Rally Reminder: Register Now for Nov. 22 GTA Road Rally
Registration is open for the St. Louis Region’s Second Opportunity Road Rally Sunday afternoon, Nov. 22.
Second Opportunity is an afternoon course-following GTA (for “Game, Tour, Adventure”) road rally/social event of about 70 miles and four hours duration that explores the winding roads of west St. Louis County and eastern Franklin County in Missouri. It is the last St. Louis Region rally for 2026.
Start and Finish: Big Chief Roadhouse, 17352 Manchester Road, Wildwood, MO 63038.
What you need: a car, a driver and navigator, a clipboard, pencils, and paper, plus a fun inclination to take a Sunday afternoon drive.
Entry fee: $20.00 per team for SCCA teams, $45.00 per team for non-member teams. An SCCA team is defined as a team in which at least one participant is an SCCA member. The $45.00 entry fee for a nonmember team includes an SCCA Weekend Membership for the team’s “primary entrant,” i.e., the member who pays the entry fee. The other member of a non-SCCA team receives a free SCCA Trial Membership (as will any non-SCCA member of an SCCA team).
Size of the field: Limited to 25 teams.
Registration (plus more information): Online at https://msreg.com/2ndOpportunityRally. Entries accepted on a first-come basis. Registration closes Nov. 20 at 11:59 p.m.
Check-in: Sunday, Nov. 22, beginning at 11:30 a.m.
Safety meeting: 12:15 p.m.
First car departs the start: 12:31 p.m.
About the Big Chief Roadhouse
Built near Pond, Mo., in the late 1920s by William Clay Pierce of the Texas-based Pierce Pennant Oil Company (other contemporary accounts name St. Louisan Walter Petring as the developer), the roadhouse, as part of the Big Chief Highway Hotel, served transcontinental travelers on the then-new U.S. Route 66. According to tourist guides from the period, the Big Chief Highway Hotel, with 62 tourist cottages, a full-service gas station, a restaurant and banquet facilities, was among the largest tourist-cottage hotels in Missouri.
The cottages are long gone, as is the gas station, and through the decades, the roadhouse itself has served numerous purposes, reopening as a restaurant and Route 66 landmark in the mid-1990s.
The Big Chief Roadhouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.