lake Boga, Ultima and Chinkapook’s toughest roads.
The Historic
Rally Association’s BP rally ran continuously from 1958 to 1973 as a tough
four-day rally across Victoria and into adjoining states.
Since then the
rally has been conducted at roughly five year intervals, with the most recent
edition in 2010.
The BP rally’s founder Donald Thomson, a legend of the
sport, set out a clear philosophy for the rally: “Roads should be obscure…
they should even include some which are rough or abandoned: but the best test is
to pick a fair average of surfaces such as might generally be encountered by an
Australian traveller in the outback.
“If you want to find the types of
cars… who are best suited to the outback areas of our great and pretty empty
land, then you must design a representative test,” Mr Thomson said.
For more of this story, see Wednesday’s Guardian (May 8).
