Race car driver Scott Speed stepped out of the garage, looked around and said, “I’ve now seen the future of rallycross in America.”

Speed, a veteran of Formula 1, NASCAR, Formula E, IMSA and ARCA, had found a home in rallycross, specifically the Red Bull Global Rallycross series, which folded in the winter of 2017 amid charges of unpaid debts and general mismanagement.

Now, in May 2018, Speed was about to race in a new series, Americas Rallycross, that, oddly, happened to debut here—Silverstone in England, where the FIA World Rallycross Championship was racing, headlining the massive SpeedMachine festival. Americas Rallycross was prominent on the undercard, because Speed and his Andretti Volkswagen teammate, TV personality, drifter and stunt driver on movies like Ford v Ferrari, Tanner Foust, was there, too. As was Subaru’s roster of Americas Rallycross drivers, who were well-known on the international circuit.

The ARX cars were virtually identical to those used in the WRX, except that VW didn’t race the Beetle in that series, so the ARX Beetles, out of Michael Andretti’s stable, were especially amusing to the European crowd. The ARX races were drawing crowds as large as the WRX races, and the U.S.-based cars were just as fast as the ones the vaunted Europeans drove.

Americas Rallycross

So this is what Speed was talking about when he said this would be the future of ARX in the U.S.—starring at big festivals that featured bands, DJs, lots of food trucks, a vintage racing series—a weekend that would attract younger people, something more valuable than you can imagine for every form of motorsport, and what just isn’t happening in America.

Icing on the cake was that Ken Block would compete in a Ford for most of the races—few people in motorsports appeal to the under-25 demographic better than Block, whose stunt-driving videos on YouTube have drawn enormous audiences, with at least one topping 100 million views.

What could go wrong?

Well, everything.

There were about 35,000 fans at SpeedMachine in England that May of 2018. It was back at Silverstone for 2019, but for 2020, it has been dropped from the FIA WRX calendar. Apparently 35,000 fans is not enough to make it financially worthwhile. Also dropped: the FIA WRX’s annual trip to Canada, at Trois-Rivieres, near Montreal. And at the end of 2018, the FIA WRX’s only race in the U.S., at Circuit of the Americas in Texas, was canceled.

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The fact that the FIA WRX would rather go to Latvia than America and Canada is telling.

And a week ago, Americas Rallycross, the series where Speed, Foust and the rest of the cast of characters raced, was canceled with a simple, sad, awkwardly worded little post that said, “After consultation with a wide group of stakeholders and interested parties, IMG has taken the difficult decision to not extend the Americas Rallycross Championship beyond the 2019 season. We would like to thank our passionate fans, teams, drivers, partners and event hosts for their support and participation in Americas Rallycross.”

And for the second time in two years, most everyone who depended on professional rallycross in the U.S. was out of a job.

Why?

It goes back to the original, professional, over-the-top Global Rallycross series, which really introduced pro rallycross—compact cars with 700 turbocharged hp competing in bite-size races on a course that was about half dirt, with jumps, and half pavement. It was full-contact racing, because often the only way to pass is to punt the other guy out of the way. The racing itself was never the problem, though frequently it was Speed and Foust battling each other, with the Subarus and Fords lagging behind. But it was definitely entertaining, in person and on TV.

Americas Rallycross

Which is where Colin Dyne, a businessman who helped bring in William Rast to sponsor the Indianapolis 500-wining car of Dan Wheldon in 2011, enters the picture. Dyne took over the series in 2012, after founders Chip Pankow and Brian Gale had led rallycross along in the U.S. with gradual, measured growth.

That changed as the bombastic Dyne brought in Red Bull as a sponsor and arranged what may have been the best TV package of any form of motorsport in the U.S. at the time. “Bringing Colin and the investment group on board has delivered an essential component that allows us to capitalize on the buzz we created in 2012,” said Gale at the time. Red Bull GRC also boasted the youngest fan demographics of any major racing series.

By, say, 2015 everything was looking just splendid. Thirteen rounds at nine tracks, including the nonpoints X Games events at COTA. Running in at least one round: Chevrolet, Citroen, Ford, Hyundai, Subaru and Volkswagen. There was also a strong field of GRC Lites cars, spec cars built by Olsbergs MSE; it was a good place for up-and-coming drivers like Austin Cindric and Conner Martell to learn racecraft. Red Bull GRC drivers in the 2015 season included Speed, Foust, Block, Nelson Piquet Jr., Travis Pastrana, Bucky Lasek, David Higgins, Rhys Millen and Jeff Ward.

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But in 2016 Dyne’s empire started to crumble, and during 2017, it was in full disaster mode. Manufacturers were pulling out: Subaru and Volkswagen were giving their teams full factory support, but Ford teams like Steve Arpin’s Loenbro Motorsports and the Honda OMSE team didn’t get the same backing.

Honda won once in 2017, Ford twice, with VW winning nine of the 12 events and the championship with Scott Speed. Subaru, shut out, had a miserable year.

But it didn’t seem to matter by the end of 2017, because it was apparent Red Bull Global Rallycross was on life support, as Dyne tried to organize a 2018 calendar but failed. Lawsuits followed—against Dyne and GRC for unpaid bills, and against participants, including an absurd lawsuit Dyne filed against Subaru, largely leaving his attorney to plead his case. But his attorney, Michael Avenatti, was busy with other things, such as Stormy Daniels and contemplating a run for president of the United States.

Suddenly, in stepped a savior: IMG, the enormous company that owns and/or manages dozens of events, ranging from the Miss Universe pageant to the Professional Bull Riders association. And the Ultimate Fighting Championship. And Euroleague basketball, presented by Turkish Airlines. And the WME Voiceover agency. You want Dennis Quaid, Kevin Costner, Matt Damon or Gilbert Gottfried to voice your next commercial? Call IMG.

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And, by the way, IMG runs the FIA World Rallycross Championship.

Between Christmas of 2017 and New Year’s, IMG executives made the hurried but sensible move to try to salvage rallycross here. They envisioned a series that would essentially copy their success with WRX, down to the means-business FIA sanction, for North America.

There were several major problems facing them in 2018: They had no schedule, no tracks for the inaugural Americas Rallycross series. They had no TV package, and they had to deal with the fact that the Red Bull Global Rallycross series had left a disaster in its wake, and it would take a great deal of convincing to separate the Red Bull GRC from a soundly backed ARX—many thought rallycross is rallycross, and rallycross owed a lot of people money in America.

IMG hastily assembled a season that consisted of four races—the introduction at SpeedMachine in May in England, a second round at COTA in July, a third round at Trois-Rivieres in August and the finale back at COTA in September. In Canada and at the COTA finale, ARX was joined by WRX. There were guest appearances by Jacques Villeneuve and Travis Pastrana. The GRC Lites series morphed into ARX2, backed heavily by DirtFish, a rally school in Washington owned by Steve Rimmer, whose airplane leasing business helps pay the bills.

Americas Rallycross

It was understandable that the 2018 season for ARX was fragmented, but for 2019, the schedule wasn’t much better: The opening race was at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, followed by a July race at Gateway Motorports Park, just east of St. Louis; Trois-Rivieres, along with the WRX, in Canada in August; Circuit of the Americas Sept. 28, then back to Mid-Ohio a week later for the finale.

Volkswagen was not expected to be back in 2019, in part because champion Speed had been lured away to Subaru, and—after all—the Volkswagen Beetle had ceased production. But Faust managed to help get enough backing from VW and other sources to keep the Andretti team running, in part by bringing on the sponsored Cabot Bigham to fill Speed’s seat.

Subaru, on the other hand, was bubbling with excitement. The team, run by Vermont SportsCar founder Lance Smith, finally had competitive new WRX STI cars, enough funding for three cars—and Scott Speed, the current and past champion. Speed lit a fire under the team, and started winning, right up until be broke his back at a nonpoints event at Pastrana’s Nitro Rallycross event in Utah in August, and was out for the season.

Still, Subaru won four of the six races, and while Foust and VW won the drivers’ championship, Subaru finally claimed the team championship.

Americas Rallycross

And then it was done, with ARX’s statement several days ago saying it made the “difficult decision” to kill the series. Clearly, IMG lost interest after the 2018 season—there was minimal promotion, no innovation, certainly no SpeedMachine-like festivals. When Scott Speed said at that event in May 2018 that he had seen the future of rallycross in America—well, he hadn’t. IMG botched its attempt to save rallycross.

That Volkswagen wasn’t coming back for 2020 was a given—the Beetle had been summarily retired by a press release issued after the 2019 ARX finale. “This is a fantastic end to the Rallycross era with the Volkswagen Beetle,” said Scott Keogh, CEO Volkswagen Group of America.

It would cost too much to convert the Beetles back to the Polos they started out as in 2015, and there is no U.S. model VW is interested in rallycrossing. So, says Volkswagen, goodbye and good luck.

Subaru is the only company that seems sad about ARX's demise. We asked for a statement from Subaru and got this: “Subaru and Vermont SportsCar are disappointed that ARX will be not be running a series in 2020, especially just after securing the ARX team championship, but we recognize that IMG has the right to discontinue the series based on their own business needs.

Americas Rallycross

“We were excited to be a founding partner of ARX and appreciated the professionalism that IMG brought to the table during our two years working together—including the significant effort their management team put into building permanent rallycross tracks here in the U.S.—but ultimately it seems they weren’t able to secure the level of sponsor support they needed to continue.

“We remain committed to the sport of rallycross,” Subaru said, “and have had several conversations with the other players in the sport over the past few months about where it can go in the future. We see an appetite for rallycross here in America that hasn’t been fully tapped. It’s an incredibly exciting sport with a ton of potential, and this is a chance for the right people to get involved and create something new. Even with ARX folding, we feel good about the sport’s future overall and we expect to be competing in rallycross in 2020.”

There are a couple of wild-card possibilities for 2020: Travis Pastrana could step up his Nitro Circus rallycross program to include multiple events around the country. And a series called TitansRX—founded in part by Pankow, founder of the original series that Red Bull Global Rallycross became—is also hoping to assemble a 2020 schedule in the U.S.

Americas Rallycross

But an elephant in the room during this whole process must be addressed, and very well may be the central cause for the failure of rallycross in America, and that’s the internal combustion engine. Nobody but Subaru seems to like them anymore. Volkswagen and Ford have both expressed serious interest in an all-electric rallycross series, and even Subaru hinted that they’d take a look at it. An oblique comment by Paul Bellamy, IMG’s head of the FIA WRC series as well as ARX, alludes to the need to go electric when he was explaining why he canceled the SpeedMachine festival at Silverstone.

“One of the reasons we went to Silverstone was to utilize the whole facility, not just the rallycross track,” Bellamy told Motorsport.com. “What we found is, as the whole car industry moves to electrification, there was less budget for car manufacturers to put people in their ICE (internal combustion engine) cars to test them. Subsequently it meant that the likes of Peugeot and Volkswagen didn’t require the (entire) track that we used to do passenger rides and things like that.”

FIA World Rallycross has been working on an all-electric class, as has TitansRX. Would electric rallycross draw more of a crowd than what we have now? Foust has driven an all-electric rallycross car. “And it’s impressive. And for the kind of races we do, it’s perfect.” Torque from a high-performance electric motor is massive, and the races are short enough to make battery life a moot point. And Foust said they even sound fast.

But who wants to be the first one to dip a big and very expensive toe into that water? Would a manufacturer back building and racing an electric rallycross car, in hopes that some other manufacturers would follow suit so they’d have someone to compete against?

Clearly there would have to be an agreement among manufacturers, as there was with Formula E, to formulate a plan and stick to it. So far, that hasn’t happened.

So the future of rallycross in the U.S.? Your guess is as good as anyone’s.

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