TORONTO -- Canadian X Games star Andrew “ACP” Comrie-Picard will battle for the driver’s title November 23-24 at the brutal Rally of the Tall Pines in Bancroft, Ont. “The fight for the championship is down to the last round,” said Comrie-Picard. “It’s going to be an exciting race.”
The team makes its return to the Canadian season-ender this year in the Slowboy Racing Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX that they used to take on some of the best rally drivers in the world at the 2007 Summer X Games. This season, the team has finished on the podium of every single round in Canada. And while a win at the Rally of the Tall Pines has so far eluded the team, fans hold them as one of the favourites in the grueling, daylong race.
“The Tall Pines Rally is a technically challenging race that rewards the brave,” says Comrie-Picard. “We’ve taken some really tough turns there in previous years but I’m optimistic that this year our luck will change.” Last year, a mechanical fault forced the team to retire from the race early. In 2004, they were fighting for the lead when they crashed off the road in the final moments of the race.
The Rally of the Tall Pines is renowned as one of the toughest on the continent. Variable weather and technical roads mean conditions are a mystery to competitors until they start their engines on race day. The team is counting on Yokohama tires to see them through to a top finish.
This summer, ACP was the only Canadian driver to compete in the wildly popular X Games Rally that saw competition cars leap over each other in a never-before-seen gap jump. Other competitors included road race pro Boris Said, the late Colin McRae, and X Games superstar Travis Pastrana.
Rally car racing is considered the extreme sport of automobile racing and is often described simply as “real cars, real roads, real fast.” This allseason motorsport sees drivers and their co-drivers take modified road cars to the limit as they achieve blistering speeds over courses that cover more than 200km of gravel, dirt or snow-covered roads.
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ABOUT THE DRIVER: The Edmonton-born Andrew Comrie-Picard has competed in the American, Canadian, and North American rally championships in 2007. When he isn’t racing, Comrie-Picard works in television. He is the co-host of the 2007 Canadian Rally Championship broadcast, airing nationwide on the CHUM TV network, and the host and associate producer of the fifth-annual Targa Newfoundland broadcast, shown on Speed Network in the US and Global television in Canada. He is also the host of the Global TV reality show War of the Wheels, and an extreme auto correspondent for Driver’s Seat television. Comrie-Picard divides his time between Toronto and Indiana, Pennsylvania.
ABOUT THE CO-DRIVER: Longtime co-driver Marc Goldfarb is a regular teammate to ACP. Goldfarb began rallying in 1979 and co-drove the first Subaru actively sponsored in the national pro-rally circuit. His co-driving course curriculum is taught at the internationally renowned Team O'Neil rally school. Goldfarb resides with his family in Atkinson, NH, where he works as an engineer.
THANKS TO: Slowboy Racing (www.slowboyracing.com ), Yokohama Canada (www.yokohama.ca ), First Commonwealth Bank (www.fcbanking.com ), Mitsubishi Motor Sales of Canada (www.mitsubishi-motors.ca ) K&N Filters (www.knfilters.com ), Motul USA (www.motulusa.com ), Kinetic Motorsport (www.kineticmotorsport.com ), Engine Pro (www.enginepro.com ), Innovate Motorsports (www.tuneyourengine.com ), Pagid North America (www.pagidusa.com ), Vibrant Performance (www.vibrantperformance.com ), Sparco (www.sparcousa.com ), Piloti (www.piloti.com ), and FixAuto Blainville and the Losier family.
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