KEY POINTS:
The Ruby Rallyfeste weekend starts today, celebrating four decades of rallying in New Zealand, with 60 cars set to take to the roads.
The rally starts at the Waikato Events Centre in Hamilton and will travel on to northern Waikato, Plantation/Churchill and Waiterimu/Waikare for four high-speed tarmac special stages. This will be followed by a service break in Te Kauwhata.
In the afternoon, there are four gravel stages in the Maramarua Forest where, after another service break at Te Kauwhata, the cars will finish the stages at Maramarua East.
Rallyfeste chairman Laurie Brenssell said the event had drawn a good mix of old and new (cars and drivers).
"It's great to see most have entered into the spirit of the celebration by competing in both the morning's tarmac and in the afternoon's gravel section. The public will be able to see some of the very best rally action from some of our country's top past and present drivers."
Top seed for the 80km of high-speed special stages will be Auckland's Neil Allport, with his son Richard alongside, driving PJ Johnston's classic Ford RS200.
Allport, a triple New Zealand rally champion (1986, '89 and '92) will be among old adversaries this weekend. They will include another triple champion, US-based Rod Millen (1975, '76 and '77), and his son Rhys, who will share the driving of a four-wheel-drive Mazda RX7.
This car was built to compete in the four-wheel-drive Audi Quattro era and was used by Millen to win a succession of US rally titles in the 1980s.
Millen is also looking forward to renewing the old 1970s on-road rivalry with Mike Marshall. Marshall started rallying in a Ford Anglia in the 1970 Shell Silver Fern Rally and is well remembered for his sideways exploits in Ford Escorts.
He will also be remembered for a one-two finish alongside Hannu Mikkola in the 1973 Heatway and his win 1975 in one of the world's first MKII Escort RS1800 cars.
1979 champion Paul Adams will have former co-driver Don Fenwick alongside, and they will compete in a slightly more modern Mazda Familia 4WD. Adams is the only driver competing this weekend who started in the original 1969 Silver Fern Rally.
After a tentative start to local rallying in 1967, the first international high-speed special-stage rally in New Zealand, using closed roads, took place in April 1969. The Silver Fern Rally was organised by the Wellington Car Club.
Starting from Taupo, 32 competitors made their way through a series of closed-road special stages, some up to 30 miles, to Auckland and then south again to the finish in Wellington.
The event saw 22 finishers, with the overall winners, Grady Thompson and Rick Rimmer, driving a Holden Monaro V8.
Other notable names in the finishing list were Paul Adams, Neil Johns, Jim Richards and Colin Taylor.
With a vision to the future of rallying, any profits arising from the Dunlop Rallyfeste weekend will be donated to the Motorsport New Zealand Rally Scholarship Trust.
While New Zealand rallying is still relatively strong at grassroots level, the cost of performing competitively at the international level is now beyond most teams.
However, a class for less-powerful two-wheel-drive cars and the worldwide resurgence of classic and marathon rallies such as the Otago event and the recent NZ Silver Fern Marathon Rally are seeing competitors, cars and spectators returning to the sport.
