The Healesville Stages was Glenn Cuthbert’s first attempt at organising a round of the Australian Rally Championship. Organising such a major event is a substantial task. As we have access to many documents from that time, we’ve presented them on this page to give readers an insight into the work required to organise a successful ARC rally in 1993. It is more challenging today!
Our normal event page for the Healesville Stages providing results and other information about the event as it occurred on 13 and 14 March has been kept separate.
The original application to conduct an ARC event was made by the Ford Four Car Club. However, presumably because they didn’t want to take on the financial risk, the FFCC withdrew from the event and Glenn set up Victorian Rally Services P/L and it took over responsibility for conducting the rally. As Glenn had not previously been involved in organising an ARC event, CAMS required that he have an experienced assistant. David McKenzie, director of Akademos as an ARC round in 1981, was appointed to that role.
Glenn was inspired by Rally Australia, Australia’s round of the World Rally Championship and the 1991 document below provided Glen with a guide to achieving his own objectives. Further direct experience of Rally Australia was achieved by Glenn and David competing together in that event in 1992 in Glenn’s Mitsubishi Galant VR-4. Running our of brake pads and damaging the brakes meant they didn’t finish.
An additional challenge for 1993 was that CAMS announced a new timing system for ARC events in 1992. The new system is essentially what is used today, known as A-A timing. The principal difference between the new and old system was that A-A timing kept most competitors at 2 minute intervals at the start of each special stage throughout the event. under the old system, the time gaps between the faster and slower cars increased as the event progressed, meaning that spectators in the latter part of the event typically had long gaps to wait between cars.
The change meant training all officials “from scratch” how to use the new system. That included a day of manning dummy controls using a loop of road near the former Amcor paper mill in Alphington, where there were no houses. Fortunately, David and Glenn had experience of that system through Rally Australia and David competing in the Motogard WRC event in New Zealand in 1980.
