Tour de Forest Is This Weekend: Six Stages, 49 Cars, and a West Title Fight
Tour de Forest is this weekend, and it is exactly the kind of rally that makes regional stage racing worth paying attention to.
ARA has 49 cars listed for the October 4 event in western Washington. The route is compact by rally standards: six stages, 38.97 competitive miles and one 40-minute service in the middle of the day.
That sounds short until you look at what the roads actually are.
Hard-packed gravel. Loose side roads. Potholes. Crests. Dips. Off-camber corners. Three runs each over two stage configurations.
There is nowhere to hide a bad setup for very long.
The championship picture is still moving
Arto Ylikangas enters the weekend leading the ARA West Regional overall standings by three points over Julien Sebot, 34-31.
The problem for Ylikangas is simple: he is not entered.
Sebot and co-driver Steven Harrell are.
They are bringing a 2021 Ford Fiesta Rally4 in Open Two-Wheel-Drive, and a strong result puts Sebot in position to move ahead in the regional championship.
That alone is enough to give the event some weight.
There are also class championships still alive all the way through the entry list, which is usually where regional rally gets more interesting than the single overall result suggests.
Short rallies punish slow starts
Six stages means there is not a lot of time to spend “settling in.”
If a team gives away ten seconds on the first stage because the tire pressure was wrong, the driver was cold or the pace notes were conservative, that loss becomes a much bigger percentage of the whole rally than it would over a 120-mile national event.
The same goes for service.
Forty minutes sounds comfortable until the car comes in with a bent wheel, damaged bumper, loose exhaust, cracked skid plate and a driver asking for a setup change.
Regional rally still needs race-team discipline.
Andy Miller is one of the obvious overall threats
Andy Miller and Mitch Meadows are bringing their naturally aspirated four-wheel-drive 2005 Subaru Impreza WRX STI.
ARA points out that Miller is the two-time reigning West Regional overall champion, and the car has continued to develop through 2026.
That combination matters on roads like these.
A car with a broad usable powerband, reliable driveline and suspension the driver already understands can be worth more than a huge peak-power number on a loose, broken stage.
There is a real old-school two-wheel-drive fight too
Open Two-Wheel-Drive has 14 cars listed.
That includes Sebot’s Fiesta Rally4, David and Jenatte Clark in a 1999 BMW M3, Nick Allen and Stefan Trajkov debuting an Open 2WD 1981 Toyota Starlet, and a bunch of other regional cars that are nowhere near identical in layout or philosophy.
That is one of the best parts of rally.
You can have a modern homologated front-drive car on one line of the timing sheet and an old rear-drive Starlet on the next.
The road does not care.
The 501c Rally Team is using the event as a real shakedown
Chris Miller and Crystina Coats are moving from two-wheel drive into a GC Impreza coupe as they prepare for 2027.
Tour de Forest is their first serious four-wheel-drive shakedown in that car.
That is exactly the kind of thing regional rally is good for.
Use the event to learn what breaks, what overheats, what rattles loose, how the notes work with the new car, and whether the crew can service it efficiently.
Better to learn that now than at the first major event next season.
Rally prep is not the same as track prep
Every nut and bolt matters, but the priorities are different.
Skid plates need to stay attached after repeated impacts. Brake lines need to survive rocks and suspension travel. Wiring needs support. Mud and gravel cannot be allowed to chew through hoses. Wheels have to take hits that would never happen on a road course.
Then the crew still has to be able to service the car quickly.
That combination—strength plus serviceability—is where a lot of rally builds either become good or become miserable.
The co-driver is not passenger weight
Rally is the easiest place in motorsports to see how stupid it is to treat the driver as the whole team.
The co-driver controls timing, notes, schedule and communication.
A fast car with bad notes is not a fast rally car.
A driver who does not trust the calls will hesitate.
A co-driver who is late on the information can put the car off the road even when the mechanical setup is perfect.
The rally starts Sunday morning
ARA says the first car leaves the Powers Creek service area around 8:30 a.m. and is scheduled back around 2:17 p.m.
Six stages. One service. Forty-nine cars.
That is a proper way to launch this new Race Club section.
We are going to cover rally like racers actually care about it: the cars, the setup, the failures, the event structure and the people trying to make the whole thing survive.
Sources: American Rally Association Tour de Forest preview; ARA Tour de Forest event page.
Photo credit: Erick Huertas and Nicholas Grigway via American Rally Association editorial coverage. Race Club claims no ownership of the images.
