It'd be great to say that this is a story about my meteoric rise to fame as a WRC driver or about how I managed to follow Petter Solberg through the tree line by riding one of those fantastic World Rally Championship (WRC) television camera choppers. But no, this is a story about how four American dudes traveled to New Zealand and got to experience a world rally the only real way that there is - by eating too much and slogging through an empty muddy forest.
This tale began here in the States, where I received an altogether nonchalant phone call and invitation from Dominick Infante, the rally-loving public relations guy for Subaru of America. The new Subaru Rally Team USA PWRC-class 2008 Impreza WRX STI was set to debut at Rally New Zealand and Ken Block would be piloting the beast. The trip was designed to be casual, with none of the usual presentations or seminars that accompany other press junkets. The only other guys going would be former SCC Editor Josh Jacquot and photographer Greg Jarem. Everything was designed to be low key, loose, and to give us the full experience of a WRC event. No b.s., just rally racing. Throw in the home of Xena, the Lord Of The Rings movies, and Rhys Millen and you've got yourself a deal. It wasn't a tough pitch at all.
Rally New Zealand has in recent years been headquartered in the city of Hamilton, about an hour and a half drive out of the more famous city of Auckland, the sprawling metropolis into which I landed. Lending a definite sense that this is no pretentious and overbearing F1 paddock, the city of Hamilton is small and very quiet. The area where we stayed was anchored on one end by a bicycle shop and the other by a herd of Thai restaurants. To put it into perspective, we stayed at the nicest hotel in town, which was on par with your average American business hotel. But I did get the definite feeling that it's the place to be when the WRC is in town. Solberg, Phil Mills, Malcolm Wilson, and Sebastien Loeb all wandered into the lobby at separate times, carrying on in a casual manner. We had breakfast with WRC crews and drivers just a table away. Loeb even checked into his room himself. How many racing world champions do you know that would do that (Fernando Alonso, I'm looking at you)?
But, in the end, it wasn't the town that really mattered; it was the dirt that surrounded it. I was here to see a WRC race in person and I wanted to see (and get pelted by) the native dirt and rocks of Xena-land. Our first day was spent at the practice course, which was an undulating, deeply rutted gravel course built through what appeared to be an events center that played host to campers as well as rock-crawlers. Jet lag was throwing my brain into a spin and the oddly clean air was feeding too much oxygen into my smog-infected nostrils, but I could have done an enduro once I set foot on that soil. Mud and sand started to flow through my veins. I was at the WRC.
Massive tents stood in front of us once we set foot at the Mystery Creek Events Centre, headquarters to Rally New Zealand. It would be just a couple hours before I was scheduled to go for a ride-along with Ken Block in his PWRC Subaru WRX STI. The Subaru Rally Team USA guys had managed to squeeze just two media rides into the morning schedule, and I would be going second. I heard that the first guy up was some sort of TV show host but all I really cared about was that he didn't pee into the racing suit, which I would have to put on after he was done.
By Joey Leh
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