For the second time this season, Brandon Semenuk has passed Ken Block on the final stage of a rally for the win. But he’s not sure he can do it for a third time.
The first time was when Block hit a deer on 100 Acre Wood. Now, after a dust-filled stage on which Brandon had a clean road, he had the edge to pull 0.9 seconds ahead of the Hoonigan Hyundai for a last-minute upset American Rally Association presented by DirtFish National championship victory.
“I would’ve been stoked on getting even second in the powerstage,” Semenuk admitted to DirtFish at parc fermé, “but to get max points and to take those seconds back from Ken is…I can’t even believe it.”
This sentiment was shared by many around the rally. Block had turned a 20-second deficit from an intercom failure the day prior into a three-second lead after winning six of the seven prior stages on Saturday.
We went ten tenths, eleven tenths the whole weekend, and we won by 0.9s. So there’s no confidence in the championship if we have to do that again.Brandon Semenuk on his ARA National title chances
The final stage was only 3.80 miles long. But it was still enough distance for Semenuk to make a difference.
“I was blown away by that time to be honest,” he said.
“We pushed hard, and when you’re going that hard for two days straight and everything works out, you have these moments where you just think, like, is the car going to fall apart on us? Are we going to go off the road? Are we going to lose the pace somewhere?
“We never really lost it. We had good stages and minimal mistakes, and the car was flawless.”
While Semenuk may have won the battle, he’s still not too confident about the war. The far more developed and researched Hyundai i20, even in its detuned form, presents a real threat to the factory Subaru.
Its WRX STI has been largely unchanged since 2015 and a big development push now would be somewhat uneconomical, as it enters its final year of competition before a regulations shakeup for 2023.
Semenuk must work with what he’s got. And that’s got him questioning whether he can keep sustained pressure on Block.
“We went ten tenths, eleven tenths the whole weekend, and we won by 0.9s,” Semenuk pointed out. “So there’s no confidence in the championship if we have to do that again. It’s not going to be easy.”
Semenuk went on to suggest he has to push harder than Block to achieve the same result: “I mean, I’ve never driven the car, so I don’t know, but I guarantee he didn’t drive it as hard as me this rally.”
It’s a bold claim from Semenuk. But does he have a point?
Block won 10 of the 15 stages in New England. Of the five he fell short, he suffered from an intercom failure on two of them – at one point losing 3.5 seconds per mile to Semenuk on Beaver Pond, where he initially encountered said problem.
The only other time all rally where he was more than one second per mile off the stage-winning pace was the final test, North Road, where he lost the rally lead to Semenuk. Block had complained of dust hindering his pace on the final runs of Saturday, the rally’s final day.
On pure pace during the past three rounds, it’s been clear that Block poses a serious threat to Subaru in his current form, and it’s up to Subaru to play smart and capitalize on anything they can to try to win, just as Semenuk has managed on NEFR.
