Scooting a car around quickly on a gravel road is difficult. Unless you're from Finland, then or course you have chromosomes R, A, L, L, and Y strung right in. For the rest of us, learning to rally race is a process of trial and terror.
"Rally driving is car control and car control is a learned thing," began Tim O'Neil, founder of the Team O'Neil car Control Center inn New Hampshire (www.teamoneil.com). "Planning for the unplanned is part of it. Rally is strategy," he continues. "Not necessarily to beat the other guy, but strategy to keep the car under control no mater what. Winning can follow."
Unlike road racing, where each turn can be analyzed, dissected and perfected, rallying is an endless environment of change. Just as you get into a groove of swinging from a turn on a nice gravel stage road, it rains, the defroster quits and wiper blades fall off. Then your mind goes off track, followed shortly by the car.
O'Neil has made a career out of teaching the discipline of driving at high speed on loose surfaces while maintaining control. It is O'Neil's mission to take raw gravel slingers and turn them into "wicked fast" rally drivers. We took a new Impreza WRX to O'Neil's three-day Advanced International Rally Techniques course to find out how it's done.
O'Neil begins the morning lecture on the first day with his first commandment of rallying: "Balance is the first and most important element - balance the throttle and brake, and using as little steering input as possible. Only use as much as is needed." He then moves on to such topics as the importance of left-foot braking - a crucial rallying technique to master.
O'Neil has taken the techniques of loose surface driving and broken them down into small definable steps: "The student can concentrate on one thing at a time and it gives the student small, achievable goals - that builds confidence."
The driving starts on a 200-ft gravel skid pad behind the wheel of a front-wheel-drive VW Golf. In order to learn the basics of balancing the brakes, throttle and steering, we begin with a simple exercise of trying to keep the car in a perpetual drift around the circle. Tim described my first go round as a classic case of "stabbing and steering." He explained, "When the car isn't turning, it's easy to just keep adding more steering and/or throttle, and just understeer right out of the circle." It's difficult to let go of some tarmac techniques, and let the feet dance on the pedals to steer the car.
The techniques of balancing the brake and throttle become more difficult when we move on to the slalom. Staggered cones are set up on a huge gravel lot representing fast, medium and slow corners. As O'Neil puts it, the goal is to "modulate brake and throttle balance to essentially steer with the back of the car. And it's a matter of getting all the turning done before the turn."
O'Neil illustrated his words by blasting down the hill into the slalom and effortlessly swinging the Golf around the cones, using fluid combinations of throttle, steering and braking. After the tutorial, it was my turn. The results were simply spectacular, bur not all that impressive. We put all the cones back up, then O'Neil, with the patience of a job, reiterated the process. Consistently getting the car turned in on time and through the course with most of the cones left standing took time. But that's the point of the school.
After a day and a half of nailing down the basics, it was time to fire up the Impreza WRX. "All-wheel-drive cars can certainly be your friend," said O'Neil. "They are most stable and of course have more grip, but they can be harder to stop and may not turn in quite as well as a two-wheel-drive car. You have to be careful not to get in over the car's head by being too confident, especially in the wet."
The Impreza impressed. It seemed to do everything right; it was predictable and inspired confidence, even when it was over-driven.
O'Neil did an illustration run in the WRX, fast enough this time that the wind coming in the side window whisked my hat into the back seat. We swapped seats and I headed into the slalom, faster than before. Approaching the first cone, I stabbed the brakes, stood the car on its nose, pirouetted around the cone and had the car pointed at the second one - just with the back of the car, not the front. With a little more tweaking, I started to connect the dots. It started to feel like rally racing.
The last big brake/throttle principle to learn was the pendulum turn. Changing direction in a small area from a ridiculous speed is a complicated proposal. Or at least it feels that was the first couple times. It's an odd sensation to be looking out the right rear window (if you're making a pendulum to the right) so you can see the cone you're about to swing around.
At first, committing to the pendulum turn is extremely difficult because all the elements (technically there are eight) are going through your head: enter the turn from here, lift here, brake, apply throttle, and so on. Practice it enough times, however, and it starts taking on a slow-motion effect. You don't even think about it. It just happens.
According to O'Neil, "This whole effort is to get you to the point where it isn't thought about any more, because if something like this comes up during a rally and you have to think about it, it's too late. It must be second nature."
By the third day, it had all started to come together. Now we would try driving in the woods on real roads.
This isn't my car, was the first thought in my head coming over a crest mid-turn - not the right thought to be having at that moment. The kink in that little sweeper had snuck up on me. No worries, Tim uses wide roads in the beginning for a reason. Getting the Subaru hauled down and turned in for the next corner wasn't second nature just yet, but the process was happening in the right order, and I wasn't panicking.
Mentally, rally driving is hugely taxing. Even though there are just a small number of techniques that you use to get the job done, the variables you must content with are innumerable. But that's the point of learning such a high-consequence sport in a low-risk environment. O'Neil's constant mantra of "car control, car control, car control" is something you'll be saying in your sleep after you leave.