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Tanner Foust: Holy X Games!
Written by: Tanner Foust   
08/08/2007 - 07:00 PM
Los Angeles
 
In the battle of the X-Games energy drinks, Foust's Rockstar came out on top of Block's Monster and Pastrana's Red Bull. (Photo: Ronnie Arnold) » More Photos

Tanner Foust here writing for SPEEDtv.com from X Games 13! Rally Racing is enjoying its second showing at the Summer X Games and after Colin McRae rolled and continued in the final lap last year, losing to Travis Pastrana by less than second, this year's show is under the gun to be bigger than ever.

I'll spend a brief moment on the format and then dive straight into what the drivers are going through this week. Ok, 12 cars will pair off in single elimination rounds on a track that goes into and out of the Home Depot Center, twice utilizing 160 foot ramps and featuring a 70 foot gap jump where one car jumps over the other! It's going to be cool…

The week started on Tuesday with a practice jump at Lake Elsinor for all twelve cars. Jesse built us a jump to simulate the one we wouldn't encounter until Sunday morning's press rides. On paper this jump is a no-brainer; find a speed, accelerate off the end and wait for the landing like the first monkey into space…
Start calling him "Big Air." Foust was an animal over the jumps. (Photo: Ronnie Arnold) » More Photos

However, driving a car up the face of a 10 foot dirt ramp when every cell in your body knows it will vault your $150,000 car 20 feet in the air is inherently an unnerving feeling! To find an optimal speed, Subaru factory driver Ken Block had an eloquent solution: his teammate Travis Pastrana hopped on his bike, jumped the thing, and Ken drove along side the ramp to match the speed.

Problem solved.

Now it was time for each competitor -- top US drivers in their own right with championships and accomplishment oozing from their new driving suits -- to step out onto the high dive like a six year old. How long would they stand there looking down and the pool below before lunging off? Ken loaded up, and after his crazy Stunt Junkies launch of 171 ft, popped his Subie over the obstacle in a demoralizing, anti-climactic way. It looked so smooth. Other drivers were not so confident-some for good reason. ACP and Ramana Lagamen nosed their Evo's into the landing hard. Ramana actually did 2 back-over-front flips! Colin McRae stepped up, no problem. He does that on his new video game, DIRT, all the time.

CLICK HERE for the Tanner Foust X-GAMES Photo Gallery

It was my turn and all I could think about was the high dive analogy.
I had two things going for me, there was ample time to watch others fly their cars and work out speeds, and… well, I guess that was it. Just like on the high-dive, I stepped up and jumped as quickly as I could. I did one warm up just to be sure I knew where 3rd gear was (the shift took place on the way up the ramp after the point of no return, so I'm only sort of joking…) and the next run was it.
Tanner's road racing skills helped him on the tarmac section of the super special stage. (Photo: Ronnie Arnold) » More Photos

There was very little room to get up to the 53 mph required so it was a maximum acceleration run. I feathered first gear, barely on the throttle as all 4 tires were getting too much wheel spin. The wheel spin carried into second gear until we hit about 45 mph, then the inevitable "point of no return." The ramp looked really big at this point! Then we hit third and I went full throttle just to make sure. After a short lift I went back to full throttle to keep the nose up in the air and we were weightless.

Chrissie, my co-pilot, involuntarily grabbed her seat in reaction to the windshield of blue sky and the weightless speed. I kept half throttle just to make sure a gyroscopic moment didn't try to tilt our nose down early, like braking does on a dirt bike. And with a dull thud we were back to earth. The air time was probably only in the 2-3 second range but it felt muuuuuch longer.

Well, with that out of the way we packed up the cars and headed for the Home Depot Center for the 13th Summer X Games! The rest of the course would pretty much be asphalt and concrete so setting up the car would be difficult; but we'll tackle that hurdle when we get there!

~Tanner

For those that don't know how things went when Tanner got there, he, um…, WON THE X-GAMES RALLY GOLD MEDAL! As of yesterday, Tanner said he still had 506 congratulatory emails to reply to, so once he knocks those down, we hope to have him tell us about the finals of the event, taking on 2006 X-Games Rally champ Travis Pastrana, and what it's been like becoming an overnight star (ten years in the making…) ~Marshall

For more info on Tanner and his supporters, please visit: www.tannerfoust.com, www.rally-america.com, www.rockstar69.com, and www.aempower.com.