Tanner Foust Wins Carnage-Filled X Games

Tanner Foust and co-driver Chrissie Beavis narrowly beat Ken Block and Alex Gelsomino in the final heat of the 2007 X Games Thirteen. We'll have a full update and comments from the competitors later, plus a photo gallery from Andrew Harvey. Here is the official X Games press release...

Photo: ArtPartPhoto

LOS ANGELES – Tanner Foust, a stunt driver on movie screens this weekend in “The Bourne Ultimatum,” surged ahead in the home stretch to take the checkered flag – and the gold – in the Rally Car Racing Super Special competition, the final event of ESPN X Games 13.

Rally Car, which features a driver and a co-driver racing street legal cars on closed sections of roads called “stages,” is in its second year at X Games, and this year’s race marked the first time teams raced head-to-head. They did so before a sellout crowd at The Home Depot Center.

Foust and co-driver Chrissie Beavis led early in the final race but lost the lead to Ken Block and his co-driver Alessandro Gelsomino – only to blast forward in the last inches of the course and cross the finish line .68 seconds ahead of Block and Gelsomino.

“[Block] was leading us going out, and on the way back he must have caught bad breaks because he got really close and I was thinking ‘Oh my gosh, there’s no dust at the finish line, we might have a chance at this,’ ” Foust said afterwards.

“Big finishes somehow always happen at the X Games,” Foust shrugged.

Travis Pastrana, the Moto X Freestyle legend of double backflip fame, said recently that Rally Car Racing now occupies “99.9” percent of his time. During a semi final heat, Pastrana crossed into Foust's lane in a similar push for the finish line, and was disqualified. He later took the bronze in a heat run to determine third place.

“I thought [Foust] might be a little bit ahead – I just totally overtook that corner a little bit, and completely ran right through the barrier,” Pastrana said. “They made a call, and we’ve been on the other side of calls a lot…we’ll take it – we’re still at the podium.”