Here's a pained plea for help from anyone who might know infinitely more about rallying than I do (which wouldn't be difficult).
I am trying to ID a photo of a harbourside parc fermé or perhaps just an assembly area, packed with early '70s rally cars. Particularly distinctive, to me, are the blue Alpine-Renault A110s. The image in question comes from a storage packet headed 1973 Tour de Corse - the Tour of Corsica. Alongside the quay is moored the ferry 'Napoleon' - which fits into a greater interest of mine than rallying - to be brutally honest. The ship is the 1959-launched version bearing that name, which was replaced by a more modern-design vessel introduced in 1976 on the Marseilles/Toulon-Corsica service. So its presence would certainly fit with the image being from 1973.
Still with me?
OK - so what's my problem? Well, most of the rally cars visible bear three-digit competition numbers. Yet in that inaugural season of the Rally World Championship it appears the qualifying rounds conferred at most two-digit numbers upon participants (well, the first 99 of them).
Contemporary magazine reports of that December '73 Tour de Corse (riven by snow, incidentally) include photos of cars with only single or at most double-digit comp numbers... I have wondered if the cars might be carrying the numbers from a preceding event, just about to be changed - but that doesn't seem to fit either.
So - what the hell am I looking at then in this shot of three-digit numbered rally cars, on a harbourside, with a Corsica ferry in the background, and preserved for decades in a '1973 Tour de Corse' storage packet? Was there another Corsican event which would have merited apparent works Alpine entries during 1973?
Or might this conceivably be Sardinia perhaps, not Corsica at all - so the harbour might be Cagliari rather than Ajaccio, or whatever? Or might the image be from some other year from, say 1971-75? As far as I can see those years' Tours ran only double-digit comp numbers too... Every alternative I have tried thus far has proved to be a blind alley.
Any advice - up to and including "retire right now, you're past it" - gratefully received.
Foiled of Farnham
Edited by Doug Nye, 31 March 2023 - 08:33.