Ronald Reagan was president. The Berlin Wall still stood. And the World Rally Championship last held an event on U.S. soil, the Olympus Rally, in June 1988.
Thirty-five years later, WRC is exploring the opportunity of returning to America with a rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What’s the likelihood of this becoming reality? Stronger than you might think.
Why the U.S.? Why Chattanooga?
This past weekend, Rally USA held a demonstration event, which included a block party on Friday next to the iconic Chattanooga Choo Choo. WRC Head of Business Development Marc de Jong observed the event and believes the stars are aligning for the series to return to the U.S.
“There are three things coming together,” de Jong says. “First, the Ford motorsports program transferred its main responsibility from its European office to Detroit. Mark Rushbrook [global director of Ford Performance Motorsports] asked the question, ‘Why not go to the U.S.?’
“Then, we started looking at the research provided by Nielsen Sports. We found there’s a high recognition of rallying in America that had been growing. That corroborated with our stats on social media, on our WRC+ subscriptions, on our website traffic. There is a growing number of people in the U.S. that like rally.
“Number three was the interest of Chattanooga to come talk with us. The guy at Chattanooga Sports who took our phone call said, ‘Oh yeah, WRC, I was actually playing the video game last night.’ That is an anecdotal confirmation on what I said before–awareness of WRC [in the U.S.] is remarkably high.”
Why Chattanooga, though? America offers plenty of fine roads where rallies can occur.
The answer: location, location, location.
“World-level events need a very unique combination of infrastructure,” says Stuart Woods, Rally USA manager and grassroots rally racer. “Chattanooga was a crossroads historically. There’s a large river, there were railroads and there are interstates that connect Chattanooga to the South, to the Northeast, to the Midwest and to the West. The airport is large enough to support some volume of traffic, but we’re also close to the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta. The Port of Savannah is vital … [It] is one of the largest shipping ports in the U.S., [and Chattanooga is] about 6 hours away from there.”
With a big event also comes a big influx…
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