For most of the last two decades, rally racing has been the quiet cousin at the American motorsport table, overshadowed by NASCAR ovals and, more recently, Formula 1’s Netflix-fueled rise. But look closely at the numbers coming out of grassroots events, manufacturer boardrooms, and social media, and a different picture starts to form. The pieces that typically precede a motorsport surge in the United States, rising car counts, returning manufacturer money, a charismatic young star, and a broadcast model borrowed from a proven playbook, are lining up for rally in a way they have not in years.
A grassroots base that is already building
The clearest evidence sits at the club and national level of the American Rally Association, the country’s largest stage rally series. Back in 2019, the ARA ran nine national events with an average of roughly 62 car entries each. Fast forward to 2026, and the top RC2 class alone set a series record with nine entries at the 100 Acre Wood rally in Missouri, one of thirteen FIA-homologated cars at that single event. That is a meaningful jump in the caliber and depth of the field, not just the headcount.
The business side backs this up. In December 2024, USAC signed a multiyear promotional rights agreement with RallyForward to grow the ARA’s national championship, and Kubota Tractor Corporation stepped in as presenting sponsor of the 2025 season. A tractor manufacturer betting marketing dollars on stage rally is a small but telling signal that outside brands see a growing audience worth reaching.
Manufacturers are circling again
Nothing signals confidence in a racing series like a factory program, and rally’s manufacturer roster is expanding. Subaru has anchored American rally for years, but reporting from Road & Track indicates Toyota GAZOO Racing has been developing a GR Corolla RC2 rally car specifically for the American Rally Association, setting up what could become a four-way factory fight alongside Subaru, Mini, and Honda. Toyota does not build homologated rally cars for markets it considers a lost cause. Its presence is a bet that the American audience for stage rally is worth the investment.
Manufacturer involvement matters because it tends to arrive right before, not after, a spike in mainstream interest. It brings marketing budgets, dealership tie-ins, and technology storylines that pull in audiences who do not necessarily follow rally as a sport but do follow the brands.
The Block family effect
No single figure did more to introduce rally driving to a mainstream, non-motorsport American audience than Ken Block. His Gymkhana video series, which blended precision rally driving with stunt choreography, drew hundreds of millions of YouTube views over its run, with industry estimates for the full franchise landing north of half a billion and, by some counts, over a billion combined views. Those numbers dwarf the television audience of most traditional American rally coverage, and they reached car enthusiasts who had never watched a stage rally in their lives.
That audience has not disappeared, and it now has a new focal point in Lia Block, Ken’s daughter. She became the youngest champion in ARA history in 2023, winning the Open Two-Wheel-Drive title at just sixteen, and in 2026 she became the first woman to lead an ARA National event on outright time. Off track, she carries roughly 1.4 million Instagram followers and more than 460,000 on TikTok, a social footprint that rivals or exceeds many drivers in far more visible American racing series. A young, telegenic star with an existing built-in fan base is exactly the kind of asset that has driven crossover growth in other motorsports.
Borrowing the Drive to Survive blueprint
Formula 1’s American renaissance is the closest working model for what rally could replicate. Research cited by The New York Times found the number of American F1 fans grew from about 44.9 million in 2019 to 49.2 million after Drive to Survive became a Netflix hit, and Nielsen later reported that roughly a third of the docuseries’ viewers went on to become F1 fans. US race audiences have since climbed to record territory, with average viewership reportedly reaching about 1.3 million per race in recent seasons, up from around 1.1 million a couple of years earlier.
Rally arguably has better raw material for this kind of storytelling than a circuit series. Cars run inches from trees, spectators, and each other on closed public roads, co-drivers add a built-in second character to every storyline, and mistakes are instantly, visually catastrophic in a way lap-time racing rarely matches. A well-produced behind-the-scenes series, especially one that leans on the existing Hoonigan and Block family brand recognition, has a clear template to follow and an audience already primed by car culture content on YouTube and TikTok.
The money is already moving
Zoom out to the broader industry and the tailwinds get stronger. Fortune Business Insights projects the global motorsports market growing at roughly an 8.2 percent compound annual rate through 2034, and separate market research from firms tracking motorsport components put North America’s share of that supply chain at more than a third of the global total. General motorsport television audiences in the US are also trending upward outside of rally specifically. ESPN reported one late-summer 2025 broadcast drew about 1.2 million average viewers, up nearly 19 percent from the comparable event a year earlier, evidence that American appetite for racing content beyond NASCAR and F1 is broadening.
Gaming data tells a similar story about latent demand. Codemasters’ Dirt Rally 2.0 sold in the neighborhood of six million copies, while the officially licensed EA Sports WRC title has reportedly moved closer to 350,000 units since its 2023 launch. That gap suggests the appetite for rally as an experience is large, even when a specific product underperforms, which points to a marketing and access problem rather than a lack of underlying interest.
The broadcast bottleneck rally still has to solve
None of this guarantees a breakout. The World Rally Championship, the sport’s global top tier, is still split across DAZN, TNT Sports, and the dedicated Rally.TV app internationally, with no single simple home for American viewers the way NASCAR sits on network television or F1 sits on ESPN. Domestically, the ARA has leaned on RACER-affiliated streaming and social clips rather than a marquee TV deal. Until rally lands a broadcast partner willing to package it the way ESPN and Netflix packaged F1, growth is likely to stay concentrated among enthusiasts who already seek the sport out rather than casual sports fans discovering it by accident.
The verdict
Taken individually, none of these signals would be enough to call a boom. A record car count at one regional-caliber event, one manufacturer’s rally program, one driver’s social following, and one market research forecast could each be dismissed as noise. Taken together, though, they describe a sport with rising grassroots participation, returning factory investment, a genuine crossover star in Lia Block carrying forward her father’s mainstream appeal, a proven Netflix-style growth model sitting right next door in Formula 1, and broader economic tailwinds across motorsport as a category. The missing ingredient is still distribution. If rally racing finds its equivalent of Drive to Survive, or simply a broadcast deal that puts it in front of casual sports fans, the growth already happening at the grassroots level has a realistic path to becoming the mainstream story many in the industry believe it can be.
Figures cited above are drawn from ARA, PR Newswire, Road & Track, Variety, The New York Times, Nielsen, Fortune Business Insights, and public gaming sales estimates, and should be treated as approximate given how quickly participation and viewership numbers shift season to season.
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