Story: Evan Rothman
Picture: Tim Williams / Rally America
This weekend’s Susquehannock Performance Trail Rally (STPR) plays host to the fourth round of the Rally America series, regarded as the most competitive rallying series in the United States of America.
With Tim Williams’ photographic skills, HANDBRAKES & HAIRPINS will be in attendance at this weekend’s rally in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania to bring you the latest and most entertaining rally news and action photography from this event in next week’s issue.
The STPR, as it is commonly referred to, brings a rally route that features some of the most fearsome roads in world rallying.
With top rally teams preparing their rally machines for this weekend’s event, the teams from as far as Canada have signed on to do battle against USA’s best crews.
The STPR website, www.stpr.org, has a number of interesting features one of which explains the rally classes beautifully:
“Rally America has grouped Performance Rally vehicles into three groups with two of the groups further broken down into classes. The groups are:
• Open category – Classes are: Open, Open Light, Group 5 and Group 2.
• Production category – Classes are: Super Production. Production GT, Production and Rally Truck.
• Historic category – Groups all cars into the Historic class.”
This year’s route is once again provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureua of Foresty. A route of 100,8km in the Susquehannock, Tioga and Tiadaghton State Forests will be used for the special stages, being repeated three times over the course of the weekend. Added to this will be 14,4km of private roads. The Subaru SuperSpecial Stage at the Tioga Country Fairgrounds is just under a 1,6km-long, and will be a feature not to be missed this weekend.
This the 34th running of this much-anticipated rally, is not only the oldest inthe Rally America series, but the fastest too!
Subaru Rally Team USA driver Ken Block (now driving for the Monster World Rally Team powered by the 2010 Ford Fiesta), set the fastest times on the opening stages of the Waste Management Susquehannock Trail Performance Rally (STPR) presented by Citizens & Northern Bank and never looked back, taking his second win of the 2009 season at this notoriously tough event. For this year, however, he will pushed hard through all the stages by Antoine L’Estage/Nathalie Richard (Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X), Bill Bacon/Peter Watt (Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX), Dave Mirra/Martin Headland (Subaru Impreza) and Travis and Terry Hanson (Subaru Impreza).