Details involved in preparing, choosing and competing in various wheel-2-wheel events mainly in the Midwest both in my previously owned 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution IX and other racecar rentals!
After a few rounds on the Slalom course - sharing the 4 cars and 4 instructors between the 8 of us students, we moved onto the next course. This was is nicknamed the 'Boneyard' and would be much longer with higher speeds and varying types of corners. I was def looking forward to this, as this is one of the courses that Top Gear utilized when they visited - that episode airing just a few weeks prior to my trip!
The video below is my first round of runs through the Boneyard. Some turns good, but the double-apex ones not so good on exit as I kept trying to drive the car like a Tarmac course and it just would not turn as the grip level is non-existent!
My most common flaw was not turning the wheel enough to get the car to fully rotate. But unlike most of the others, I never spun the car completely around or anything crazy. I was cool enough to knock over a few cones with the rear of the car (since it wouldn't rotate fast enough). That was fun! Also pretty cool as the instructor is yelling - "...just go, keep going!"
It was a heck of a lot of fun, and something completely different. I was picking it up fast, but I had a long long way to go if I ever really wanted to Rally. A 1/2 day school by no means was going to make me an expert; I was just here to have fun! And the views around the Washington state countryside were spectacular - check out the vid!
While I have been mulling over a few different Driving School options such as Skip Barber or Bob Bondurant, I thought about some different options. Perhaps something like a Rally school, offroad racing or Baja experience.
Well, as luck would have it we were planning a weekend getaway to Seattle where one of the best Rally Schools - Dirtfish - calls home. Even more coincidental, about 1 week before we were leaving, the show Top Gear aired an episode where they visited Dirtfish as well! Crazy. Watching it got me totally stoked for the 1/2 day school I had planned.
The 1/2 day experience fit into our schedule pretty well and I showed up a bit before 8am on Saturday Sept 21st less than an hour from the Seattle airport. I would have loved to do the 2-day or 3-day of course, but there's only so much time on a 'vacation' to enjoy some racing!
I got signed in and once the other attendees showed up - 8 in all - we
headed into the classroom section for some quick overviews. There's a
few cars inside you can check out and the hallways are lined with
driver's suits which is pretty cool.
The classroom instruction was pretty high-level and short really. They explained the basics and I was the only one of the group that had ANY driving experience. The problem being that off-road Rally is much different than tarmac racing so I was prepared to do learn!
We divided up into 2 groups of 4 and hopped into the 4 Subaru STi's that we would rotate between. First up was a rocked skidpad where the instructor drove around 1st explaining that the steering wheel is really just a 'suggestion' and we'd be turning the car with the pedals with the concepts of weight transfer. While this wasn't new to me, it was pretty freakin wild how things worked! A round with the instructor was followed by 2 rounds with us behind the wheel!
Next up was a short slalom course where again the instructor ran 1 round and then we were up. Below is a vid of my first runs in the car on the slalom course:
