WRC

You already know MINI will be back in WRC this year, testing at a limited number of events ahead of a full push for the 2012 season. Here's the view from inside the company on what it means to throw gravel with the MINI badge. With this years adoption of the cost-saving Super 2000 rules for...

Booty, beats, and Block: the Monster World Rally 2011 Fiesta RS WRC makes its debut with a party. What else would you expect from the flat-brimmed icon? Crazy energy-drink inspired graphics and grandiose claims, of course. Those are present, too. Along with the new Fiesta RS WRC car, Block has...

Monte Carlo is one of the classic homes of rally racing, and the original Mini was no stranger to its wiles. The new MINI WRC isn't, either, now that the two have shown off at the Rallye Monte Carlo Historique. Posed beside its forerunner, the new MINI WRC looks gargantuan, despite being based on...

File this one in the "we hope, but we don't expect" drawer, as it's almost too good an idea to be true: a road-legal, widebody, 300-horsepower MINI Countryman based on the World Rally Championship car. The source of the rumor? Anonymous and sketchy, but we almost don't care. Almost, because we hate...

Ford factory WRC driver Mikko Hirvonen and much of the world rally team was on hand in Birmingham, U.K. today for the unveiling of Ford's new Fiesta RS WRC entrant, set to take the place of the current Focus for next year's championship. The use of the Fiesta as the WRC racer comes on the heels of...

If you aren't already aware, Travis Pastrana, while being one of the nicest guys in motorsports, is also one of the craziest. Case in point: he set the world record for jumping a Subaru WRX STI onto a barge in Long Beach Harbor. That car, along with Tommi Makinen's Nurbugring lap car and a handful...

At the speeds and level of aggression required to drive with the top tier of the World Rally Championship, it takes only a millisecond's mistake to end up on your roof, the day over, and out of the points. Kimi Raikkonen gives us an excellent illustration of this point from Spain. Watching...

MINI chose the Paris Auto Show to pull the wraps off its all-new FIA World Rally Championship car, which is based on the new 2011 MINI Countryman and signals the brand's reentry into world-stage rally racing. The WRC, which has been under development for two years, gets a 1.6-liter turbocharged...

Sounding like a cross between a pissed-off jungle cat and a million-strong cloud of very angry bees, the MINI Countryman World Rally car was caught testing in Portugal this week by an amateur camera. The footage isn't all that revealing--no more so than the officially released photo--but it does...

MINI's return to rally is fast approaching. The Countryman World Rally Car has just cleared the shakedown phase in the hands of famed racing firm Prodrive, and now heads on to further development. Shakedown testing established the fundamental core of the car's functionality and systems as working...

Few, if any automakers strike quite the same balance of ruggedness and raciness as Subaru.

America's dorifto golden boy takes on the ex-F1 Finn in the stadium at Portugal.

The finalization of 2011 FIA WRC engine rules have kicked the Fiesta RS program into high gear.

Ken Block will take the wheel of a Fiesta and Focus in racing for 2010.

World Rally Championship racing won't see a Subaru factory team this year, but the 37th ADAC Zurich 24 Hour Race - a 24-hour race at the Nurburgring - will. The 200-car field will include a factory-built WRX STI that's hitting the track in the name of data collection and development. Of course...