The 1979 Repco Reliability Trial, often known as the Repco Round Australia, was a 14 day car trial circumnavigating the island continent of Australia. 167 crews started the event with 92 classified as finishers, however only 13 cars completed the entire route. The final results are provided below. The stunning 1-2-3 finish by the Holden Commodores, headed by Australia’s best known driver, the late Peter Brock, was the public story of the event, however the countless other stories of competitors, service crews, organisers and spectators are not widely known.
Many consider this to have been the last great round Australia trial. As was written on the back cover of Bill Tuckey’s book, An old dog for a hard road, “The 12th round-Australia motoring event run since the first (1953) Redex, the 1979 Repco is now acknowledged as the toughest long-distance rally since the continent-to-continent epics of the first decade of the 20th century.” The previous round-Australia was in 1970, the Ampol Rally and Trial, but it did not go to WA. Also over two weeks, the 1970 Ampol was about the same length as the Repco but had much less competitive distance.
The Repco was run during what many consider to have been the golden years of Australian rallying, where many events were arduous and challenging. Events such as the international Southern Cross Rally typically comprised several throusand kilometres of competitive stages over four days, making a modern WRC even seem like a bit of a picnic. In this tradition, the intensity of competition and the difficulty of the terrain covered in the Repco was unprecedented and set it apart from earlier round-Australia events or the London-to-Sydney marathons. About 41% of the Repco route was competitive and quite a lot of the remainder was not on sealed highways. As such, no subsequent road rally event has reached the level of toughness of the Repco.
Like earlier round-Australia trials and the London-to-Sydney epics of 1968 and 1977, crews in the Repco were expected to drive virtually non stop for days at a time with limited rest breaks. Nowadays this would be considered irresponsibly dangerous. The subsequent Mobil 1 Trial in 1995 and Playstation Round Australia of 1998 were necessarily quite different types of events, largely as a result of safety concerns. As the Mobil 1 Director Bob Watson observed, “The event equalled the Repco for length, at 20,000 kms (sic), but took three weeks because CAMS rightly insisted on more rest breaks for crews”. In fact the 1995 Mobil 1 Trial was a special stage event with many long and tiring liaison stages. Of the total distance of 18,300, only about 2,300 km (12.5%) were competitive stages. Additionally, only 16 of the 54 stages conducted were held at night. In addition to the full rest day in Broome, ten other overnight stops were taken.
In the modern era, the Repco is more comparable with rally raid events such as the Dakar, although being run for 4WD vehicles (and in some cases motorbikes), these events can tackle even more challenging terrain. Nevertheless, some of the terrain in the Repco would not have been out of place in a modern Dakar Rally despite the fact that all cars were 2-wheel drive.
The full event story is provided for each of the six Divisions:
- Division V (Melbourne to Adelaide)
- Division S (Adelaide to Perth)
- Division W (Perth to Darwin)
- Division T (Darwin to Townsville)
- Division Q (Townsville to Sydney)
- Division N (Sydney to Melbourne)
