Cars

Automotive ADD: Why Red Bull Global Rallycross might save motorsport

650 horsepower flame-spitting airborne action in Washington, DC.

Jonathan M. Gitlin – Aug 1, 2016 1:05 pm | 31

A grid full of 650hp GRC Supercars smoking their tires at the start of a heat. Credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Nelson Piquet Jr takes me for a ride in his Global Rallycross Ford Fiesta.

WASHINGTON, DC—Red Bull Global Rallycross (GRC) paid its annual visit to the nation’s capital this past weekend. As a form of racing, rallycross has been doing something few other series have managed in recent years—it’s growing new fans and appealing to kids who, by and large, are more interested in getting the latest phone than a driver’s license. With that in mind, we spent a couple of days at RFK Stadium watching the action and talking to some of the drivers to find out what makes this flavor of the sport so successful.

A brief primer: the cars all start life as regular production cars—Volkswagen Beetles, Ford Fiestas, and so on. They’re eventually stripped down and highly modified. Highly turbocharged two-liter engines pump out more than 600hp, driving all four wheels. The tracks are a mix of tarmac and gravel and include a dramatic jump over a dirt ramp. And the races are fast and furious, a series of short heats with plenty of opportunity for door-banging and paint-trading.

This year, Andretti Autosport’s Tanner Foust and Scott Speed have been the men to beat, taking the majority of the wins so far in their VW Beetles. We got to ask both drivers what makes GRC a hit. “The secret is two-fold,” Foust said. The racer made his name in Formula Drift, then the X-Games, before competing in rallycross first in Europe and then here in the US. By now, you might also recognize him from Top Gear America.

“We started the sport in the US in the X-Games, and that naturally has a young demographic. The players in the sport—especially in the beginning—were names like [Travis] Pastrana, Bucky [Lasek], and Ken [Block] and Dave Mirra, who were all subscribing to the idea that ‘with age comes a cage; and they’d take their two-wheel adventures into four wheels,” he told Ars. “And then there’s the short racing format. When everything’s narrowed down to three minutes, you don’t have to pay attention that long—they call it motorsport for people with ADD. It has all the sweet spots. You have a drag racing launch with incredibly fast cars, you have jumps, you have drifting and sliding through the corners, you have cars that can pull 2Gs in the corners if they need to. And you have unique venues. There’s a lot of pros for a young crowd.”

His teammate Scott Speed—who has raced in Formula 1 and Formula E—concurs. “It’s short races, it’s actually entertaining, and the content that’s generated here is unrivaled,” he said. “The YouTube videos we can make or the pictures that come out from these races—you take a picture of an F1 car on track and it looks like it’s standing still. You take a picture of my Beetle coming sideways over the top of the jump and it looks fast, it demonstrates that speed. I love it. It’s super fun to drive, the cars are incredible to be able to go around corners with dirt and 70-foot jumps.”

Even a recent conversation with former IndyCar driver Alex Lloyd turned to talk of GRC when discussing the future of motorsports. “I think you need to do something radical, and appease the non-purists and the purists at the same time. The closest that we come from a sport that I can see catching on is Global RallyCross,” Lloyd said. “People want that nature of things happening quickly, it’s aggressive, there’s jumping, there’s action, and then it ends. And then a little bit later there’ll be another heat going on. I think it’s that mentality that specifically America wants. Look at football—it’s a very long game but there’s lots of little segments of excitement and then it stops. And then it’s excitement and then it stops. I think racing can learn something by doing things like heat races.”

After getting a ride from fellow former-Formula 1 driver Nelson Piquet Jr in his Ford Fiesta, I can certainly confirm the GRC cars are like little else when it comes to four-wheeled fun. As you’ll see in the video up top, they get off the line like little else—all-wheel drive certainly helps there—reading speeds of more than 120mph (193km/h) on the sub-mile track. These vehicles demand a serious degree of car control, with little in the way of electronic driver aids to help.

Interestingly, the officials in race control get access to a lot more data from the cars than the teams, with live telemetry feeds from the cars, including sensors that measure wheel speed, lambda, turbo boost pressure, and more in order to keep the competitors honest. “We’re allowed to use wheel speed sensors when we’re testing, but not at the actual track,” Foust said. “A road car has much more electronic gizmos than we do. That’s good—you want to keep it in the driver’s hands. You do have a lot of grip, only a two-liter engine making a huge amount of boost, it forces the teams to be able to give that power to the driver in a manageable way.”

Between their Frankenstein nature and all the data allowance, Foust calls the GRC vehicles “some of the most fun cars I’ve ever driven, and I’ve been very lucky to drive a lot of interesting machines around the planet.” We asked him to describe the experience of driving them, and Foust offered heaps of praise.

“They’re the most hyperactive freak shows you’ll ever hold onto from a steering wheel,” he said. “The method of driving them is to smooth off the corners and calm everything down, to try and get some momentum through the corners. They naturally rotate a bit because the differentials are so aggressive, but every car is different. Some cars are designed to be flat like a road-race car, with fairly stiff springs, and then the differentials allow some movement. Other cars are quite soft—like the one Nelson was driving—which allows a lot of body roll, but now you have this added contact patch on the outside versus the inside so the differential can basically be locked, so it’s sending more power to the outside so it turns the car. There’s different strategies for getting these things to work. Different tracks tend towards talents of different cars.”

The track layout in DC this year was much revised, lined with unforgiving concrete walls and a jump just before the finish line. Despite a heavy mid-afternoon downpour, the two VW Beetles were the stars of the show, something that must have been quite welcome given our proximity to VW’s corporate HQ. They didn’t have it easy, though. 2014 series champion Joni Wiman and his Honda Civic Coupe kept Speed honest during the first semifinal heat, and Ford driver Patrik Sandell looked set to beat Foust in the second semifinal before the latter muscled his way past in a fine recovery drive from an earlier spin.

The final was, if anything, even more exciting. Speed led from the start, but Foust had a harder time fighting his way to third. At one point, he made contact in mid-air with the Ford Fiesta of Brian Deegan—something I’d certainly never seen in many years of watching cars race each other. The competitors now get a month-long break before the next round in Atlantic City on August 28. If you’re even vaguely into cars and live near one of the upcoming races, you could do a lot worse than spend the day checking out the action.

Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

31 Comments