Houghton, MI — Subaru Rally Team USA driver Ken Block has a commanding lead at the Rally America season ender this weekend in Michigan’s upper peninsula and is in line to capture second place in the championship.

“These guys have given me this great lead,” said Block, who had more than a minute over second-place Kyle Sarasin after seven stages. “I’m just going to try and maintain it.”

Block and co-driver Alex Gelsomino had a strong start to the season, winning two events early in the year. But a string of DNFs dropped them back in the standings and they entered the Lake Superior Performance Rally in third place overall.

Heading into this event, Block’s teammate Travis Pastrana has already secured the Rally America drivers’ title. However, with three drivers separated by just four points in the championship standings, second-place remains very much up for grabs.

After a strong drive at Rally Colorado last month, young driver Sarasin moved into second-place overall in the title hunt and said 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.

The early stages saw Sarasin and co-driver Mikael Johansson in a tight fight for the rally lead, but car trouble late in the evening saw the team fall behind. The service crew said it appeared the powerful auxiliary lights were putting too much of a strain on the car's electric system and began affecting performance.

“We’ll just try and keep it on the road and hope Ken makes a mistake,” Sarasin said late Friday.

Also in the hunt for championship runner-up at the start of the contest were Andrew Comrie-Picard and co-driver Marc Goldfarb.

The duo led the championship early this season but dropped back to fourth after missing two consecutive events following a spectacular X Games front-flip. But the team suffered engine trouble early in the contest and rolled their Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX while pushing to make up time. There were no injuries, but Comrie-Picard said the car is done for the season.

“We only had about 150 horsepower and we were setting decent times, but there just wasn’t enough power to get us out of that corner.”

Blinding dust became an issue for teams as night fell, with drivers reporting near-zero visibility in some areas.

“When it’s that dusty, you just have to trust the notes,” said Pastrana.

In the Production GT Class, Pat Moro holds a commanding 74-point lead over Ropert Borowicz in the championship. Barring any significant penalty points, Moro and co-driver Mike Rossey should be spraying champagne as the class champion at LSPR. After seven stages, Moro and co-driver Mike Rossey were leading the class charge and sitting in sixth overall.

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.

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.