When Dick and Joyce Pofahl depart Nov. 2 from London, Wis., on their way to Brighton (right here in Kenosha County) in their 1950 Mark VI Saloon with friends in the Bentley Drivers’ Club (and Rolls-Royce Owners’ Club), they’ll be paying tongue-in-cheek salute to what’s billed as “the world’s longest running motoring event” taking place the same weekend in England.

The event across the pond commemorates Parliament passing the 1896 Locomotive on the Highway Act, raising the speed limit for cars, a.k.a. “light locomotives,” from 4 mph to 14 mph — and abolishing the requirement that cars be “preceded by a man on foot.” Some 30 English car owners promptly conducted the “Emancipation Run” to celebrate enactment of the law. That was the original London to Brighton run.

It became an annual rally starting in 1927, when a London newspaper editor staged a re-enactment of the original event, really more endurance test than race, restricting it to cars manufactured before Jan. 1, 1905.

Organized now by the Royal Automobile Club, with upwards of 500 exclusively pre-1905 cars entered each year, the 60-mile run draws crowds of roadsidespectators to view the “veteran” (i.e., vintage) cars drive south from London through suburbs, villages and towns to Brighton on the English Channel.

As a board member of the Bentley Drivers’ Club,

Midwest U.S.A. Region, Pofahl organizes yearly club tours, plotting the route, mapping distances to each turn, scheduling breakfast, lunch, dinner, sightseeing, whatever. Past driving tours included having participants over for coffee and kringle, tea and crumpets, a “plowmen’s lunch” (which apparently features “lots of cheese,” according to Joyce) and a picnic in the park.

This year is his first time replicating the tour in England by way of Wisconsin roads. “We’re a British car club, and it’s an English thing,” he said. “And our club has never done that before.”

It will start in London, Wis., just west of Madison, head south through Cambridge, where the group will browse antique stores before following Highway 12 to Whitewater. “They just opened a roundabout in Whitewater. That’s an English thing. So, we’ll go through the roundabout,” Dick explained.

From there, they’ll take Highway 12 south to Highway 20, go east to Highway 75 and south to Brighton, where the group will stop outside Brighton Town Hall to take photos before proceeding to the home of Gary and Dee Wier, Dick and Joyce’s son-in-law and daughter. There, they’ll dine on, what else, fish and chips.

Despite their seeming immersion in all things English since becoming steeped in British automotive tradition, the couple insists they are not Anglophiles.

“Oh, no,” Joyce exclaims. “We’re German.”