Tanner Faust and his navigator Christine Beavis prior to the start of a rally race in February. (Photo by Dilip Vishwanat / New York Times News Service)
SALEM, Mo. -- The drivers gathered around a woman holding out a deck of cards as a magician would. Pick a card, any card. Race positions were at stake.
To either side stood Travis Pastrana and Ken Block, Team Subaru, the most famous, financed and fearsome national force in rally, a motor sport that turns street-legal hot rods loose on closed roads. Between them stood Tanner Foust, a former military brat and Hollywood stuntman, who, at 35, has been using the skills learned driving a bus around the icy streets of Vail, Colo., to mount an improbable rise through the rankings of rally.
Foust's ascendance to the top level of Open Class competition coincides with an ambitious moment for rally, which has enjoyed enduring popularity in Europe only to encounter a stateside fate familiar to partisans of soccer, Nutella and the rock band Status Quo.
Rally basics
- At speeds approaching 120 miles an hour, rally drivers race through 5- to 30-mile stages of public roadway on terrain ranging from mud and gravel to smooth pavement.
- Over two days of driving, they cover about 250 miles, competing to post the lowest cumulative time on the race stages.
- Drivers are not allowed to practice on the course. Instead, they must rely on a navigator in the passenger seat who, equipped with an odometer, a map and route notes, calls out coded instructions.
Watch in person
- The third race of the season, the Olympus Rally, takes place in Aberdeen April 18-19 and is free to spectators.
- The Oregon Trail Rally, which begins at the Portland International Raceway, is the fourth race, May 15-17.
Under its previous direction, the sport failed for decades to inspire the six-pack populism of NASCAR. But in 2004, a group of drivers bought sanctioning rights to the national tour, now known as the Rally America Championship, and set out to attract a sort of audience-in-waiting. Through racing video games with names like Dirt, the promoters learned, young Americans were already familiar with rally cars.
"The young kids that play those video games, they see these cars and they relate to them," says Paul Giblin, director of business development for Rally America.
The sport has also gained the attention of ESPN and debuted at the X Games in 2006, with newfound star power provided by Pastrana, 25, a moonlighting motocross champion.
Foust came to the sport from humbler beginnings. He learned to take curves in a used Honda Civic, dropped out of the University of Colorado and worked the night shift as a bus driver. "I got fired for doing doughnuts in the Beaver Creek West lot in a big passenger bus," he says. "It was probably worth it."
At an ice-driving school in Colorado, he studied the art of the controlled skid. Eventually he gained a following in the sport known as drifting, a style of competition that rewards death-defying sidelong stunts. And he was hired to drive the General Lee in the movie "The Dukes of Hazzard."
Still, competition beckoned.
"Rally racing is this pure, crazy sport where at the end of a weekend it feels like you really got away with something big," he says. "You take so many risks in rally racing. There are at least 100 times you could crash the car at a very high speed."
In the Ozark foothills at the second event of the 2009 tour, Foust finished third, advancing him in the rankings to a tie for first, on track to compete before a broadcast audience at the X Games.
"Another event, another learning experience," he says.
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