Colin McRae (the youngest to win the World Rally Championship Drivers’ title) said, “Straight roads are for fast cars. Turns are for fast drivers.” For one gloriously-rainy Saturday in Snoqualmie, Washington, I got a chance to be humbled in the dirt, mud, and gravel of some slippery turns.
From 1987 until 1997, rally cars were my favorite thing to draw. Yesterday, I got to cross something off my bucket list: learning how to drive one. The experience surpassed my expectations, proving worth the wait. DirtFish let us get after it and prove the adage true: “Rally doesn’t have corners—just slide and straight.”
I can still hear Andrew, my in-car instructor yelling, “Brake!” My classroom instructor, Jack, caught my attention with “Your brakes are a multi-use tool.” I struggled with several aspects of the class for much of the day. It took a lot of practice to get the right amount of weight transfer with varying brake pressure.
My #38 car was the newest in the DirtFish AWD fleet with only 87 hours on the meter. (I’d never been in a car that showed hours like a tractor before yesterday.) With 300hp, this thoroughbred straight yanked you out of the turns. It was wild riding in a stock vehicle with the interior components removed.
If you’ve raced on tarmac, this sequence is what my instructor, Jack, called a “brain breaker.” It took me until the last few runs of the day to wait to get back on the gas. At one point, my instructor had me brake with my left foot while leaving my right foot on the floor to try to break the habit.
People come from around the world to DirtFish, the only rally school in the world that lets you play with 300hp rally-ready Subarus. I’ve been to IndyCar and Formula 2000 racing schools; but their instruction, facilities, and instructor personalities paled in comparison to what I experienced at DirtFish. I can’t recommend this team enough. I do mean “team.” Jack said they have as many as 30 employees working simultaneously at the school on weekdays.
By the end of the day, everything has mud on it: the cones, the cars, and even your clothes. While we broke for lunch, the team washed our rides for the afternoon session. We had ‘em coated again in a couple hours.
These are rally tires, designed to grip on the inside and through material out the other side. A DirtFish Subaru burns through a set of these aggressive tires every five days. Part of that might be how students are advised: “When in doubt, flat out.”
Jack grew up on the England/Wales border, idolizing rally drivers. Now, he works a dream job, teaching rally driving and racing his 1980’s Volvo on days off. Many of our instructors kept their personal race cars in one of the old Weyerhaeuser warehouses on the DirtFish campus. On the screen in the top left is the Link, our course for the last 3 hours of the day. On the whiteboard, Jack is explaining trail braking. Rally runs a different line around curves than road racing. You don’t want to go wide. It’s mushy out there and feels like you’re spinning tires through a crunchy milkshake.
Even though we were running at about 1/3 to 1/2 the speed of the professionals, these straightaways felt really fast. One of the bad habits Andrew had to correct was me slowing down before the turns. If you don’t take enough speed into the braking, then you don’t get enough weight transfer to the front tires to slide through the turns on the correct vector.
This was my favorite turn of the day: a 180-degree slide. We ran it forward and backwards for each lap. After nailing almost all of my second-to-last lap, I used my last lap to hit this with very little brake—gassing a power slide all the way around as half of my class cheered from the bank above. It. Was. Epic. I made my instructor laugh. Unfortunately, nobody got photos or videos of that; but it will live in my memory where I’ll Cheshire smile every time I recall it.
Precision and sequence are everything in rally driving. You want “fast hands in the slow stuff, slow hands in the fast stuff.” One of the most difficult sequences to learn requires three movements in about one to two seconds; and it doesn’t work if you get them out of order. It’s a lot to take in, let alone master.
The heart and personality of the DirtFish brand grabbed me. Everybody is so passionate about this sport and introducing you to a taste of what many consider the most exciting motorsport in the world. “Real roads, real cars, real fast.” Our instructors fed off our excitement, and the cars seemed to respond with similar eagerness. I can’t recommend this school enough. Someday, I’d love to come back for their three-day course which culminates in running a 2.5-mile forest course—sight unseen—using only the notes from your co-driver.
