RALLY: St. Louis Region to host two National club rallies

The SCCA ClubRally National Championship visits Salem, Ellington, Steelville, Viburnum, and Bunker, Missouri for the 2004 Edition of Trespassers Wil and the 100 Acre Wood.

St. Louis, MO -- The St. Louis Region, Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) will host the 2003 ClubRally National Championships (CRNC) in the form of two club rallies, Trespassers Wil and the 100 Acre Wood February 20 and 21, 2004. These events will make stops in Salem, Ellington, Steelville, Viburnum, and Bunker, Missouri bringing the "world series" of performance rally to the Ozark foothills.

Trespassers Wil is a Coefficient 2 SCCA ClubRally. (The Coefficient level is determined by the number of racing stage miles in the event. A Coefficient 2 has 30 to 65 stage miles.) This event will begin on Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. on Main Street in downtown Ellington. The first car should arrive at the finish in Salem around 7:00 p.m. There are six (6) "special stages" and two (2) spectator points along the course. The total length of this event, including the transit zones where no racing occurs, is 100 miles.

The 100 Acre Wood is a Coefficient 3 ClubRally (which has 65 to100 stage miles). Contestants, a driver and a navigator per car, will start in downtown Salem on Saturday morning at 11 a.m. and have service breaks in Steelville, and Viburnum before returning to Salem that evening. The first car is expected to arrive back in Salem around 6:30 p.m. at the Eagles' Lodge. There are eight (8) "special stages" and three (3) spectator points along the course. The total length of this event, including the transit zones, is 200 miles.

A ClubRally consists of "transit zones" and "special stages". A transit zone has the rally teams on the roads with the general public following the rules of the road and merely gets the competitors from one special stage to another. Special stages are temporarily closed-to-the-public sections of roads where competitors are allowed to travel as fast as they safely can between the start and the finish of the stage. Special stages are heavily manned by trained, expert volunteers to ensure the safety of the public and the competitors and provide a timing mechanism to score the event. The total elapsed times over all the special stages will determine both individual class and overall victories in the event. The composite times for both rallies will crown a 2003 SCCA ClubRally National Champion for five nationally recognized classes, plus a class for historic cars 30 or more years old.

Seamus Burke of Powder Springs, GA and his co-driver Charles Bradley of Kennesaw, GA were overall winners in the 2003 Trespassers Wil ClubRally, driving a Mitsubishi Evo 6.5. The 2003 100 Acre Wood saw John Drislane of Carmel, NY and co-driver Ronan Burke of Avon, CT take the overall win in their Mitsubishi Evo IV.

The CRNC Chairman for the third year is Kim DeMotte of Webster Groves, MO.
"I'm delighted with this year's courses..they are compact which will give the contestant plenty of competition in a short period of time, yet allow the public to get a feel for the sport at five different spectator venues over the two days". He added, "these are some of the finest rally-racing roads in the country, and the warm welcome we get every year from the cities we visit and the counties we compete in is the key to a successful event.both from the rallyist point of view and the public's."

Anyone interested in helping with this event may contact Curt Faigle at 314- 839-2701 or Curt@100aw.org to volunteer. While a core committee of 30 have spent an entire year coordinating details and organizing these two events well over 200 volunteers will be needed to staff the courses February 20 and 21.

Additional information may be obtained by visiting the www.100aw.org website.

DeMotte and the organizing committee are aficionados of A. A. Milne's classic story Winnie-the-Pooh. Pooh lived in the 100 Acre Wood and Piglet lived in an old tree with a broken sign that said "Trespassers Wil(l be prosecuted)..but the last letters were missing!

-St. Louis Region, Sports Car Club of America (SCCA)