Two Guys Rally

Rally America 08 Season is OVER [ October 22nd, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

Rally America’s 2008 season ended this weeked with their final event of the year: Rally Michigan (aka LSPR). Travis pastrana had already locked in the overall championship win but decided to get a podium finish anyway (~2 minutes behind first). Travis’ well known teammate, Ken Block, ended up winning the Rally to keep Sarasin out of 2nd overall. Kyle Sarasin didn’t give up on second easily and ended up with a 2nd place finish at the Rally (~1 minute behind Ken).

Kyle Sarasin did, however, end up 3rd in the overall championship this year. I would say this has been a good year for this up and coming rallyer. Did you know he is still a teenager and barely a legal adult? There is a lot more that is going to come out of this racer in the future (or so I hope his budget permits). He’ll be someone to watch, for sure.

I guess the competition pushed ACP into DNFing this weekend. He still ended up 4th in the championship but a DNF is a demoralizing way to end a season.  You should go watch ACP’s videos and make him keep racing.

Either way, it was a neat end to a season and I hope to see some more exciting races next year. Sno*Drift here we come!

Rally Michigan Next Weekend [ October 10th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

Rally America’s 9th and final rally of the season is next weekend (October 17th, 2008). It is called the Lake Superior Rally, but I like to refer to rallies by the State they are in or a convenient abbreviation (LSPR would be this rally, but that is not as fun to say as STPR). So I call it Rally Michigan as it is more fun and I’m sticking it to the man…YEA!

Racers will be swept off to Houghton, Michigan. It will be a race for the podium, but only the last two spots as Travis Pastrana locked in his 1st place this season with 116 points overall. Compare that to Kyle Sarasin’s 2nd place of 66 points overall. But watch out for Ken Block and Andrew Comrie-Picard too, they are not far off of 2nd with 64 and 62 points respectively.

Enough people are within points ranges for 2nd and 3rd place that this Rally will be an all out race to the finish line with only 1st place being locked in. There will plenty of broken hearts (and cars to go with them), and hopefully some upsets leading up to the final podiums. Unfortunately for Tanner Foust, it is not possible for him to get 3rd place overall, even if everyone DNFs but him. So expect to see 7th place overall and up fighting it out for the podium in Houghton, Michigan next weekend. It is going to be fun and your final fix of Rally America until 2009.

I Hope You Watched The X-Games [ August 4th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

The X-Games this year was AMAZING. This is the third year where Rally Racing was present as an event in the X-Games. In pure X-Games fashion the crossover jump was the biggest it has ever been. It was pretty spectacular to watch. Lots of drama and lots of up and comers including a father son team that did better than expected.

Unfortunately the only non-Subaru (Mitsubishi) racing DNFd over the jump. It was driven by Andrew Comrie-Picard, who is trailing Travis Pastrana by 1 point in the Rally America series. ACP ended up coming short on the jump (just a few mph) and the impact on the rear wheels caused him to flip end over end. What makes this more heartbreaking is it was his first race (semi-finals) of the week and he had it won if he made the jump. Why would he have it won? Dave Mirra hit the wall pretty hard and knocked his steering out of alignment right before that (and he thought he DNFd). Luckily for Dave, he was able to finish albeit painfully slow involving many excursions into reverse. There are videos of it popping up all over YouTube: here and here for example. Better luck next year ACP!

It all ended with a battle between last year’s gold medalist and the original X-Games gold medalist: Tanner Foust and Travis Pastrana. Travis was racing with a new co-driver (not too big of a deal on a Super Special) as his current co-driver fractured a vertebrae in the Freestyle Motocross the previous night. These guys are super competitive in everything they do. Anyway, Travis was able to steal the gold from Tanner in their heads up. What an exciting X-Games.

The podium was filled with 4 drivers. Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust and a tie for bronze between Dave Mirra and Ken Block. I sure hope you caught it on ABC.

A Look Inside A Subaru Parts Truck [ July 31st, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

Travis Pastrana’s car is supported by oh so many spares of almost everything on the car. Rarely would you get to see inside the support vehicles unless you were at a rally. I happened to stumble across a video of just that on YouTube. You may want to fast forward a bit past the intro.

Here is a link to the video for you RSS folks.

Back To Normal at NEFR [ July 17th, 2008 ] By:Charles Smith

The New England Forest Rally was this past weekend, and unlike STPR’s results, NEFR was back to what you might expect: Coming in first was Niall McShea and co-driver Marshall Clarke, followed by Andrew Pinker/Robbie Durant. Rounding off the podium was Travis Pastrana/Derek Ringer.

This is good news for American Rally racers. Niall McShea has had 32 WRC starts, placed 9th in Rally Australia in 2004 and was crowned 2004’s PWRC winner. While you may not think that it is good news that a PWRC winner is stomping Americans and Canadians in Maine, you have to look at the pace that was kept. Travis Pastrana was only 2:43 behind McShea and only 1:18.9 separated Pinker from McShea.

As this beautiful sport grows in America, the gap between Europe and America shrinks in terms of Rally talent (see also Colin McRae not finishing 1st in the X-Games to Pastrana).