The Irish crew who proved a point to America

I don’t mind admitting it: I thought it may have been a case of ambition overtaking ability.

As accomplished a WRC2 driver as Josh McErlean is, aiming to challenge the Subaru Motorsports USA outfit in America was a brave target – simply because they rarely, if ever, get beaten.

I equally don’t mind admitting I was wrong. Very wrong. McErlean may not have got the result at Overmountain Rally Tennessee, but he certainly made the impression he and John Coyne had been after.

To prove that a well-driven Rally2 car can indeed challenge the Subaru juggernaut.

Since the American Rally Association clipped the wings of the Open 4WD regulations in a bid to pair them closer back in-line to the global Rally2 platform at the top of 2023, Subaru has only lost one rally – and that was because they both retired.

But Coyne – this year’s ARA RC2 champion and founder of the Motorsport Ireland Rally Academy – is a self confessed “data nerd”, and reckoned things weren’t quite as one-sided as they perhaps appeared.

“I’ve been talking with Lance Smith of Vermont SportsCar quite a bit over the last couple of years discussing how do we get some real competition for the Subarus?” Coyne told DirtFish. “Because they also want to see that their wins mean something.

“Looking at seconds per kilometer gaps, split times and all that stuff, I reckoned that Josh had the pace to be right in the mix with these boys. And that’s kind of how it panned out,” he smiled.

McErlean’s pace deficit worked out at 0.28s/km to the fastest Subaru on the splits. He won a stage and actually led the rally until he was forced to retire on SS10 – a gear linkage issue preceding two punctures.

He may not have secured the result to match, but McErlean’s mission was accomplished.

“I think that was what obviously John Coyne wanted to do this weekend, was to try and prove that a Rally2 car can compete with Subarus,” he told DirtFish.

“As you know, the Subarus is a fully-fledged factory team, it’s a proper outfit – it’s the same standard as a WRC team I would say with what they have and the package they have. Yeah, to go there with a car and a trailer on the back of a Transit van with a bunch of Irish guys was quite good.

“The car itself, the Subaru, has got quite a lot of power and I think you can see from the splits on the certain stages where it was climbing up hills was where they were getting the time and then on the downhills is where we were getting it back.

“I think there are certain stages that, OK, it’s more beneficial to have the power etc. with big straights, but it’s still rallying, you still have to carry speed, and I think with what we’ve done this weekend, it was good to show that in America.”

And without his issues, McErlean is confident he could have won the rally.

“Genuinely I think we would have,” he argued, “because it’s hard to get tires in America and we were on a K6 Pirelli. They were limited on tires as well, like us, but we had K4s for the afternoon where tire wear was high.

“And I think that’s where we could have got the jump if we had got to that point.”

While part of Coyne’s plan was undoubtedly to boost McErlean’s profile – a driver he personally manages – the main vision was to boost international participation in America.

His hope now is that others take notice of what McErlean managed and feel persuaded to come and challenge the Subarus on a regular basis.

“I was very happy what I’d pencilled out on the back of an envelope actually worked in real life. I think it was a good experiment and hopefully it shows that there’s good pace here in the US if people wanted to come over and mix it with the establishment,” Coyne said.

“I would like to see more international competition over here because the stages we have at our disposal here in the US are second-to-none, the events are just superb from a drivers’ point-of-view.”

McErlean concluded: “It’s not even for me proving the point, I think it’s rallying as a whole in America that the Americans themselves, the people in the championship, maybe disregard a Rally2 car against the Open class Subaru.

“And even talking to Travis and Brandon, they’re happy too because they’re always given the status of, ‘oh, they’ve got this big car and no one else is able to race them this year’.

“So I think for rallying as a whole in America, it’s good because you can go buy this car off the shelf. You don’t have to create it yourself and you can go and race the best there is.”

So the next time a proven Rally2 competitor decides to head Stateside with a target of racing the Subarus, I’ll not be quite so skeptical.

“Basically if you asked anybody I think, and you could see it on social media the past week after we announced we were coming, there was huge skepticism from the American rallying community that he could get close to the Subarus,” Coyne added.

“And I think we kind of put that to rest.”