About the Rally Club

Every month (except January), on a Sunday afternoon, the Blue Ridge Mountain Sports Car Club (BRMSCC) sponsors a Road Rally, which is an amateur, competitive, friendly sporting event. All you need is a car with a standard odometer, a stopwatch, a non-programmable calculator, and a pen. A typical rally team is one driver and one navigator. The driver must be of legal driving age and the vehicle must be street-legal and properly inspected and insured. The routes consist of lightly-traveled rural roads in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. If nothing else, a Road Rally is a wonderfully scenic drive through parts of Pennsylvania you'd otherwise never see. Despite the club's name, ownership or even passion for sports cars is not a requirement. We get folks driving every kind of car you can think of. Some of our rallies, especially in the warmer months, are specifically designed for those who do want to bring out their precious garage queens. We try to warn participants in advance if a rally will be traveling on unpaved or rough roads. The club is governed by a board of directors that meets at least yearly. It has determined that many rules, such as scoring penalties and definitions, will be determined on a rally by rally basis and clearly written in the General Instructions (or Generals, for short) for each rally. However, some things, such as the determination of "classes" (the division of who is competing against who) must remain the same from rally to rally. Although we don't require it, we do encourage rallymasters to allow folks in the Novice class to have extra passengers in the car. (Normally, there is a penalty for more than two people in the car.) By doing this we're encouraging folks to come out and have fun with old friends and meet new folks. Once your past Novice level you won't need the extra help! Another thing we don't require is membership in the group to participate in any BRMSCC event. All rallies and the yearly dinner/awards meeting is open to anyone. Trophies are given to the winners in each class, regardless of membership status. Participating in a rally usually has a fee of $10; "Night Owl" and picnic rallies might cost a little more, say about $12-15. This fee applies to the whole car. Your only other expenses is for gas, and food, should you choose to join us in the post-rally "Food & Berate the Rallymaster" fest where we gather to compare notes and good-naturedly harass the Rallymaster for the mistakes we make. The club newsletter, The Checkpoint, is mailed monthly to all club members. Members also get postcards for each upcoming rally as well. Non-members who participate in a rally will receive the newsletter issue which contains results for the event they ran, as well as event postcards for a year or so.

BRMSCC has been around since the heyday of road rallying, incorporated in May of 1955 in Uniontown, PA., and has been running rallies non-stop ever since. Starting locations are as varied as the club members and rallymasters who create each event. We’ve had events start as far north as Mercer County (and head north!), and as far south as Uniontown, heading down into Maryland. Pretty much any of the 16 counties in SWPA are possible areas to rally in, although the tendency is to avoid the Pittsburgh urban area (except for the PVGP Kickoff Rallye) and aim for scenic rural areas with roads that are fun to drive.
For further information about the Blue Ridge Mountain Sports Car Club send email to brmscc1 _at_ mac.com or call (412) 322-6368 to get information about our next rally. Go to the main TSD rally page.