By Nathan Inman
The American Rally Association hosted the Overmountain Rally in Newport, Tennessee, on
Sept. 18-19. Among the numerous volunteers in attendance at the event were several members
of the Clemson Tiger Racing team.
The opportunity to attend the event all began when the head of the ARA academic relations
team reached out to CTR about volunteering as marshals for the race weekend. After an
extremely successful and enjoyable weekend, there is now an opportunity for CTR to create a
deeper relationship with the rally organization.
“We’re looking to form an academic partnership with the ARA, which will provide our members,
in the future, opportunities to go work in the sport of rally, whether that’s with teams, in the crews
or as engineers, or to volunteer at rallies moving forward,” Matt Flaim, assistant team principal
and driver for CTR, said. “It also opens the door to potentially, sometime in the future, create a
collegiate rally program for us, which would enable us to have our own rally car and compete
against other schools who already do something similar, like UNOH and Oregon.”
Throughout its brief history, CTR has primarily focused on endurance racing, which would
seemingly make the transition to adding a rally component a bit difficult. However, several
members of the team appear eager to make it happen after their experience.
“We were all on a group chat together after the rally, and we were all starting to look at Subarus
on Facebook Marketplace, because we were like, ‘dude, we have to get involved in this,’” said
Hadley Smith, operations lead for CTR. “It’s so much fun, and we need to — our next CTR car is
1000 percent gonna be a Subaru that we can just rip around and rally race with.”
Going into the event, many of the CTR members had varying levels of familiarity with rally
racing. Many of those who said they had no clue about the motorsport before the event now say
they are fans for life.
“I’ve been racing for 10 years, from carts, formula cars, sports cars, on tarmac, on the road, on
street courses, never off-road, but I’ve been aware of Rally,” Matteo Naranjo, lead driver for
CTR, said. “It was a unique experience that’ll definitely influence me on where I want to go next
in my racing career.”
“Rally is such a diverse motorsport, which I had no clue of,” CTR member Garrison Dull said.
“I’ve seen the clips growing up, never really followed it to a T, but when you look at it, it was like,
you’d have a driver who’s a 68-year-old Hollywood stunt driver, all the way to Def Leppard’s lead
guitarist. You’d have a 17-year-old who was a co-driver, I mean, you’d have a carpenter, a
veteran, you name it — it was such a diverse sport.”
For other members, though, the experience was a dream come true for lifelong rally fans.
“I’m a die-hard Subaru fan since as long as I can remember,” said Victor Cruz, race engineer
and mechanic for CTR. “I’ve been watching on TV since as long as I can remember, but I’ve
never been able to go to one because I just never knew where they were. So, with CTR, they
finally gave me the chance to see this in person, and I’m eternally grateful.”
“I knew what Rally was because of that, of course, but I had only really seen clips,” CTR
mechanic Brody Heinick said. “I hadn’t really fully gone in and watched Rally, and just seeing all
my favorite cars in their element at the rally up close… it was just really awesome to see that out
there.”
For one team member, the experience created a full-circle moment.
“I grew up in Ireland, and rally is kind of what got me into motorsports,” Ryan Oliver, head of
media for CTR, said. “I grew up around a lot of rally drivers and corner marshals, and now, after
spending the last few years getting more into motorsports and becoming a corner marshal last
weekend, it just showed a whole different light on rally from what I remember as a kid.”
With the experience now having come and gone, the future of CTR could very well be defined
by the event. Only time will tell if — or, more likely, when — the team will make the ambitious
leap into rally racing.
