A Classic New England Rally Is Revived, Minus the Mud

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 the organizers hoped would be covered in snow or smothered with mud. Mr. Bullard and Mr. Fogg’s car was among five dozen or so that left New York City that November day.

“We were hot to trot,” said Mr. Bullard, now 90 and living in Dartmouth, Mass.

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 motorsports chicanery, Mr. Bullard and Mr. Fogg 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.

Mr. Fogg drove. He was an experienced racer from Chestnut Hill, Mass., 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.

Mr. Fogg loved driving, and Mr. Bullard had a romance with numbers. In addition to following the route, he had to figure out how long should it 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 Fédération 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, Vt.

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 miles an hour.

Mr. Moss’s 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, Ms. 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.” Ms. van Damm also competed in the 1953 event, which had such good weather that she complained it was not challenging. The 1954 event, she wrote, taught her “it was time I learnt to keep my big mouth shut.”

Bad weather could, indeed, be trouble, Mr. Bullard said. In 1956, he and Mr. 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,” Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.

Snow was also the problem in 1954 when Stirling Moss tackled the Lincoln Gap, Ms. van Damm wrote. It was “inches deep in snow and ice,” and Mr. Moss got stuck about halfway up. “He finally had to turn back and take another route,” she wrote. “Only 14 competitors eventually got over the gap and I raise my hat to them.”

In the 1955 event, Smuggler’s Notch in Vermont “was a sheet of ice,” Frank M. Blunk reported in The Times. “The road was curved. There was a drop of 75 feet, without a guard rail on one side. On the other was a ditch.” Getting up was hard, and getting down was scary. Some of the drivers descended in reverse gear, hoping to slow the vehicle, Mr. Blunk wrote. Some teams threw sand in front of “chained wheels.”

Others just went for it. “Mrs. Martha Schweighofer of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 74 years old, was at the wheel of a 1954 Porsche coupe,” Mr. Blunk reported. “She waited until the road was clear and slid down.”

The event was tough on crews as well as the machinery. In 1955, Walbridge Bailey and his wife, Inge, from Rome, N.Y., entered a 1955 Volkswagen Beetle. Mrs. Bailey told relatives that after driving about 22 hours without sleep she was hallucinating. She thought that the lines on the road “were rising up and you couldn’t drive over them.” Nevertheless, they finished fourth.

The 1956 event was the last. But in 2018, the rally was revived by Stephen McKelvie and Gary Hamilton, two rally enthusiasts from Massachusetts, who were fascinated by the event. “I love history, and I love vintage cars and how they took on this adventure,” Mr. Hamilton said.

Early in 2019 Mr. McKelvie, 69, died, but Mr. Hamilton vowed to continue, and Mr. Buffum offered to help with the route.

The Great American Mountain Rally Revival was held again in 2019, canceled in 2020 because of to Covid 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-or-die element because — while some competitors drive contemporary cars — few owners of vintage vehicles, which are the historic heart of the event, 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, Minn., who competed in the 2019 and 2021 events, most recently driving a 1973 Ford Capri.

“We get to drive our cars. We like the history of it,” said Carl Helmetag of Riverside, R.I., 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.”

And Mr. Bullard still pines for those days of snow and ice and dark and hundreds of miles.

“It was wonderful,” he said. “I absolutely loved it.”