Real Racing: 1997 SCCA Maine Winter Forest Rally

Matthew Guy
by Matthew Guy

Summer officially began this week, meaning we are about as far away as humanly possible from the dark and stormy depths of winter. A perfect time, then, to watch action from the 1997 Maine Winter Forest Rally.

Ages ago, the event was part of the SCCA ProRally schedule and later became a Rally America sanctioned event held mainly on logging roads with some of the longest stages on the schedule. The event is now billed as the New England Forest Rally, held in the summer months, running this year on July 15-16.

In 1999, an actual Stig drove an Escort Cossie to victory over 83 other teams.

The Real Racing series has featured clips and entire races from years past. On occasion we questioned you on the content of the video but most times it was simply part of a deceitful plan encouraging the B&B to whittle away their work hours while consuming shameful amounts of their employers’ bandwidth. Down with productivity!

Matthew Guy
Matthew Guy

Matthew buys, sells, fixes, & races cars. As a human index of auto & auction knowledge, he is fond of making money and offering loud opinions.

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  • Sjalabais Sjalabais on Jun 24, 2016

    We all know winter is coming. So I see no reason not to stock up on rally vehicles.

  • Fiasco Fiasco on Jun 24, 2016

    First rally I attended. Got there and the person in charge of the workers (Hi, Diane!) said to me: "There's John Buffum over there, go see him and do what he says." It may have been my first rally, but I sure as hell knew who Buffum was. So I go over to him, and he says to follow him in the conga line to the first set of stages. I ask him what he's driving and he says "Red Audi 4000." Since there were three of them in the parking lot, I ask which one. "The one without plates." That's a pretty good summary of rally nearly 20 years ago. Plenty of fun keeping my XR4Ti on the road (except for one stuff, thank you Nokia(n) for the Hakka 10), met people who became lifelong friends and now share seat time in a Lemons car with me.

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    • Fiasco Fiasco on Jun 26, 2016

      @olddavid It was the workers conga line out to the stages. Not on stage. And the Audi was a street car as well. No shenanigans, although the stage roads were very treacherous. My friend got good at the "push to get the car rolling then outrun the car to hop in" as the Nokia snows finally caught (open diff, rear drive).

  • MaintenanceCosts Seems like a good way to combine the worst attributes of a roadster and a body-on-frame truck. But an LS always sounds nice.
  • MRF 95 T-Bird I recently saw, in Florida no less an SSR parked in someone’s driveway next to a Cadillac XLR. All that was needed to complete the Lutz era retractable roof trifecta was a Pontiac G6 retractable. I’ve had a soft spot for these an other retro styled vehicles of the era but did Lutz really have to drop the Camaro and Firebird for the SSR halo vehicle?
  • VoGhost I suspect that the people criticizing FSD drive an "ecosport".
  • 28-Cars-Later Lame.
  • Daniel J Might be the cheapest way to get the max power train. Toyota either has a low power low budget hybrid or Uber expensive version. Nothing in-between.
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