A Bit of Europe Screams Alone Through the Forest : Motor racing: In the Rim of the World Rally, a popular international sport makes one of its few appearances in the U.S.

High up on Tule Ridge in the Angeles National Forest, 1,000 feet or more above the silent desolation of Leona Valley, a brilliant light pierced the night, stabbing a zigzag pattern that worked its way down the mountain, through the chaparral and scrub oak, at breakneck speed.

As the lights grew closer, the evening quiet was shattered by the sound of a high-performance engine in a white car careening down a forestry road at nearly 100 m.p.h. The sound was followed by a billowing cloud of dust when the car broadsided through a turn and disappeared around a curve.

“What in heaven’s name is that?” asked a puzzled onlooker from the steps of the Rock Inn, Lake Hughes’ 60-year-old tavern that remains a monument to an era when moonshiners made bootleg whiskey its main attraction.

“It’s a rally,” replied a knowledgeable spectator.

“A rally? I thought a rally was when a bunch of guys driving Corvettes or Porsches got together at a neighborhood parking lot and headed out from one place to another through the suburbs,” the first onlooker said. “That guy that just went by here wasn’t any kind of a rally driver like I’m thinking about.”

No, indeed.

There are Sunday afternoon rallies of the time-speed-distance variety in which the object is to reach a specified check point at a precise second--and then there are real ones, such as the Rim of the World Pro Rally held Saturday in the mountains above Lake Hughes.

The Rim of the World was the second of seven performance rallies that make up the Sports Car Club of America’s national championship Pro Rally series.

Rod Millen, a transplanted New Zealander who lives in Newport Beach, was the driver in question in his white No. 1 Mazda 323 GTX with its high-tech six-speed transmission. Millen led nine of the 11 stages and won the overall championship by more than three minutes over Tim O’Neil of Whitefield, N.H.

O’Neil drove a factory-sponsored VW Rallye Golf built specifically for international competition.

Pro rally cars must be street legal and have license plates, but they are as much racing machines as IMSA sports cars or NASCAR stock cars. They run as fast as a driver--with help from a navigator (sometimes called a co-driver, even though he never takes the wheel)--can negotiate twisting forest service roads he has never been on. The roads are closed to normal traffic.

Teams are given a route book that the race organizer has put together that charts every turn, hazard and bump--called yumps in rally lore--they will encounter on each stage of the event. There were 11 stages in the Rim of the World that varied from three to 11 miles. Cars and trucks were sent off at two-minute intervals.

Between stages, competitors returned to regular roads and highways, which is why vehicles must be licensed and street legal. That part of the rally is called a transit. Some were as long as 30 miles, with drivers getting plenty of time to make it from one stage to another. But during their transits, vehicles must adhere to all speed limits and traffic laws.

In world championship rallying, drivers may prerun the course, as they do in most desert off-road races such as the Mint 400 or Baja 1,000. The co-drivers take copious notes to use during the actually rally. In SCCA national events, however, the rally route remains unknown until the event starts.

“I love secret rallies,” said Millen, a three-time national champion who used the Rim as a tuneup for defense of his Asia-Pacific Rally championship. “I like the challenge. They are more challenging than the world championship rallies, where you can prerun for as much as two weeks before you race.

“In secret rallies, you must be more alert, more tuned to sudden unexpected hazards. You can’t drive as controlled as the Europeans do. You have to have your car looser, set up to slide more. You’ve got to be able to flick it from one side to another.”

Millen, 39, who won his first SCCA Pro Rally championship in 1981 after coming from New Zealand--where he became bored with winning so much--also won in 1988 and 1989, but he is not defending this year. Tony Sircombe of Huntington Beach, who rode with Millen during last year’s championship season, was at his side again in the Rim rally.

“I only ran the Rim because I wanted to give the car a shakedown before taking it to New Zealand,” Millen said. “The new Mazda engine is the most highly developed one we’ve ever had. We’ve tested it, but there’s nothing like a race to give it a real wringing out.

“The Rim is an exciting challenge for car and driver with all the twists and turns and its drop-offs. Most rallies are on forest roads where the trees are the major hazards. Here the hazards are the cliffs. It’s pretty unique to go as fast as you can, knowing how little margin you have for error.

“Then, too, I wanted to help Shannon with her effort.”

Shannon, 20, is Millen’s wife of three months. She plans to race the entire SCCA national championship series. The Millens met in 1988 during the Mickey Thompson Off-Road Gran Prix stadium series. Shannon was an American Suzuki Quad team rider from Lake Arrowhead, and Rod was driving a Grand National sport truck for Mazda.

“Rod gave me a ride one day in a rally car and convinced me that it was safer than racing a Quad, which is really a fancy four-wheel motorcycle,” Shannon said. “The car is the same one I’m driving in the national series.”

Shannon’s fortunes were not as good as her husband’s in the Rim. She high-centered her Mazda, catching something underneath it that kept all four wheels off the ground on Tule Ridge during the fourth stage and was unable to dislodge it. In the season opener, the Sunriser Rally in Chillicothe, Ohio, she finished eighth overall and second in the production GT class.

“Shannon wants to be a race driver and there is no better place than rallying to learn car control,” Rod Millen said. “You must learn to anticipate each corner, and to adjust to changes, yet you must also learn not to over-adjust. Every minute behind the wheel of a rally car is excellent training for all kinds of racing.

“In a road race, you face the same corner maybe 50 to 100 times, and you learn to try and take it the same way every time. In a rally, you see each corner only once and you’d better know how to take it right the first time.”

Millen also will drive a Ford truck Saturday night in a Mickey Thompson race in the Rose Bowl as a diversion while waiting for the Asia-Pacific season to start. He replaced Robby Gordon on Jim Venable’s team when Gordon was selected to drive full time for Ford on the International Motor Sports Assn. circuit.

The Asia-Pacific opener is set for June 29 at Auckland, New Zealand, and will be followed by events at Jakarta, Indonesia; Perth, Australia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and New Delhi, India--which will run in the Himalayan mountains.

“It is very frustrating to be a rally driver in the United States,” Millen said when asked why he is running the Asia-Pacific series instead of the U.S. “There is a lack of professionalism in the management here. The SCCA is the same with rallying as it is with most of its series--it is designed more for the amateur racer than the professional.

“It’s sad, too, because the United States has such outstanding rally conditions. Some of the sites where we run, like the POR (Press On Regardless) in Michigan, the Olympic peninsula in Washington and the Rim of the World are as good as there are anywhere in the world.”

The United States was part of the world championship schedule in 1986 and 1987, when the Olympus Rally was held near Tacoma, Wash. It was dropped after two years because of a lack of interest that frustrated the European factory teams.

“The circumstances were analogous to what’s happened to Formula One in this country,” said John Buffum, an 11-time national champion who has retired to become chief steward of the SCCA series. “Hundreds of thousands of fanatical spectators turn out to see Formula One elsewhere in the world, but no one cared when they came to Phoenix.

“It was the same when the world rallyists came to Washington. They couldn’t believe it when the forest wasn’t filled with spectators, and the papers weren’t full of rally news. In Europe, rally ranks right up there with Formula One and soccer. Over here, it’s hard to find where it ranks.

“Back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, there was a push to make rallying a big thing over here. We wanted it to become as popular here as it is in Europe, and we thought having the world championships here might help it along, but we found out it just isn’t going to happen.

“Rallying has its place in motorsports, but we had to realize that we’d never be like CART (Indy cars) or NASCAR (stock cars). We don’t want to be left out, and I don’t think we are, but our niche is not as far up the ladder as we’d hoped.

“In the last two or three years, we’ve seen 40 to 60 cars at our events and that’s a good number. You can’t really handle too many more under the conditions we have to run. That’s another difference between here and Europe. Over there, they have permanent places to run, they aren’t forced to find out-of-the-way routes through national forests like this one.”

This attitude also is reflected in the competitive quality of the American drivers. Buffum, who has raced on the world circuit, was asked how the best American riders, such as his stepson, Paul Choiniere, might fare in Europe. Choiniere, from Essex Junction, Vt., won the Sunriser Rally in Ohio and was running fourth Saturday before his Audi Quattro ran out of gas and he had to drop out.

“There are 30 or 40 Europeans better than anyone here, except Rod (Millen),” Buffum said. “Competition is so much deeper over there. Paul and the others, like Tim O’Neil, they’d be hard pressed to make the top 50. There is so much more involvement in Europe. On a day like today, with a national champion rally like the Rim of the World going on, there might be half a dozen smaller rallies in the same vicinity.”

The Rim of the World Rally was first held in 1976 as part of the North American Rally Assn. series. It got its name from the area around Lake Arrowhead, where it was originally scheduled, but when it was moved to the less populated Angeles National Forest near Lake Hughes, race organizer Ray Hocker decided to keep the name.

Buffum and his former wife, Vicki, won the first event in a Porsche 911. After 1978, when Hendrik Blok drove through a spring snowfall to win with Erick Hauge as navigator, the race was discontinued. Hauge, a Napa Valley businessman, was back this year and directed Chad DiMarco of Huntington Beach to third place in a Subaru RX.

In 1984, the rally was revived by its current organizers, Mike and Paula Gibeault of Ridgecrest, and last year it became part of the national championship series.

Also contested during Saturday’s rally was the San Andreas Stages, part of the California Rally Series for local contestants. The race is held along the San Andreas fault.

Gary Luke of Morgan Hill, Calif., won the divisional championship Saturday, driving a Shelby in the stock GT class with Mark Williams of Arlington, Va., as his co-driver. They finished one minute ahead of George Deland of Hollywood and Mike Blore of Long Beach, in a Mitsubishi Starion.

The rally started at 1 p.m. Saturday in Palmdale and finished about 3 a.m. Sunday. A total of 207 miles were traveled, 74.2 in high-speed stages.

“One of the toughest things about putting on a rally of this stature is finding an area where there are enough different roads that can be closed to the public for a long enough time to conduct the rally,” said Ken Adams of Bakersfield, a former rally master and driver who has competed in rallies from Rim of the World to the London-to-Sydney classic.

“There are so many political and administrative problems to overcome that it is almost mandatory for the rally to be held reasonably close to where the organizers live. Then hours and days and weeks are spent roaming the countryside for a challenging series of roads.

“You want roads that are challenging, but not too fast. There are two ways to cut down on speed. One is with rocky, rough roads that can damage cars and equipment and are not well accepted. The other is with roads that twist and turn and disappear around one corner after another, the kind usually found in mountains.”

Most U.S. rallies are held at night, when there is less traffic to consider, but the Rim of the World had four stages in the daylight.

“If it had been in Europe, there would have been 100,000 people standing along the side of the road, watching,” Adams said. “They would only get one short glimpse of the cars, the way the fans do for bicycles in the Tour de France, but for some reason apparently not understood by Americans, they would do it.”

There were probably fewer than 1,000 people scattered along the Rim of the World Rally, 200 of them course workers, another 80 drivers and co-drivers and maybe 25 more who wandered out of the Rock Inn to see what all the noise was about.