Olympus Rally - Quick History lesson, by Jake GPLaps

Imagine a country with over a million miles of unpaved roads, with massive areas of wilderness and mountains and unique terrain which spans the gamut found on planet earth. A country with a population that has an unquenchable thirst for the automobile and the largest auto manufacturers willing to take any opportunity to outshine their rivals. A nation fueled by endless motorsport competition with some of the largest events in the world funded by the largest corporations in the world all vying to have a small slice of the pie.

It seems like a place for which Rally would have been the perfect variety of racing to claim as its own. To take a seemingly average vehicle and hurl it on seemingly average roads at incredibly unaverage speeds. Not requiring a special facility and bringing the sport itself directly to the people in their own back yards.

And that is very nearly what happened in the Cascade mountains of the Pacific Northwestern United States. For a brief 3 years of the 1980s, the world descended upon the deep forested gravel roads with the fiercest racing machines the sport had ever seen. Named for the national forest preserved on the near-by coast and the host city which shares its name, it was America’s greatest, the Olympus Rally.

For a while it lived in the shadows of European rally culture. The United States never had the infrastructure or the audience that Britain, Finland, or France had built over decades. But Olympus attracted dreamers. Organizers from the Sports Car Club of America pushed it as a cornerstone of their Rally series. For the handful of national competitors in the 1970s, men like John Buffum in his Audi Quattro or Rod Millen in his Mazda RX-3, Olympus was THE big one.

And so when the World Rally Championship set its sights on international expansion during its most legendary and dangerous era, Olympus was the clear favorite to invite the world.

Factory teams came from Lancia, Peugeot, and Audi. Drivers like Markku Alén and Juha Kankkunen brought with them the aura of the European greats. The forests of Washington were suddenly alive with the same energy as Monte Carlo or 1000 Lakes.

That first WRC Olympus Rally in 1986 was muddy, unpredictable, and utterly spectacular. The fans who made the trek out into the woods knew they were seeing something rare, an American rally treated with the same prestige as the greats overseas. Markku Alén won that year in his Lancia Delta S4, carving through stages that would later become legend.

For three years, the Olympus Rally stood shoulder to shoulder with the world’s best. But it couldn’t last.

When the WRC packed up and left after 1988, it wasn’t because the rally lacked quality. Olympus was tough, well-run, and visually stunning. What it lacked was visibility.

Rallying had always struggled to find its audience in America. NASCAR and IndyCar were tailor-made for television tight ovals, easy to follow storylines, corporate sponsors on every panel. Rallying was the opposite, spread across hundreds of miles of forest, often invisible to spectators. It was difficult to broadcast, harder to explain, and impossible to package into a neat, televised narrative.

America could not be a more perfect host for a Rally, all of the elements are there, but without corporate backing, without a way to sell it to the masses it would never work. Rally wanted America, but America, the business, did not want Rally.

The Olympus organizers did what they could, but without a major marketing push, without someone selling rallying as an adventure, not just a competition, it faded from public memory as quickly as it had appeared.

The Olympus rally is still held today as one of the premiere ARA events, but in talking with the competitors and spectators, conversation is never far from stories of Delta S4s and Audi Quattros blasting through the forests those short few years of the 1980s.