Wow, the shortest stage in the whole event was 21.5km!
How do we get an event like that to come back?

Wedge1 wrote on 01/02/10 at 11:31:23:


We get a rally going based out of North Bay, ON again!

Tom has shared with me copies of some of the old route books and I am going to start taking a look at some of these roads. The problem is that most of these are MNR roads and we know what kind of budget cuts MNR road maintenance has sustained.

Driving to North Bay or Sudbury from Toronto is not further then going to Maniwaki - and if you consider the roads and traffic - it's not even that much further then Bancroft, in my opinion anyways.  Having events in the northern part of the province was not that uncommon back in the sixties.

There is construction on all the remaining 2 lane sections of hwy 11 between North Bay and Toronto (the section is only about 30 minutes worth now).  I imagine it'll be complete within 2 years.  

Anyway - I'd certainly contribute if there was interest in reintroducing rally to these parts.

TomH wrote on 01/01/10 at 12:21:54:


Man!  Does that bring back memories  

I can only imagine what the workload, expense and the number of workers would be like doing the route for the Voyageurs using todays safety standards. In 1982 for the Muskoka Rally and 83 for the Voyageurs; we were lucky to have good number of workers from the North Bay rally club. Then there was Dave Carlin who many of you probably don’t know but spent hundreds of hours working on the event and when I needed something done in North Bay, it was looked after properly by Dave. Trips up to North Bay from Kitchener weren’t really a big deal with fuel at about 30 cents a litre.
 
The northern stages around Temagami were very remote in 1983 and there was very rarely any local traffic other than logging operations and the odd trio of naked women running in the bush. Today, the road is a major logging artery and has been the scene of several protests ( people chaining themselves to trees ) over the years.  A 2 pass recce
for the route we used would probably take more than two full days. A 200 km stage event today normally takes a day to write notes ( 100 km of stage roads with each stage run twice ) The Voyageurs had 235 km of stages with none of the stages repeated in the same direction.

When I did the results on my website it was after looking at some very close battles that were going on during the rally and thought it would look much better using todays results format. I would like to do the same to some of the other earlier Voyageurs or other events from the 83 championship, so if anyone has results they could send me, please do.  Soon to come, map of Day 2 of the 1975 Criterium Rally ( first year being observed for WRC )
Wait till you see the length of those stages!!

Maybe times are changing, Dave. We got a very gratifying 24 entries for the 2009 Lanark Highlands Forest Rally, which is definitely out of the way for competitors in the TO area.

Jeannie