Bemidji, MN — The stage is set for a fierce battle between the Subaru Rally Team USA drivers this weekend at the Ojibwe Forests Rally in northern Minnesota.

With just three events remaining in the 2008 championship race, Subaru Rally Team USA driver Ken Block is looking to topple teammate Travis Pastrana from the top of the Rally America standings.

“Ken has to win this race and we’re going to try and stop him,” said Pastrana on Friday.

With second-place Andrew “ACP” Comrie-Picard sitting this one out after his end-over-end flip at the X Games earlier this month, the third-place Block has a clear shot at the championship lead.

Also expected to jostle for a top finish is Rockstar Energy’s Andy Pinker. The 2007 championship runner-up has suffered from reliability problems this season that have hampered his results, but he hoping strong results at the final rallies of the season will bring him back into title contention. He is currently sitting in seventh-place in the overall standings.

Comrie-Picard was not the only top driver absent from the contest after a brutal X Games competition that saw many series frontrunners take heavy damage to their competition cars. Drivers Tanner Foust, Matthew Johnson and Pat Moro also opted to sit this round out.

The Ojibwe Forests Rally began Friday afternoon with a spectator stage at the Bemidji Speedway, where teams kicked up the dust for roaring spectators on a quarter-mile oval course, before moving to the sandy and stages of the Paul Bunyan State Forest.

The event opened Thursday night with a crowd-pleasing freestyle motocross exhibition from “Cowboy” Kenny Bartram and Pastrana at the Bemidji Speedway. Bartram, a two-time X Games gold medalist in moto events, has been a regular threat on the U.S. rally scene since his 2006 series debut.

The event also features a strong two-wheel drive field that includes veteran driver Doug Shepherd and co-driver Karen Wagner in a powerful, Group 5 Dodge SRT 4, and Production class regulars Jan and Jody Zedril, in their Mitsubishi Lancer, and Jim and Marianne Stevens, in their Suzuki Swift.

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 the forest logging roads in Minnesota, to the high-altitude Yampa River Valley in Northwest Colorado, and the Pacific Northwest forest and coast paths. The series moves west to Steamboat Springs for the next round, Rally Colorado.