Subaru Loads Up For a Rally Filled Weekend

By Logan Utsman on Friday, July 13th, 2012

New England will soon enough be awash with the kind of noise and chaos only possible from a Subaru rally car. In the automaker’s first double-header of the 2012 season, both the Subaru Rally Team and its newly established PUMA Rallycross Team will battle it out this weekend in their respective motorsports. While David Higgins, Craig Drew and their hardened STI drop the clutch and power through the New England Forest Rally July 13, the trio of Sverre Isachsen, Dave Mirra and Bucky Lasek will be prepping their 600 horsepower fire shooters for the next day’s round of the Global Rallycross Championship.

“We want to just get the job done here this weekend, clinch it, and then be able to go to the last round with no pressure and really be able to go flat out for the fans,” said Higgins. With two wins and two second place finishes across the previous four rounds, Higgins and Drew have been powering through this year’s Rally America season with solid success. With just two rounds to go including this weekend’s event in Maine, Subaru is looking strong to win the entire championship. But with 100 miles of technical gravel, the rally team will still have to be on their toes for the New England Forest Rally.

Just 100 miles south of the Maine event, the fourth round of the Global Rallycross Championship will be taken place. Starting Saturday, July 14, the race will be held at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway and will feature some of the most unusual racing vehicles the world has ever seen. Mixing elements of rally and track racing, rallycross cars produce stupid amounts of power and charge through both asphalt and dirt in the same lap. Subaru’s team consists of three WRX STIs with more than 600 ponies to all four wheels and suspension though enough to handle multiple 60 foot gap jumps.

“Having David [Higgins] and his co-driver Craig [Drew] rallying in the forests of Maine just a whisper away from retaining their championship title while teammates Sverre [Isachsen], Dave [Mirra], and Bucky [Lasek] are racing on asphalt inside a permanent race track in New Hampshire really highlights the versatile performance of our Subaru WRX STI,” said James Han, motorsports marketing manager for Subaru of America.

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