In 2000, at the age of 16, Travis Pastrana was already one of the most accomplished motorcyclists on Earth. He won the World Freestyle Motocross Championship in 1997 at the age of just 14, and would continue winning that championship every year through 2003. He’d won freestyle motocross gold at the X Games and the inaugural Gravity Games in 1999. There were precious few places left for Pastrana to prove himself on two wheels.
He’d get the chance to prove himself on four.
Watching Colin McRae On Blockbuster VHS
Pastrana had always wanted to race cars. He was given a go-kart at the age of two; His father owned a construction company and Pastrana found himself racing around his dad’s shop across dirt piles and skid pads from a very young age.
“Any vehicle [my family and I] could get running, we would go rally. We fixed up the vehicle til it worked, and we’d rally until it died. Repeat,” he recalled. “We loved World Rally, and thought it was the greatest drivers on the face of the Earth doing the coolest stuff ever… it was a lot like growing up in motocross, you know—you crash, you get back up… push on regardless.”
Some of his earliest motorsports fan memories are watching recorded WRC events (rented from a local Blockbuster Video) of Colin McRae piloting the 555 Impreza to wins even after huge wrecks.
By the time Pastrana had a driver’s license, he had ridden to every motorcycle title on offer, but had never competed in an auto race. One of his main sponsors, in an attempt to motivate him, asked him what his biggest pie-in-the-sky dream was. His answer was immediate.
“Alpinestars was one of my good sponsors and they said, we’re going to renew your contract next year. What would you like to [get this done]? I said I want to go drive a Subaru WRC car… You’ve got Richard Burns. He’s probably next in line to win the championship. You guys have the best car. This would be my absolute dream.”
The owner of Alpinestars, Pastrana recalls, “said look—if you win the [AMA] Outdoor National Championship, I will go ahead and take you over, and you will drive the Subaru WRC car.”
For a 16 year old gearhead, that was as motivating as you’d expect.
“No 16-year-old had ever won the National Championship and I was down quite a few points [at the time]… From the time I made that deal… I didn’t lose a single race from then until the end of the season.” He won and became the first 16-year-old to ever win the National Championship. Alpinestars held up their end of the bargain. Pastrana, at 17 years old, got to drive Richard Burns’ WRC car.
As he retold the story to me, he added, “And it was awesome.”
This Kid Can Drive
As Pastrana first tasted rally driving at the dawn of the 00s, Chris Yandell began his career at Vermont SportsCar as a marketing manager. Subaru was partnered with VSC at the time as they campaigned Prodrive WRC cars in SCCA ProRally, but Yandell was always on the hunt for new opportunities.
“My task was how to make this bigger—get more eyeballs and sponsors and press and all that,” Yandell said.
Part of that was hunting for drivers who could introduce a new audience to the sport of rally in general, which despite enjoying mainstream success in Europe had never caught on in the U.S. the same way. Yandell had a light-bulb moment when he heard about Pastrana’s test drive.
“I was reading this in, like, Racer X magazine [a motocross publication]… [Alpinestars] gave Travis a rally experience… Travis basically said it was the most amazing time he’s ever had and the most fun he’s ever had, like, bar none. And then that was it! Nobody ever did anything with Travis.”
Yandell recognized the opportunity.
“I’m like, this guy Travis is a huge star, and he just said this is the most fun thing he’s ever done in his life. And we have cars sitting here. And he’s American! I don’t think that the Europeans are going to hire him and bring him back to Europe... I see this, as a marketing guy, and I’m like… we should get him into a car more.”
Yandell invited Pastrana to drive some of VSC’s prepped Subarus at Team O’Neil’s rally school in nearby New Hampshire.
“We pitched this as a test for him… let’s try this for real. We brought in David Higgins—champion driver at the time—and we had John Buffum, who is the winningest American rally driver of all time.” With an action sports film crew on-hand, Pastrana ran the school with Higgins in the right seat.
“David’s instructing him,” Yandell recalled. “Basically, David pulled Lance [Smith, founder of VSC] aside halfway through and basically said, ‘If you’re gonna spend any money on anyone, it’s this kid. He can drive.’ David was impressed instantly. [Pastrana] actually is really good. And Travis had a blast!”
VSC scraped together whatever money they had at the time—which, Yandell stressed, wasn’t much—and approached Pastrana about running a rally. He—predictably—accepted. His first season would be the start of an incredible comeback for the sport of rally in America.
Rebuilding After Tragedy
Mark Lovell and Roger Freeman’s deaths on-stage at the Oregon Trail Rally in 2003—in a VSC/Prodrive-campaigned Subaru works car—shocked the tight-knit American rally community. All manufacturers in the SCCA ProRally championship withdrew from competition at the end of 2003, leaving America’s highest form of rally racing composed entirely of privateers for the 2004 season.
VSC, having found a driver in Pastrana—and learned the tricks of running a team from ProDrive and Subaru over the previous three seasons—continued onward in ProRally without factory support, and attempted to help keep the sport alive. Pastrana only ran three events his first year as a VSC-sponsored entry, but he performed well enough the team decided to continue with a full-season run in 2005. He also drove well enough to attract the attention of one of his sponsors’ owners, a then-unknown businessman who’d co-founded DC Shoes.
The businessman, of course, was Ken Block.
“[Block] saw Travis doing rally and he’s like—Travis, who are the rally guys? Set me up, get me in there. So Ken calls us up, and he says ‘I wanna do this. How do I do this?’ I’m like: you called the right place. We got you,” Yandell recalled.
Block ran through the same test gauntlet as Pastrana, and was invited to drive at O’Neil’s Rally School with David Higgins once again in the right seat. Yandell and the VSC team were impressed.
“Almost the same thing that happened with Travis happened with Ken, where we’re like: Damn. He actually can drive.”
They built Block a Group N Subaru WRX, and he was off to the races.
2005 would be a make-or-break season for VSC. Money was tight and the company had built cars for both Pastrana and Block, who were competitive in their Group N cars, although not able to consistently win against the faster Open class vehicles. Still, there was enough attention on them that Yandell and Lance Smith, founder of VSC, were pitching Subaru on making a comeback to rally in America.
Then came Colorado.
Rally on SportsCenter
Pastrana was an excellent driver in his first seasons, albeit a bit aggressive. This showed in his on-stage results in his first full season as a rally driver. He’d either podium, or he smashed up the car. At Colorado Cog Rally, toward the end of the 2005 season, Pastrana did the latter and wrecked in spectacular fashion. He clipped a mound of dirt with the passenger rear tire and flipped his WRX eight times in a row.
This was, to put it mildly, a problem for cash-strapped VSC.
“When he rolled that car,” recalled Lance Smith, “We were broke. That car was $175,000. It was destroyed. Travis and I sat by the trailer [watching the replay] for an hour and a half going—what the hell are we going to do? We’re done.”
And yet Yandell and Smith recalled that crash actually—very inadvertently—saved VSC and rekindled interest in American rally.
“This is before YouTube,” Yandell explained. “And you had to have server space to serve the video. [Our web designer] got some deal where it wouldn’t cost [us] anything—it went up on the NBC Olympics website. We did… like 40,000 views in a week, which back then was like the equivalent of 1,000,000. We were like ‘Oh my god we gotta update the server!’”
Smith added “I hadn’t even landed back in Vermont yet, and it was on Sportscenter… It was about a week later, Subaru called and said, ‘Lance, we want you to restart this thing.’” In 2006, Subaru would return to rally racing in American events, and VSC would be the team to bring them back. Pastrana’s wrecked car would no longer break the bank.
VSC, naturally, got to work at proving Subaru had made the right choice. Pastrana won the outright title in 2006 behind the wheel of a VSC-built Impreza. He won the title for four straight years, often with Ken Block just a step or two down on the podium behind him.
Leaving WRC—And Still Winning
After the 2008 season, Subaru left WRC due to the global financial crisis’s strain—leaving the VSC-run Subaru Motorsports USA team as the company’s highest tier of motorsports. The team picked up the mantle with grace.
VSC and Subaru have gone on to win every season of American rally since 2010, barring only the COVID-shortened 2020 season. Pastrana, alongside teammate Brandon Semenuk, is still competing in a Pleiades-emblazoned VSC-built WRX. (The pair finished 1-2 overall this season.)
VSC hasn’t constrained itself to solely rally cars, either. When Block handed the Gymkhana torch to Pastrana in 2020, VSC began building high-performance Subarus for the series. The most recent—and perhaps most famous—of these cars was the Family Huckster, a heavily modified Subaru GL wagon bearing an homage livery… to the original Olympic Ski Team ad campaign car.
The GL wagon was Pastrana’s idea; His aunt owned a GL that passed down to his family for use as a field car. He thought it handled surprisingly well for a family wagon as a teenager. As a Hoonigan driver, Pastrana thought it would look “out-of-place” going sideways and flying through the air. A team of Hoonigan employees pitched the Ski Team homage livery, which Pastrana immediately took to thanks to its patriotic roots and American color scheme. VSC put it all together, and now, it’s one of the most iconic Subarus since the original Ski Team wagon.
America Really Loves Subaru
Rallying remains Pastrana’s passion, “the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, on two wheels or four,” he says. His goal in coming years is to help foster grassroots participation to get more people involved, no matter what car they’re in. He maintains that for everything fun he’s ever wanted to do in a car, Subaru makes a vehicle for it.
He’s not alone in that feeling; The U.S. remains Subaru’s strongest market, and the WRX is one of the only cars in America to sell better with three pedals than two. Subaru of Japan never returned to the WRC after its departure in 2008. Its sole top-level racing efforts outside of the US are on tarmac in the Japanese Super GT series. Americans—with some special efforts from Vermonters—are the only reason the seven sisters still fly through the forest.
