About

I remember seeing a photo on some rally group on facebook a few weeks ago, but now I can’t find it again. Does that sound familiar?

Or maybe this. I think that photo was on a rally in 1972 which was won Bob Watson. But I can’t recall what the event was!

Australian rallying, and Victoria in particular, has a rich history dating back to the 1940s and further. But accessing reliable information on the events, people and cars was never easy, that is until David McKenzie came up with the idea of rallypedia.com.au. It was conceived as an “encyclopedia” of rally history, a repository of documents, photos and the like, as well as being a reliable source of information, akin to cricket’s Wisden Almanack. Over the last 5+ years, David together with Geoff Byron and Ian Richards, have been gathering and cataloguing as much information as could be found on trials and rallies, mostly in Victoria, and back as far as WWII. It has been and continues to be a massive task. But great progress has been made.

We have been focusing on past events and series, with future plans to include more information on people and cars. We have to date catalogued more than a thousand individual trials and rallies for which we have varying amounts of information. Some have scant detail, some have a full set of documents including official results and route instructions. Relevant photos and the odd video or audio recording have been included where available. Many hundreds of events have been plotted either on Google maps or the international database of special stage events (rally-maps.com) with links from rallypedia. We have focussed initially on last century as well as completing the Victorian Rally Championship events right up to the present. But there is much more to do, with many hundreds of more recent events yet to be added.

In addition to the VRC, we have catalogued all the old BP Rallies, thanks to Ross Runnalls’ fantastic research. We have included all fifteen Southern Cross Rallies with full details on every edition. All the round Australia trials are included, with full detail of the 1979 Repco Reliability Trial recently added from Ian’s blog. Most of the Marathons are included. We have not sought to duplicate the excellent work of Tom Snooks, particularly on the first two decades of the Australian Rally Championship, available on australianrallyhistory.com.au. We want to complete the ARC history as well as including more non-Victorian content, and have included lists of other state championships in the hope of enticing some interstaters to take some interest in their history.

We have developed the website to enable people to find whatever they want as easily and quickly as possible. A simple search box is one possible starting point, but remember to be as specific as possible and put multiple words in double quotes. This is especially useful to locate pages that mention specific people. We have plans to make the search capability more powerful.

Another way to search is via years and calendars. We have a page for each decade with major events and series listed by year, then a page for each year, currently only for Victoria, that includes a full calendar of events. Some of the earlier years don’t have complete calendars. Year pages will also list the series for that year, such as the VRC, TAUCC and in more recent years, VCRS. Series are also able to be found from the top-level menu, and from there you should find a list of all the winners and links to each year and thence to the individual events that were rounds of the series in that year. Where possible, we have included (or reconstructed) points tables for the series for that year. We are also constructing lists of editions of particular events, such as the Alpine. Some of these can be accessed directly from the menu and some from an Event index or via a list of car clubs that have organised particular events.

We would like to acknowledge the many people who have so far contributed material to rallypedia. There are too many to mention, but we were pleased to receive considerable material from Beau Simpson, Geoff Floyd, Graham Wallis, Peter Shearman, the estate of Dave Smith and of course, Ross Runnalls. Ian Ellis and others from the Ballarat Light Car Club have helped with old Begonia and much else. Peter Otzen and George Davidson contributed much on old Akademos rallies. Much information on “missing” events has been found in old MUCC Unicar magazines, and for this we are indebted to the late Don Humphries. The Southern Cross history would not have been possible without the contributions of the late Dan White and his wife Rosie, and of course Tom Snooks. And we are also grateful for the contributions of many photographers, including John Wilkinson, Bruce Keys, Ian Smith, Ken Cusack and John Doutch.

Melbourne University Car Club is currently covering the basic running costs of the website, for which we very much thank them.

How can you help?? Well if you have relevant documents of any kind – regs, results, spectator guides, route instructions, photos – we potentially need them! While we are happy to receive ANY contributions, we would prefer that you first check rallypedia to see if we already have them. Alternatively, make a list of what you have – year, event, document type – and let us know. If you are able to scan documents, please let us know so that we can let you know our preferred scanning settings – this is important because once a document is scanned with certain settings it can be difficult to adjust these. Alternatively, we can receive physical documents or photos, scan them, and if you wish return them to you. Most documents since the mid-1990s have been electronic and do not require scanning, so if you have these (perhaps because you were an event director), please let us know. We also want to hear your personal stories – tall tales and true! Jot down your recollections of particular events or whole series.