Sunday send off
Sunday · July 19, 2026 · Virginia City, Montana
Barbed Wire,
Air-Cooled Porsches
& Virginia City
The Vigilante 77 Sunday dirt crew returned wearing dust, carrying stories and occasionally relying on barbed wire.
The Vigilante 77 Sunday Finish
WHEN THE DUST SETTLED
By the time the Vigilante 77 Sunday dirt crew rolled back into Virginia City, the cars no longer looked like carefully prepared rally builds. They looked used.
Dust filled the tire tread. Bugs covered the windshields. Luggage, tools and spare parts had shifted around. Hoods and deck lids were open. Drivers stood in the shade outside the Fairweather Inn comparing stories from Montana’s backroads.
That is exactly how rally cars should look.
Air-cooled, mid-engine and completely committed
THE PORSCHES CAME TO WORK
These photographs capture the group after the route, but the backroads are written all over the cars. The Sunday lineup was especially strong on Porsches.
A blue air-cooled 911 wore a Bilstein windshield banner, auxiliary lights and a roof rack stacked with gear. The red number-six 911 sat nearby with its hood open, looking less like a collector car and more like a machine that had just finished doing its job.
Then there was the silver Cayman. Rally lights, a roof basket, all-terrain tires and dirt-road scars transformed the mid-engine sports car into something wonderfully unreasonable.
The strange stuff makes the rally
THE GLORIOUS ODDBALLS
A blue first-generation Ford Bronco looked perfectly natural against Virginia City’s weathered wooden storefronts. Nearby sat the vehicle that can easily be mistaken for another old Bronco from a distance: an old Dodge body mounted on a Ford Crown Victoria chassis from a former police car.
The lifted Baja Beetle brought another completely different answer to the same dirt-road question. A blue-and-white vintage station wagon completed the scene, cruising past Calamity Jane’s like the entire town had become an old rally photograph.
Not factory approved
NICK, A PORSCHE AND SOME BARBED WIRE
No proper dirt rally ends without at least one repair. Nick’s white Porsche was sitting on a bright-green floor jack with a rear wheel removed and tools spread across the pavement. The solution involved barbed wire—the sort of field engineering that will never appear in a Porsche service manual but absolutely belongs in a Montana rally story.
It was not concours-correct. It was exactly what was needed.
A problem appeared. People stopped. Tools came out. Somebody found a solution. The broken part became a story before the car was even back on the ground.
The perfect finish line
BACK AT THE FAIRWEATHER INN
Virginia City was more than a backdrop. The old buildings, wooden sidewalks and faded signs made the rally cars look like they had arrived in another era.
The Fairweather Inn gave the group a perfect home base. Thank you to everyone at the inn for welcoming the rally, giving tired drivers a place to regroup and helping make the weekend feel completely at home in Virginia City.
Thank you
GOOD ROADS. COOL CARS. BETTER PEOPLE.
A huge thank-you goes to the Jackalope Drivers Club, every sponsor who made the weekend possible, every participant who brought a car and a good attitude, and the town of Virginia City for opening its doors to this wonderfully strange collection of people and machines.
Good roads matter. Cool cars matter. But the people are what turn a route into a rally.
I cannot wait for next year.
Finished JPEGs · RAW files · Custom edits
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