Lia Block Just Beat Every Car at Ojibwe, Not Just the Field in Her Class
· Yahoo Sports
Lia Block crossed the finish line at the Ojibwe Forests Rally two minutes and one second ahead of the next-fastest car in the entire field. Not her class — the entire field. In stage rally, where a dozen different classes of cars share the same gravel and the same stopwatch, that kind of gap over everybody is rare on its own. That it happened to be a 19-year-old driving for Rockstar Energy-backed Block House Racing made it a good story. That she also became the first woman to ever win a U.S. national rally outright made it history.
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Here's the part casual fans usually miss: American Rally Association National events don't run one race, they run all of them at once. Dozens of cars split across classes ranging from full-blown all-wheel-drive machines down to modified street cars, all hammering the same stages, all timed against the same clock. The "overall" winner isn't the fastest car in a category, it's the fastest car on the property, period, regardless of what's under the hood or how many wheels are driven. Pulling that off in a two-wheel-drive car is close to impossible, which is exactly why Danny Shalev and Glen Ray dragging their Peugeot 208 Rally4 onto the third step of the overall podium, behind two all-wheel-drive cars, was its own small miracle at Ojibwe.
Block isn't some overnight sensation. She was already the youngest ARA National Champion in history, having claimed the Open Two-Wheel-Drive title in 2023 at age 16. Last year she detoured through single-seaters, closing out an F1 Academy campaign before turning her focus back to gravel and trees. Her father's shadow hangs over all of it. Ken Block built a global brand out of sideways Fiestas and Mustangs before his death in a snowmobile accident in January 2023, and machines like his Hoonitruck are still touring museums today. His daughter winning outright in the sport he spent two decades popularizing domestically is the kind of symmetry a marketing department could dream up but never actually manufacture.
The car underneath her is worth explaining too. Hyundai's i20 N Rally2 is a purpose-built, FIA-homologated customer racer: a turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder good for roughly 300 horsepower, paired with a five-speed sequential gearbox and all-wheel drive. Crucially, it's built to be sold to privateer teams rather than locked inside a factory-only program, and it sits one full rung below the hybrid Rally1 cars fighting at the top of the World Rally Championship. That's why everyone from championship contenders to well-funded gentleman racers shows up to ARA Nationals in some version of a Rally2 car. Block isn't sitting on unobtanium hardware nobody else can access. She's out-driving a field of similarly equipped, similarly funded teams.
The timing mattered as much as the result. Block came into Minnesota clinging to a two-point championship lead over Seth Quintero, who campaigns a Toyota GR Corolla Rally2 for Toyota Gazoo Racing World Rally Team, after a season that had given her every reason to be frustrated. She lost the season-opening Sno*Drift Rally to a late mechanical failure while running for the win, then survived three separate tire punctures at Rally Colorado just to salvage second place. Three straight podiums without an overall win is the kind of streak that makes a driver look unlucky rather than slow. Ojibwe erased that narrative in a single weekend.
Block set the tone immediately, winning the opening stage by 16.7 seconds over Quintero. On the second stage, Quintero clipped a rock hard enough to break a control arm on his Corolla and couldn't get it repaired before the stage closed, ending his Friday. It didn't end his weekend, though. Stage rally's "Rally 2" provision, a different Rally2 than the car class of the same name, lets a retired crew rejoin the following day carrying a time penalty as long as the car gets fixed overnight. Quintero's team did exactly that, and he came back fast on Saturday, picking up stage wins and the bonus points on offer for the Power Stage. None of it mattered for the overall result. Block spent day two protecting a lead that had already grown past a minute, and drove it out to a final margin of 2:01.8 over Javier Olivares, who brought an Element Rallysport Ford Fiesta Rally2 home in second.
"It feels like it's been coming for a long time," Block said afterward, and the championship math backs that up.
Block now carries a 21-point championship lead over Quintero into the season's final two rounds, up from just two points before Ojibwe. ARA's championship format only counts a team's best six results across the season, which is a small mercy for a driver who's already burned through bad luck twice this year. Quintero can't simply out-finish her from here; he needs Block to have a genuinely bad weekend at Overmountain Rally Tennessee or the season finale to close the gap.
Winning outright as a woman in stage rally isn't just an American first, it's rare anywhere. Michele Mouton won a World Rally Championship round outright at the 1981 Rallye Sanremo in an Audi Quattro and remains, more than four decades later, the only woman to have done it at that level. Block's win at Ojibwe doesn't close that gap on the world championship stage, but it puts her name in a very short sentence at the American national level, and it happened at 19, an age where most of her competitors are still learning which pedal does what on loose gravel.
There's a business angle here too. Rockstar Energy's backing of Block House Racing was always partly a bet on story value as much as stage times, and a first-of-its-kind overall win is the kind of moment a marketing budget can fund but never script. For fans who want to actually watch the follow-up rather than read about it afterward, ARA streams live stage times and GPS tracking through its RallySafe app during National events, which is a far better way to follow a discipline that's genuinely hard to spectate in person. Cars are scattered across dozens of miles of closed forest roads, not lapping a fixed circuit. Overmountain Rally Tennessee runs September 17-19 outside Newport, and it's the next real chance for Quintero to make the deficit interesting again.
Whatever happens there, Ojibwe already changed what's on the record books. Rally's overall podiums had been an all-male club at the U.S. national level for as long as anyone had bothered to check. Now they aren't, and the timing sheet says so.