Following the Suez crisis of 1956 and consequent petrol shortages and rationing across Europe, many manufacturers and small volume car constructors brought out tiny vehicles offering transport for two to four people with very low fuel consumption.
The Royal Motor Union of Liège, Belgium, organisers of the Liège-Rome-Liège Rally (and later the Liège-Sofia-Liège and other events), under its Commissaire-Général Maurice Garot, decided to create a rally specifically for these tiny cars,[2] to test them thoroughly and find out which, if any, were really capable of transporting two people at a good speed over all types of road conditions.
The times for the Liège-Brescia-Liège rally were probably more relaxed and it may well have kept to the 50 km/hour requirement (except on the German autobahns and in Yugoslavia, where it was permitted to run the event at 60 km/hour) but that was still an extremely difficult speed to average in such tiny-engined cars over the very challenging route, which included more than 20 mountain passes, including Vrsic in Slovenia and – twice – Europe's two highest road passes, Passo Stelvio and Passo di Gavia in the Italian Dolomites.
They would not rest until Saturday morning, when they were due to arrive in Brescia, Italy (having driven 1970 km via Ljubljana in Slovenia) at 09.50.
Winners of the Authentic category for cars of a type that could have competed in the original event were Patrick Pellen, Ronald Hagelen and Els van Beek from the Netherlands in a Vespa 400 (intriguingly, a type of car that had been entered in the 1958 event but was not ready in time for the start).
For 2019, the event will be run for Triumph TR sports cars from TR2 to TR8 – reliving the glory days of sports car rallying in the 1950s and 1960s, when TR2, TR3, TR4 and TR6 performed gallantly on the Liege-Rome-Liege, Liege-Sofia-Liege and Marathon de la Route events, organised by the same team as the original Liege-Brescia-Liege.