I am always up for a new photographic challenge, so when Ken Block invited me to tag along with him and his crew for this year’s New England Forest Rally, I figured it would be no sweat. After all, I did the exact same thing last year at WRC Spain, so this wouldn’t be much different, right? Boy was I wrong…
With only limited access to places where you can watch the action from, rally in itself is a very hard sport to spectate – no matter where in the world you are.
In Spain the crowds were massive – the World Rally Championship event there has become a family tradition with the locals. Fathers bring their sons to races and when they have sons they do the same, and so on. Plus WRC tends to hold rallies closer to major cities – sometimes right in the middle of them.
It’s a little bit different in America, because unfortunately rallying is not as popular here as it is in Europe.
Even though the New England Forest Rally is probably one of the biggest events of its kind held in North America, there are few spectators. But it’s hard enough just to get to the stages, let alone find a comfortable place to watch from.
You would have to be absolutely nuts to try to follow a certain team on multiple stages. Of course, that’s exactly what we did….
Out of the 13 special stages held over the course of the two-day race weekend, we caught the leaders a total of eight times.
Looking back, I think that’s physically the best we could have done, considering we basically had to run our own rally just to keep up.
This included driving some of the special stage roads before they were closed to the public ahead of the competitors coming through.
Some that we drove through were downright treacherous, and our rental SUV was bottoming out around every other bend. We did anything and everything we could to follow Ken and his co-driver Alessandro ‘Alex’ Gelsomino.
Of course, Ken was not the only big-name driver making an appearance at this event. Travis Pastrana also competed.
He piloted his Subaru to a 3rd place overall finish, which was much better than he expected considering the mechanical failures the team had to deal with on the first day.
