2018 North America

[Zeakiwi]

Atko to be on North American stages for Subaru in 2018
https://rallysportmag.com/atkinson-joins-subaru-rally-team-usa-rally-campaign/

[janvanvurpa]

Atko to be on North American stages for Subaru in 2018
https://rallysportmag.com/atkinson-joins-subaru-rally-team-usa-rally-campaign/

Great:rolleyes:

Just another rich guy doing absolutely nothing to add any interest to the sport.
last several years the only guys who give one flying f**k about the so called "National Championship" are 14 to 23 year old, soft skinned, overweight, baseball hat wearing rabid Subaru-fan-bois who infest every rally related forum and FB page.
There is no spectacle and no honor in Subaru USA funding open class cars costing 10 times what they cars they compete "against"....and the fleets of garage built barely warmed over VW Golves or old near stock GC8s and GDs..
No honor at all in deploying a multimillion dollar effort to crush clubbies, so after 16 years of this it is getting mind numbingly boring.....

Now if Atko came over with a effort matching the normal effort, came over as just one of the guys..driving a "typical" level car..that would be abnother thing---
Like when Brendon Reeves came over and did 4-5 "Nationals" in a Fiesta FWD in a good spec and promptly beat every car except Higg-strana and or Ben Klock, that was fun....It demonstrated one thing very clearly: he can drive and all those dozens of turbo Subarus and the one or 2 Evo guys can't....

[kirungi okwogera]

John, what do you think would be the one or two biggest changes that could be made that would improve competition (hopefully public interest too) in American rallying? I've always been into rally but followed it seriously only since I've lived outside the US, so I never had much exposure to NA rallies. When I have, it's been much as you described.

[NaBUru38]

Today it's the last day of the Sonora Rally, a four-stage rally held under Dakar Rally rules (no GPS tracks, no maps, etc).

http://www.sonorarally.com/

[NaBUru38]

Breaking news in short track off-toad truck racing: the Crandon, Bark River and ERX racetacks left TORC for Lucas Oil.

http://shortcourseracer.com/midwest-tracks-withdraw-from-torc/
http://www.racer.com/lucas-oil-off-road/item/148236-lucas-oil-partners-with-crandon-bark-river-and-erx-for-new-short-course-off-road-racing-platform

[GravelBen]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but what sort of level/spectacle is the Canadian Rally Championship?

I'm going to be over there in September, potentially at a convenient time to see some of Rally Defi near Montreal. Worth the effort or am I likely to be disappointed in comparison to NZ rallying?

[janvanvurpa]

I just spoke with a trustworthy friend who lives just down the road.. He said "Maybe 4 cars look like they are even trying, the rest ...meh but If he wants put him in touch and I'll show him around and where to get decent beer." He works as a tree planter which is a very hard job and gets people from all over the world, all a bit crazy..But I have introduced him to Swedish and Finnish club rallying and shown him bits of Otago a couple of years ago when Paddon won overall in the Escort..So he has some idea of what GOOD rally is about...and what Canadian and US rally is as well----but it hasn't deterred him from building his own car...RWD as god intended.

His English is fine, (if only a bit twisted), his wit is excellent with huge doses of sarcasm and irony...September might be right on the edge of Autumn, and around there the colors are quite spectacular....So looks like you can't lose...Maybe be extra interesting to have somebody actually see a North American event in light of the little group of seriously self-deluded people in Calgary, Alberta (both his and my least favorite place in the entire country--4-5 guys who have just a handfull of rallies between them who have announced with some (BS) fanfare that they have established a "Study Group" to bring WRC to Canada") who are dreaming some fantasy of bringing a WRC event to Canada...based on their "experience" of regional event organising with usually 17-19 cars showing up--which they rave about as towering achievements.

(Alberta is "Like Texas, without the interesting characters.." Oil out in the boonies, sheer luck that nobody had anything to do with but which has affected most peoples minds making them think they're smart..Not just lucky" and is the weirdly heavily US style fundamentalist religious/conservative province... )

Stay in touch as the time gets nearer..

[GravelBen]

Thanks, have heard similar from another source now too. Bit sad in comparison to the 115 entries for Otago this weekend!

Think I'll flag that rally then. I'll be at a wedding at Niagara then planning to head out to the east coast to check out Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, looking forward to it.

[janvanvurpa]

Oh sh1t , didn't see this...Jeeeezuz..how much time ya got? The roots are embedded deeply in the unique culture here..and while Merikuh is an idustrialised country, it really does not widely share in the cultural development of Western Europe..

Where to seriously begin?

Culture...Americo-centric views of the world? (even that is problematic..Americo-centric implies an American CENTERED view point which implies there are some other areas of awareness on the periphery...And that is decidedly not the case in most. Most are barely aware of other states much less the exisitence of other countries..America's infamous monolinguistical record means 99% don't even TRY to read any news from anywhere else, if its not in simple, mainly monosyllabic words..Even if you try to show them that they know more say French than they realise, they don't try...

So the ONLY thing that they care about is whatever is right in front of their nose..for the moment...

Shifting gears....Analysis, deep or otherwise, is not a particularly common mode of thinking here.. There is a lot of black/white, good/bad rather simplistic thinking.
Since i entered this sport about 1984 there has been one "Next Big Thing" that is going to "save" rally in North america..Always related to TV and promotion and some dreamed of flood of sponsorship dollars... In our now nearly dead forum we have a thread nealy 10 years old titled "Oooo! The next "this will save rally" is almost here! (https://www.rallyanarchy.com/phorum/read.php?4,24930)" Since 2009 its been trickling along... It does show some think.
But the analysis of how to build the sport, how to build better cars, how to learn skills in driving, recruitment, retension is always "If we get a washed up WRC "star", that'll generate interest, get us on TV and the sponsorship dollars will pour forth...

If somebody buys a $300,000 hand built car and manages to come 3rd 30-40 minutes behind Higgens they're praised as "An amazing driver"... If they build yet another cookie-cutter Subaru---which makes up approximately 60-62% of the field in the 2000s and they are slower than shit, the obvious answer is they need Reiger suspension--to go down stages at 75 km/hr while the top 2 are averaging 110 km/hr.. Or a bigger motor..or just spend more..

If they look at videos of Swedish or Finnish drivers in Group H or F-cup they either say "they have such bad-ass cars or "they're so fast because ot the 40+years culture there" with no explanation of how a rally culture--other men going fast 20 or 30 years ago enables a guy today to put the foot down hard.. Oh I fogot, the other answer "They've all being doing it since they were 8"......glimpsing the answer--long duration at the sport---but missing the point that if somebody started at 25 or 27 or 30, that if they stuck with it and piled up years of experience that the same guy would be fast--way way faster than around here----in 10 or 12 years.
Nope that wasn't what the next guy said, the next guy said "they all start at 8" so that must be it. (I heard that in America in my serious sport, moto-cross....despite telling them that a lot of the guys back then--late 60s/early 70s did not even sit on any kind of motorcycle till 17-18..And showing them photos of the guys showing that I knew the guys they were talking about, shared gargaes with them, trained Tuesdays and Thursdays with them..did physical trianing Mondays and wednesdays...Nope it wasn't what "everybody said" so it was dismissed..
That brings us to a fascinating artical which is applicable here..(It's 0130 here I have to sleep)

http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/


The Death Of Expertise (http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/)





By Tom Nichols (http://thefederalist.com/author/tomnichols/)JANUARY 17, 2014


I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.
I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.




But democracy, as I wrote in an essay about C.S. Lewis and the Snowden affair (http://tomnichols.net/blog/2013/08/02/snowden-manning-and-screwtape/), denotes a system of government, not an actual state of equality. It means that we enjoy equal rights versus the government, and in relation to each other. Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.” And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.
What’s going on here?

I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.



If you would like i can expand on the cultural basis why Americans don't embrace rally (because it is hard and unpredictable) and because Americans are not fighters (They want to win yeas but with huge applications of $$$ and "technology", or tricks and bling) and because of an unusal culture wide "knowledge" that "We never lost a war!!" ignoring the fact that we never fought an enemy either not generations more primitive or one already "bled white" as the Native Americans were (already 90% dead from diseases) or in WWI where USA came in only at the Spring Offensive 1918 when Germany was bled out with over a million dead, or WWII where again by time Americans were engaged in the main theatre in the West--Jun 44 onward----(Africa and Sicily and the Italian campaign being bad but really peripheral campaigns--just look at the numbers of men engaged) then Germand had lost at least 3 1/2 million dead or captured---and the same in Asia...the Japanses had been fighting for 6 years before we were engaged in any sort of ground operations (even then say August 1942 in Guadalcanal there were intitially barely 17,000 troops engaged---versus 4 million in Russia on each side--or more. We don't want to fight... (An interesting note on the Westfront opening in 6Jun 44.. just 4 months later fully 25% of "loss of effective" was by "battle fatigue"....Stress, shutting down.... how did the "bad guys--fighting non-stop for 5 years at that point, do it? carry on what was clearly a lost cause? I suggest it is because their culture, almsot EVERY other culture has plenty of stories and narratives of triumphant victories---but every other culture, including out "enemies' have stories of glorious defeats as well..of fights to the last man and le dernier cartouche!

But not us.. "we never lost a war" We always win. No stories of the fight to the end.

More later if you like, I have to sleep.


Oh just curious, where did you live, and where are you now? What is "your own" language?

[Zeakiwi]

Targa Newfoundland is in September but probably a bit late for your travel window. (Ask them to delay the wedding a week later?)
http://targanfld.com/targa-newfoundland-2018-dates-rates-revised/
Find a co-driver role? https://youtu.be/lIlOR6O--C0 (newfoundland targa through the villages)

If you can handle getting probed by US airport security and supplying your fingerprints and god knows what else - the NASCAR brickyard 400 is on at Indy (if it does not rain) Always the Indy 500 museum with cars and bikes to visit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es2BsqILg-A (brickyard 400 bingle 2017)

Always ask them to schedule the wedding a bit earlier World RX at Trois rivieres - 4th august2018.

[GravelBen]

Targa Newfoundland is in September but probably a bit late for your travel window. (Ask them to delay the wedding a week later?)
http://targanfld.com/targa-newfoundland-2018-dates-rates-revised/
Find a co-driver role? https://youtu.be/lIlOR6O--C0 (newfoundland targa through the villages)


Actually that might work out... I'll check the dates and stages.

[Zeakiwi]

Block burns the Cossie escort.

https://www.facebook.com/KenBlockRacing/videos/10155739015015765/

Not much to see but the language is good.
https://youtu.be/CD6xZGapqsA