Forget Dina Carroll and a song that regularly rings in Christmas. David Higgins knows what the real perfect year’s all about.It’s about a straight eight: eight starts, eight wins, five back-to-back Rally America titles, seven Stateside successes. The man from the Isle of Man’s got rallying on the pond’s far side sorted.
Higgins’ victory on last weekend’s Lake Superior Performance Rally was his eighth win of the year and it sealed a 100 per cent success record for him, his co-driver Craig Drew and the Subaru Rally Team USA squad.
Typically, Higgins wasn’t one for gushing sentiment. He’s more understatement than overblown.
“It feels good,” he said. “To be honest, I hadn’t been thinking about it too much before the event, but then the pressure began to build a bit when started the rally and it became clear what we could achieve.
“The record, the perfect season, is really for the team; everybody has worked so, so hard for this – the team deserves a record like this one.”
For Higgins himself, winning in America is nothing new. Before he joined Subaru America, he’d already won two SCCA Pro Rally (Rally America in old money) titles with Mitsubishi. And since he fired up an open class Impreza for the first time in 2011, he’s tackled 35 individual RA rounds and retired from just two of them.
The remaining 33? He’s been on the podium every time and won 23 of them.
You have to go back to the Ojibwe Forest Rally – the penultimate round of 2013 – for the last time Higgins finished and lost a RA round.
Unsurprisingly, the former British Rally Champion’s enjoying his time in America.
“The roads are fantastic,” he said, “you really could run the world championship within the national boundary of America – there’s a bit of everything in this series. And working with the guys at Vermont SportsCar, who build the car, and Subaru of America is brilliant.”
Subaru’s season’s been so strong, there’s probably a song in it…
Source: Maxrally