The Oregon Trail Rally is known as one of the toughest on the Rally America calendar, and as the fourth round of the national championship series, it’s the moment when the race for the national championship title is at its most intense.
Oregon Trail is tough for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the traditional punishing roads of Oregon’s coast range with their extreme crown to drain the coast’s prodigious rainfall. The organizers lost access to those roads this year, and moved the rally to the equally challenging slopes of Mount Hood. The roads in the Cascades aren’t as crowned as the coast range, but they are substantially rougher, with embedded boulders that can launch a rally car.
This year’s Oregon Trail Rally took place over 100 miles of competition on a course that includes …Â Details
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Hakan Samuelsson thought he had it all figured out. In 2006, the CEO of German commercial truck manufacturer MAN schemed to take over his former employer and Swedish rival, Scania. He had the banks behind him. VW owned 30 percent of Scania; they had to agree to the takeover. And why not? Volkswagen had no use for Scania, as VW’s commercial truck division only operates in South America. So Hakan Samuelsson made a deal with Bernd Pischetsrieder, then head of Volkswagen. Unfortunately for Mr. Samuelsson, he talked to the wrong guy. Ferdinand Piech, the person pulling the strings over in Wolfsburg, had different plans . . .
Before we get to what happened, let‘s take a small detour and look at where Piech‘s story began.
In fact, let‘s begin with his grandfather Ferdinand Porsche… Details
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