Endurance rally scoring & navigation question...

[formulaphoto]

Can someone give me a brief primer on how endurance rallies such as the Monte and Coupe des Alpes worked back in their original incarnations (50's & 60's)? In particular, I'm trying to figure out how the multiple starting points worked, and how they were scored. From what I gather, those were called "concentration" legs, and then when the teams arrived at a common point, they started doing regularity stages?

On events like these, and more current events such as the LEJOG reliability trial, are just the regularity stages scored, or are the "transits" somehow also scored?

I organize classic car tours here in BC, and I've been looking at pulling together a European style endurance rally. Our TSD rallies here are a little different from in the UK (ie. tulips, no maps, and other things) though, and I don't quite have a grasp on how navigation/scoring worked on those Euro events. I also hope to come over to Europe/UK to try some of your road rallies too when I can find a car to rent/buy/borrow (or a patient driver willing to take me on as a co-driver!)

Cheers,
Warwick

[LMM76C]

A broad brush answer regarding the Classics back in the day is that timing to the minute on open public roads was sufficient to decide a winner with the performance of the cars of the day and the poorer roads (but with a lot less traffic).
The Monte ran under some sort of handicap formula, giving more favourable timing, right up to the end of the works Mini participation eg. benefitting lower capacity class (64), favouring Group 1 (66), 8 tyre per leg limitation (67).
Each multiple start point leg was roughly the same distance from its start to the concentration point. Individual routes looped about to achieve that. Only winter weather and an element of car reliability relieved the boredom.
Whilst what is now called "Regularity" did appear in rallies of the day (in the sence of en route checks with early as well as lateness penalties), its current usage is very much a modern situation, giving rise to quite ludicrous happenings on events like Historic Mille Miglia, where serious winners compete over only the last hundred metres or so of each section to arrive on their exact time.
The Alpine used to have different schedules for each class, many only barely possible, and specialised in cumulative pressure ie. you might attain the schedule at first but some minor problem could soon cause you to drop time.
To all intents, the Classics were out and out road races, with many impossible time schedules and with the Liege and the Alpine the "worst" examples because of the good weather. Modern traffic killed both off.

I have limited experience of BC roads but, from what I saw, the situation would be little different from Europe - modern traffic and speed limits giving few options (with the added problem of your most interesting roads disappearing under impassable snow for half the year). North American TSD events are probably more complex mathematically than modern European historic events but the principle remains and there seems limited legal public road alternative.