Travis Pastrana won the Rally in the 100 Acre Wood last weekend in a car that, on paper, had no business winning. His Subaru WRX ARA25L, running in the Limited 4WD class, beat a record nine RC2-class entries — purpose-built, FIA-homologated Rally2 machines from Škoda, Hyundai, and Ford — on Missouri’s fastest gravel roads. The final margin over the entire field was 21 seconds after two days and roughly 100 miles of stages.
That’s the story American rallying needed to tell right now.
The 2026 Rally in the 100 Acre Wood wasn’t just another ARA round. It was the deepest, most internationally flavored field the series has assembled. Toyota Gazoo Racing World Rally Team made its American rally debut, former WRC2 driver Sean Johnston showed up in a Renault Clio Rally3, and Lia Block made her Rally2 debut in a Rockstar Energy Hyundai i20.
Against all of that firepower, Pastrana and co-driver Rhianon Gelsomino started first on the road — the worst position in gravel rallying, sweeping loose rock off the racing line for everyone behind. They ran sixth after the opening stage.
The rally turned into a knife fight. The lead changed hands multiple times across Friday’s stages. Pastrana appeared to seize control on SS5 with a 12.1-second stage win, but organizers later nullified the results after complaints about dust and misdirected lights that compromised visibility.
That decision wiped out the Subaru team’s tire strategy and reshuffled the entire order heading into Saturday.
Saturday morning was chaos compressed into gravel. Patrick Gruszka led in his Hyundai i20 Rally2, then Block took over. Pastrana and Gelsomino clawed from sixth to third in the morning loop, picking off Javier Olivares and then Gruszka on consecutive stages.
They passed Block on the next loop and sat second, staring at Williams’s tailpipe. Heading into the final three stages, four crews were separated by 22 seconds.
Pastrana made his move on SS11, ripping open a 16.4-second gap after Williams suffered a left rear puncture. Williams fired back with a stage win the next run, where the top four finishers were blanketed by eight-tenths of a second.
On the final Power Stage, Gruszka edged Pastrana by one second to steal the stage win and five bonus championship points. It wasn’t enough. Pastrana and Gelsomino held on for the overall victory.
“There were four drivers with a chance to win going into the last stage, and we were all driving eleven tenths,” Pastrana said. The man who built his career jumping motorcycles into foam pits and backflipping dirt bikes sounded genuinely rattled by the intensity.
Behind the Subaru, the RC2 class fight was absurd. Gruszka beat Williams for second overall by four-tenths of a second — after two full days of racing. Block finished just three seconds further back in fourth overall, a striking result on her first Rally2 outing.
The ARA is fielding internationally competitive cars and drivers in numbers it has never seen. A Limited-class Subaru beating that field doesn’t diminish the Rally2 machinery — it elevates the entire championship. Pastrana is 41 years old, running a car with less sophisticated aerodynamics and less power than the Rally2 entries, and he won on commitment and road knowledge against drivers with World Rally Championship pedigrees.
The series moves to the Kubota Olympus Rally in Shelton, Washington, April 17–19, where tight forest roads will flip the script on everything that worked in Missouri’s wide-open sweepers. Olympus expands to three days and over 200 stage miles this year, making it the longest event on the 2026 calendar.
Pastrana will start that one with a target on his roof. After 100 Acre Wood, every Rally2 team knows what it feels like to lose to a car that costs less and weighs more. That’s a problem they’ll be desperate to solve.
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