Houghton, MI — It’s an exciting race for championship points at the Rally America season ender this weekend in Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Heading into the Lake Superior Performance Rally Subaru Rally Team USA’s Travis Pastrana has already secured his third consecutive Rally America drivers’ title, but second-place is very much up for grabs. Three drivers are separated by just four points in the overall standings heading into this final event of the season.

After a strong drive at Rally Colorado last month, young driver Kyle Sarasin moved into second-place overall in the standings and he is hoping for the home-field advantage this weekend. The student at Northern Michigan University in nearby Marquette has run this event twice before and says he’s up for the challenge.

Sarasin was in second place after the opening stages of the rally, trailing Subaru Rally Team USA driver Ken Block by almost four seconds.

“We want to keep our second place in the championship,” said Sarasin, who is co-driven by Mikael Johansson. “My game plan is to go out and see how it goes.”

Block and co-driver Alex Gelsomino are looking to turn their luck around at this event. After winning two events early in the season, the duo have suffered a string of DNFs and are currently sitting in third place in the championship. A win here would move them into second place in the championship.

“I’m just trying to get back on track. I have a second, a third, and a fourth in this championship – all I’m missing is the top, but it isn’t going to happen here,” said Block early Friday.

Also in the hunt are Andrew Comrie-Picard and co-driver Marc Goldfarb, who led the championship early this season but dropped back to fourth after missing two consecutive events following a spectacular X Games front-flip. But a broken spark plug early in the contest led to heavy engine damage Friday and the team’s Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX was lagging behind.

“It isn’t going to get any better but we’ll keep on going until we can’t go anymore,” said Comrie-Picard. “It’ll take some driving, but it’s a long rally and we can claw back some time.”

In the Production GT Class, Pat Moro holds a commanding 74-point lead over Ropert Borowicz. Barring any significant penalty points, Moro and co-driver Mike Rossey should be spraying champagne as the class champion at LSPR.

The event also plays host to the final round of the three-event MaxAttack! Triple Crown Rally series. The series consists of three events across the country, featuring a $5,000 prize fund to be distributed among the top two-wheel-drive teams, as well as a season championship.

More than 20 two-wheel drive rally cars have made the trip to the upper peninsula to vie for the top prize, including series leader Eric Burmeister and Dave Shindle in their MazdaSpeed3, and the legendary Doug Shepherd and Karen Wagner in their Dodge Neon SRT-4.

The Lake Superior Performance Rally, known as LSPR, runs through Michigan’s rugged upper peninsula. With fast gravel roads, deep rutted sand, the likelihood of snow, and even a tarmac stage thrown into the mix, the event is a definite challenge.

The event is based in the town of Houghton, MI, at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The community is the gateway to thousands of square miles of waterways and forests and is also the largest town in the area, making it a cultural and recreational hot spot of Michigan’s “copper country.” The roads are fast and technical, requiring careful tire choices by the drivers. Rally teams must pay close attention to road conditions as they can change quickly due to the legendary unpredictable fall weather.

Teams and rally fans are also remembering the late Jeff Moyle at this event. The local driver died last month in a parasailing accident. Many teams are sporting commemorative stickers on their competition vehicles.

Moyle was a popular competitor on the U.S. rally scene who is missed by many friends and fans. He is remembered as a man who lived life to the fullest, whether it was his work at the business or his racing career. He was an accomplished racer, both on water and land. He was recently a top competitor in the Rally America Series, which led to an opportunity to showcase his skills at the X-Games in Los Angeles, CA this summer.

Rally car racing is considered the extreme sport of automobile racing and is often described simply as “real cars, real roads, real fast.” This all-season 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 100 miles of gravel, dirt or snow-covered roads.

The 2008 Rally America National Championship series consists of nine exciting events throughout the country in many different weather and road conditions. Throughout the year, teams take on everything from snow-covered trails of Michigan, forest-logging roads in Minnesota, coastal paths of the Pacific Northwest, fast but rocky challenges of New England, to the high-altitude roads of Northwest Colorado, and finally to its conclusion in the fall splendor of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.