By the end of Saturday, Pastrana and longtime friend and rival Ken Block were virtually tied for second overall and poised for a Sunday fight for podium positions.
Sunday morning dawned clear and chilly, with Pastrana determined to distance himself from Block and eat into his teammate Semenuk’s lead.
Brandon Semenuk and John Hall earned their first win of the 2021 season at Oregon Trail, with serious pace on Saturday and a strategic drive from first place on Sunday.
Travis Pastrana and Rhianon Gelsomino confirmed their 2021 American Rally Association championship at the Oregon Trail Rally, securing the title with a second-place finish and eleven stage wins.
The three-day Oregon event kicked off with two super special stages at Portland International Raceway, with Travis Pastrana leading the event by the end of the night.
The 2021 ARA co-driver’s title is the first overall U.S. championship for Rhianon Gelsomino, who joined Pastrana in mid-2020 and has earned five wins and nine podiums in only ten events since then.
The final rally season results for Subaru Motorsports USA include five event wins – Sno*Drift, 100 Acre Wood, Olympus, Ojibwe and Oregon Trail – and a total of ten podiums in seven events.
The overall ARA driver’s championship podium—along with the Oregon Trail event podium—included three crews in Subaru vehicles, with Pastrana/Gelsomino beating out Ken Block and Alex Gelsomino for second and Semenuk/Hall in third.
The crew of the #180 executed their strategy perfectly, giving away a few seconds to Pastrana and Gelsomino as needed to manage risk but keeping the bulk of the lead intact.
Semenuk’s strategy for Sunday was to carefully manage pace to protect his lead—a tall order on the super-fast Oregon hill stages.
Pastrana and co-driver Rhianon Gelsomino compete for the 2021 rally title under the watchful eye of in-car cameras.
By the end of the event, Pastrana had earned an event-leading eleven wins out of eighteen stages but couldn’t manage to close the gap to Semenuk.
Stage 10 of the event was a special nighttime running of Maryhill, one of the most spectacular stages of the 2021 calendar.
Semenuk made his move on Saturday, winning five of the eight stages to take a lead of more than 30 seconds into the final day.
Despite a puncture that dropped them to third early on Saturday, Pastrana and Gelsomino reverted to their season-long form with three stage wins including both runs up of the Maryhill tarmac hillclimb.
