An iconic event will return to the Victorian rally calendar next year, after many years on the sidelines. Once a round of the Australian Rally Championship, the North Eastern Rally will be given a new lease of life, with a date in November 2020. The North Eastern Rally was for many years a staple event on the Victorian Rally Championship calendar, but forestry restrictions in the early 2000s eventually led to the event being dropped from the calendar. Those bans from the pine forests in north east Victoria and other regions of the state still apply, but a new team are determined to give the rally new life. "With the challenges of being able to attain enough competitors for a stand-alone event crammed in around a bunch of other stand-alone events and championship rounds, the committee have elected to retire the Mount Porepunkah Rallysprint format and look towards revamping an older NECC event name and format," North Eastern Car Club president, Scott Mann, said.
"Scheduled for mid-November 2020, the event committee will be now looking to hold the North Eastern Rally as a round of the Victorian Club Rally Series.
"Based out of Bright, the event will be looking to use a variety of roads well known to the club members from iterations of this event run in the 90s, as well as some roads not so familiar to many. "Further to this, the club will be running a shorter ‘piggyback’ event known as the Bright Stages on the same day to provide a proof of concept for the planning of much larger event scheduled for November 2021."

Bruce Robertson slides his Commodore through a corner in the North Eastern Rally in the 1980s.

The 2020 event will be run in alignment with the current VCRS regulations and may have a mixture of day and night-time stages. Early plotting suggests around 120km of competitive distance will be available. The event will be directed by Gary Gourlay, with support from Stuart Lister and Scott Mann. The North Eastern Rally was a round of the Australian Rally Championship in 1976 and 1977, when it was won by Ross Dunkerton and George Fury in Datsuns. Other high profile winners have been Bob Watson, Colin Bond, Dinta Officer, Geoff Portman, Graeme Wise and Scott Pedder.

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