X-Games Can Save American Rally Racing
Let’s face it – rally racing rocks. Balls to the wall over loose surfaces, jumps and with nothing but nature surrounding you. Sure, ole Mother Nature is actually out to puncture and flip your rally car but that’s just part of the fun. So, how come rally racing isn’t as big as NASCAR in the US?
Subaru and Ford keep the factory supported hopes alive in America but the sport has never, in our opinion, lived up to its full potential. With a penchant for flips, crashes, flying dirt, and sideways antics, rally racing should be a regular Internet sensation like drifting. But we’ve yet to see a deluge of slow-motion skateboarding montage videos appear and the Europeans have always beaten us in terms of rally “fandom”.
ESPN’s X-Games can help change all that. Sure, it’s only once a year and ESPN isn’t exactly a rally racing TV network. But X-Games still brings two of the biggest things that rally racing needs – eyeballs and decent TV coverage. Sponsoring companies just love TV airtime.
Every year, the X-Games brings big crossover traffic from such other categories as half-pipe inline skating and dudes doing bike tricks. Once these other sports end their competitions, the stands fill with thousands of spectators who have nothing better to do than discover what rally racing is. And most of them really like it.
X-Games’ marketing effect can also be seen in US rally racing’s direction. It comes as little surprise that today’s leading American rally drivers are also dipping into drifting (Tanner Foust, Samuel Hubinette, Rhys Millen) or were already known to the X-Games crowds (Travis Pastrana, Dave Mirra, Ken Block).
Companies are now stepping up to the plate with rally racing, the X-Games 16 roster is a list of all-stars, and the sponsorship and push helps. X-Games 16 is finally showcasing what they call SuperRally, a four car wheel-to-wheel battle on dirt that is known in Europe as rallycross.
With the Rally America series showing no signs of stopping and the New Jersey Motorsports Park rolling out a rallycross schedule, rally racing is only going to get stronger. Hopefully.
Rally and drift drivers Sam Hubinette (L) and ACP (R)
Ken Block’s ghymkhana video saved US rallying. Although I’m sure that the xgames helped bring enough sponsors into rally that he could attempt it in the first place.