Marathon de la Route
car race in 1931–1960
The Marathon de la Route was a series of road rallies held in Europe between 1931 and 1971, including Liège–Rome–Liège and Liège–Sofia–Liège rallies held on public roads and closed-circuit races held at the Nürburgring from 1965 until 1971. It was reserved for so-called touring cars. Many renowned drivers participated such as Olivier Gendebien, Willy Mairesse, Lucien Bianchi, and Jacky Ickx.
History
Liège–Rome–Liège
The race took place on an open road, an average distance of 3,500 km non-stop (sometimes more than 5,000 km as in 1959): departing Wednesday at 11 pm from Spa, and returning to the same place on Sunday around 4 pm. A Golden Cup was also sometimes awarded to three-year class winners such as Bill Bengry. The rally of August 1939 was the last major rally event before World War II. Belgium's Ginet Trasenster of Bugatti and France's Jean Trévoux in a Hotchkiss tied for first place, denying the German works teams shortly before their countries were overrun. This was one of five Liège wins for Trasenster.
The Liège continued as uncompromisingly an open road event run to an impossible time schedule, and remained Europe's toughest rally until it had moved to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.
Liège–Sofia–Liège
From 1961 to 1964, the course was modified to Liège-Sofia-Liège. This reflected the desire of the organizer — the Royal Motor Union of Liège to diversify the route and to find traffic-free roads.
The public source identifies “Marathon de la Route” as car race in 1931–1960. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Marathon, Route and race.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3257373. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1971, 1965 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marathon de la Route” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.