It’s a great moniker for the premier award in SCCA® RallyCross®: The Dirty Cup. This honor is presented annually to recognize an individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the sport. Since 2010, this award has been handed out to a cadre of members who’ve truly gotten down and dirty, ensuring the success of one of SCCA’s wildest and most fun activities.
The 2023 Dirty Cup recipient surely fits the mold. Western Ohio Region’s Ed Trudeau, was feted as one of the longest serving RallyCross stewards – he’s headed up the RallyCross National Championship since 2018, albeit with a one-year hiatus in 2022 to allow a fellow Ohioan, ZB Lorenc, to serve as Chief Steward so he could compete.
Indeed, Trudeau has acted as Chief Steward for not only the RallyCross Nationals but also RallyCross National Tour events for the last few years while faithfully serving on his Region’s board.
The Chief Steward’s job is among the least glamorous but arguably most important volunteer position in the SCCA event org chart, but its demands seem tailor-made for 9-to-5 engineering manager Trudeau.
"I've been involved with RallyCross steadily since about 2008,” says Trudeau, a “reformed” kart, dirt-track sprint car, and ATV racer who discovered – and quickly latched onto – RallyCross in the mid-2000s.
“It was probably about 2006 or 2007 when I bought my first Subaru,” he says. “I was looking for a change of pace in racing, and I heard or saw something about RallyCross, thought I might go try it out. At the time, Subaru was closely tied in with the RallyCross side of things, and there was a little bit of encouragement to go do it.
“So, I went out and tried it,” Trudeau continues, "and I quickly realized that despite the fact that I had been racing most of my life, I didn't know anything about this sport.”
RallyCross is popular in Ohio and its environs, the Buckeye State inheriting a rich, multi-decade SCCA Pro Rally legacy. Trudeau learned quickly, and well. “Ohio is one of the [states] where RallyCross really took off,” he says, “and most of the SCCA Regions in the area work together.”
Trudeau took over as Western Ohio Region RallyCross chair in 2012-’13 and never looked back. “My job and life situation kind of took me away from the competition side of things,” he says. “Stewarding was something that I could do that kept me involved. Competing is one thing, but providing a great event for other people and seeing the appreciation they have for competing – that's a big part of it for me. It’s why I like to do it.”
Muddy Launch
Trudeau started kart racing in grade school, at age 10.
"My dad, Ed Sr., was [into] Club Racing – Formula Ford, Formula Vee – and he started us kids in karts. In the early to mid-1980s, he switched over to dirt track racing, and we all went off down that path for a while.”
Trudeau raced sprint cars all through high school and the early college years before heading off on his own into ATV racing while earning a Mechanical Engineering degree from General Motors Institute (GMI).
Married for 30 years now (“Beckie really supports me. Yes, she knew what she was getting into…”) and with two grown daughters, Trudeau has worked as an engineering manager for the last 15 years even as he ramped up his RallyCross involvement behind the scenes.
If RallyCross is something of the SCCA wild west, then Trudeau is one of its sheriffs.
“There have been some challenging moments,” he laughs. “Probably the most challenging one [was] my first year as RallyCross Nationals Chief Steward, 2018, I think, in Iowa. Sunday came and…well, we had a big rainstorm. We were debating: Should we cancel the second day or not?
“Every new person thinks, 'Hey, mud sounds like a lot of fun!’ But in reality, mud is just terrible. You can't go anywhere. Everybody gets stuck and then the whole event just grinds to a halt. But we held a drivers’ meeting and everybody, unanimously, said, ‘Let's run.’ So we did. We ended up taking half of the course away, making it as easy as possible to get through.”
The mud challenge had a silver lining, though. “It taught us some techniques we use now and keep in our back pocket in case of rain. It’s one of the things I make sure all the teams think about before we even get started: What are our contingency plans?”
Remaining proactive is one of Trudeau’s core leadership skills.
“Well, people extol my praises, but it's mostly because I make them think about, ‘What are you going to do when this happens, or when that happens?’ And then I just stand back and let them do what they need to do. Especially [in regards to] safety,” Trudeau says. “That’s one of the first things I make sure everybody thinks about as we go into [an event]. Don’t take safety for granted. What is the plan should things go wrong? Let's make sure that everybody knows."
Let’s Do It!
Trudeau will be stewarding the Sept. 1-2 West Virginia RallyCross National Tour event and Assistant Chief Steward at the Oct. 18-20 RallyCross National Championship event in Alabama – “Assistant” because his hope is to run in the proposed RallyCross UTV class, drawing on his ATV racing experience.
Although RallyCross is seemingly little-changed on the outside looking in over the last dozen years, Trudeau has been one of many expediting change on the inside.
"When I got involved at the National level, I brought a lot of the lessons we had from the Regional events in Ohio,” he says. “We've kind of shaped the way the events run now around some evolving core concepts – things like course design. We make sure now that our designs are such that they're easily fixable and don't tear up as fast as they maybe would have in the past.
“When you're running a bunch more competitors [at a National versus a Regional event], you can tear things up really fast if, especially if, your goal is to make everything as tight and technical as possible. That often leads to, ‘We're going to spend the whole day just fixing the track.'
“I'm a teach-by-doing kind of a person. Rather than just stand there and try and tell somebody, ‘This is how you should do things,’ I’m, 'follow me and I'll show you how we should do it.’ Once they grasp it, then it's in there. But I'm not of the mindset that my way is the only way. If you have a better idea, tell me and let's try it.
"And if it works, then, hey, great! Let's go! Let's do it!
Ed Trudeau will carry on getting his hands dirty, getting it done.
Dirty Cup indeed.
One More Thing…
“We’re probably not putting the word out strongly enough that in SCCA RallyCross, you don't need to have the 'right car’ – especially at the Regional level – in order to have a fun time,” Trudeau adds as a final point.
“It's dirt and most people don’t necessarily buy cars to go out and play around in the dirt with them,” he explains. "But the message we need to get out is that you can go buy a $1,000 beater, drag it out there and have way more fun than the guy that just spent $40,000 on a Ford Focus RS and is worried he's going to tear his spoilers off."
To that end, Trudeau and several others have been in conversation this past year about the possibility of expanding the spec racer program into RallyCross. The idea was kicked around at the Great Lakes Divisional Meeting in late winter, Trudeau says, and seems to hold much promise.
“What car or cars would we pick in order to be able to do that, remove that barrier to entry for everybody?" Trudeau asks.
Have thoughts on the topic? Drop the SCCA RallyCross Board a note at rxb@scca.com
Photos courtesy Ed Trudeau
