Ken Block explains what happened at Rallye Baie

Posted on 28. Jun, 2009 by Warwick in Baie-des-Chaleurs 2009

After his big rally-ending crash on Friday night at Baie-des-Chaleurs, Ken Block (part-time Arborist!) sent us an update on Saturday with the full details of their off-road excursion.

"The rally was going well. My Subaru STI
was handling exceptionally well and the first three stages went great
(we were leading by 15 seconds). I was feeling good, but was
concerned about the hanging dust we were about to face going into the
two late night stages. But, I knew I had to trust my pace note skills
and try to run a good pace (which can be very scary and have a bad
outcome if you are wrong!).

At the beginning of stage 4, there’s a long straight into a tight right
corner. I know this part of the stage well, and was confident I knew
it even in the dense dust at night. But, I was over-confident and
didn’t realize how close to the corner we were till it was too late.
So, I tried to slow the car down the best I could before we went off
into the trees…but, we still ended up going off sideways at approx.
70 MPH. We hit so hard that we broke one decent size tree in half,
and rolled up the tree behind it 15 feet. When the car came down
(after rolling approx. 2.5 times up the tree), we landed back onto the
tree we had broken (on the passenger side of the car), and that three
foot stump went into the car thru the back passenger side window (it
was a crazy sight to see a stump sticking up into the inside of the
car!).

This was the biggest and scariest crash I have EVER had. I am really
stoked that Alex and I were able to walk away from this one, and the
car wasn’t damaged too bad. Special thanks to my team and Subaru for
building such a safe and sturdy car."  [Photo of car via WRS]