The Dirt Road Taken Ed Brennan March 2019" The dictionary calls it a seminal moment. It refers to an event that strongly influenced what came after. Robert Frost wrote about it in the poem "The Road Not Taken". Mine was on Sunday November 14, 1976 when I decided to pick up a newspaper to find results from a Formula 1 race. While looking through the sports section, an article titled "Earlybirds, Late Comers Are Gauche in This Set" by Larry Bodine caught my eye. There was a photo of an MGB and a Datsun 240Z with two guys named Denny Gallagher and Bill Emmerich talking, and a second photo of them looking at some kind of a computer on the dash of the 240Z. This I had to read!

I read the article from the paper to Bill and asked, "What do you think?" Bill said, "sounds like fun, how do we enter?". I said I'd contact the Mayor's office Monday.

When I reached to Mayor's office Monday, I found out they had no involvement in the organization of the event except for the Mayor flagging off the cars, but they did have contact info for Denny Gallagher who was the chairman of the event.

Next came my first contact of what would become many in the years to come with Denny Gallagher. Denny said we could still enter and gave me all the required info to make it happen. In the course of the conversation, I assured Denny that we did have experience and spoke of the vehicle we would be driving (full sized Chevy Impala). Denny assured me it would probably fit though the trees and with the limited slip differential we would be fine.

Over the next few days we received the entry conformation along with the "General Instructions". We gathered the required items (tow rope, flares, shovel) and set off to practice in the dark. The first thing that was obvious was we needed a light to read the route book. Since Bill was going to be the co-driver, he took care of fabricating a clipboard with a light. Friday night we fueled up the car and crossed our fingers that we had everything required.

Saturday at noon we arrived at the Jefferson Hotel in Asbury Park along with about 60 other teams. Our Impala looked a little out of place parked next to most of the well prepared (smaller) rally cars. But we were here to have fun and everybody seemed friendly. We made contact with Denny, picked up our route book, and waited for our start time.

One problem we never thought of was the starting ramp! The ramp was fine for Datsun 510's and other small imports but would the weight and the width of the "Big Chevy" be too much for it to bear? The thought of destroying the start ramp wasn't the kind of introduction to the sport we were looking for. Our fears subsided when car number 25, a Pontiac LeMans with Mike Lotwis and Al Muller, pulled up. If the wide-track Pontiac would fit, the Chevy should be fine.

I don't remember many details of that first event except to say we had great time. We managed to not get lost, got scored on every control, and not get stuck in the sand or between the trees. We finished 13th out of 33 cars in our class, 36th overall and made it back to the bar in time to celebrate. We were hooked!

Over the winter, we started to acquire more information on the Rally Series NEPRS - Northeast Performance Rally Series. This information came from the Series Administrator, Harry Handley. We learned that the NQP was the 4th and final event of the 1976 season. The events were sanctioned by the Sports Car Club of America - SCCA as an introduction to the SCCA's Pro Rally events. At the time, I wasn't aware that we had a series like that in this country. I was aware of WRC events, the Monte Carlo, and remembered reading about Ford's Falcons competing in the East African Safari in the 1960's, but a whole series here was very interesting.

The 1977 NEPRS schedule had events listed starting with the Tri-State in Maine in January with another called the Triple Challenge in February. Neither of those events seemed realistic for us to do given our level of experience and equipment. But they did list an event in June called the Roaring Borealis starting in Allamuchy, NJ that seemed to be a possible next event for us.

On Saturday, June 18, 1977 we again were in a parking lot with much more appropriate vehicles. But we did see the Pontiac with Mike Lotwis so we had some company. The event was great fun and we end up 10th in class and 27th O/A.

By this time we were hooked on our new-found sport and the time had come for some decisions to be made. The first was the commitment of time necessary to get serious about running the NEPRS series. In 1977 Bill and I had been competing nationally for the past few years in Control Line Combat a model airplane contest where two planes on 60 foot lines chase each other in a circle trying to make cuts in a crepe paper ribbon at around 100 mph. If you are not familiar with it, check out the link on YouTube or just imagine two bees chasing each other around in a jar. We decided to go rally and one of the first things we discovered was performance rallying had the same reputation in the SCCA that control line combat had in model aviation. They thought we were nuts to drive on dirt roads in the dark and possibly damage your race car. We heard the same thing from other non-combat flyers because no matter how good your reflexes were, mid-air crashes were a fact of life, just like trees on a rally stage. So making the switch seemed natural. So now the first thing was a more suitable vehicle.

Our pursuit of a new vehicle was solved by a friend and coworker of Bill's. He was a SAAB fan for years and agreed to put one of his SAAB 99's up for adoption. Somehow we managed to acquire and prepare it in time for the next event, the Connecticut Classic on August 27. The rally was fun and uneventful except for our first exposure to an irate local who held 20 or more rally cars at gunpoint and then escorted us all out of Massachusetts.

We ran the Night Stalker on October 1 and had a great time in spite of the heavy rain that caused the rerouting of some flooded roads. By this time we starting to meet new friends that we would remain close to for years.

We had to skip the next two events and the final event in Vermont but we did manage to revisit where we started last year at the NQP on November 19. This year we finished 2nd in Class C and 18th O/A.

At the end of the 1977 season we were fully committed to the next season. After our second place class finish at NQP, we felt confident we could be competitive for the overall finish, but to do that you needed to have better equipment. That meant either getting a Halda and doing the math with tables for class B or buy a rally computer and run class A. Bill was having too much fun enjoying the roads to have his head stuck down doing math. So it was settled. We were going to run A. The problem was in 1978 you couldn't just get a computer the next day. After talking to people winning the events, we learned the hot ticket was a Zeron made by Bill Gronning who was also a rallyist. Since back then you couldn't just look up his contact info on the Internet, we had to do it the hard way.

By 1978 I had developed a good rapport with Harry Handley so I gave him a call to find out how to contact Bill Gronning. Harry told me Biil was building a new model of the Zeron but wasn't sure when it would be available. Harry said to contact Denny Gallagher because he had just ordered one of the new Zerons. I called Denny and he said I should contact Ira Meislik who lived in New Jersey and was taking orders for the new Zerons. Next step, call Ira and set up an appointment for a demo of how the Zeron worked. So on a cold snow covered Sunday in February, Bill and I went to Montclair, NJ for a Zeron demo. After seeing how the Zeron worked, it was clear we had to have one. So with checkbook in hand, we were ready to place an order. The only problem was nobody knew when the new machines would be ready for delivery, maybe by June! This was a problem because we planned to run the Blue Mountain Sunsetter on March 18. Of course we could just run Class C but after seeing how the Zeron worked, there was no going back. I even offered to buy Ira's 660; he said no but did say I could borrow it for Blue Mountain Sunsetter, good deal!

So we got to play with the big boys at Sunsetter with Ira's 660 and even got to meet Bill Gronning and of course bug him about when the 770 would be ready. We found out that we could beat most everyone that wasn't Class A but it would take some practice to get close to the top.

In 1978, the competition was getting fierce. On any event there was a dozen or more teams that could take the overall win, one bad leg would drop you from 1st to 15th or worse. Also the events were competing with each other with glitz and prize money. We lucked out running a SAAB because they started paying prize money for 1st-3rd overall in class and best finishing SAAB. In the days of less than $20 entry fees and $20 motel rates and 75 cent gas, it was easy to make back your weekend expenses.

The long awaited Zeron 770's arrived in July. We tried it out for the first time at Doctor Devio's The Route of All Evil. We managed a three way tie for 2nd place with two of the best teams running so we were very pleased to say the least. We finished off 1978 by running Octoberfast in October and NQP in November.

Starting in 1979, we ran eight of the nine scheduled events plus two National Pro Rallys, the Susquehannock Trail Pro Rally - STPR in June, and the Happiness Is Sunrise - HIS in August. Then in 1980 we ran seven of the nine NEPRS events plus ended the year with the Atlantic 200 NARRA National Stage Rally.

By the end of 1980, Harry Handley's vision of a series to get new competitors into the sport was a resounding success. The events took on a life of their own with each event trying to outdo the others. National brand name sponsors (Budweiser, Pizza Hut and Coca-Cola) and more prize money. When NQP moved from Asbury Park to Red Bank in 1979, we had a High School marching band to send us off, and one year we had a parade through town with everything circus like except for the elephants, and I am sure we would have had them if Denny could have found some.

Harry Handley retired as Series Administrator in December 1980 and passed the position to the able hands of Gary Webb. Gary had been a series competitor from the start and also one of the organizers of the Tri-State Rally, the traditional series opener in January. Gary faced two challenges for 1981. First, the loss of two of the most successful events (NQP and Route of All Evil) and second, more of the organizers were becoming full time competitors both in NEPRS and all stage format rallys.

The series continued in its traditional format of Performance TSD, with Gary doing everything possible to find new events, until 1984 when the SCCA decided the events must be all stage format.

The Northeast Performance Rally Series was a special blend of the great work by the Series Administrator, the organizers, and the competitors to make it one of the most successful series in rally history. I love the all stage format of Pro Rallys but the early NEPRS events were some of the most challenging events I ever ran. We used to joke about how on a stage it was easy because we could slow down for the corners and on the NEPRS events you would fall below zero and have to make up the time, but most veterans of the first few years agree it was the most fun of any type of rally.

Harry Handley, Gary Webb, Denny Gallagher, Joe DeLuca and many more organizers and competitors have passed on but I will cherish the memories of the times we shared and realize how important it was to choose the "dirt roads" on that Sunday in November 1976.

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