I’ve wanted to get out to the Dirtfish rally school in Snoqualmie, WA for probably a decade. For about as long, I’ve been listening to my degenerate amateur rally driver and co-driver friends warning me that rally school would punch a little hole in my heart that could only be filled with more time in a rally car. Earlier this week, I finally made it happen and now there is a hole in my heart that can only be filled with more time in a rally car.
I have been writing about cars professionally for more than a decade. When I say that Dirtfish was the most fun I’ve had driving, what I mean is that it was more fun than: Driving the LaFerrari at Fiorano, the Porsche 918 Spyder at COTA, driving a prototype C7 Corvette cross country, doing the Tail of the Dragon in a 911 GT3 Touring, The Rubicon Trail in a Wrangler Rubicon and dozens of other bucket list driving experiences I barely remember now. It fucking ruled. I texted my pal Jimmy to tell him I was having a good time and he said: “Ya, there’s a good reason it’s ruined my life.”
Arriving at the school, the first thing you see is the remnants of the Snoqualmie Falls Lumber Company mill. The next thing you see, is the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department because the Dirtfish offices are in the building they used for the Sheriff’s Department in Twin Peaks. That’s where I got to admire an impressive collection of fire suits and some nice simulators, and it’s where I met my instructor, Michelle Miller and completed a short ground school—in the Sheriff’s Department from Twin Peaks.
Within half an hour, Michelle and I were in a BRZ headed toward a 315 acre maze of gravel. The school offers instruction in BRZs and WRX STIs, I chose the BRZ because I’m building a vaguely BRZ-based race car and wanted seat time. We started by sliding the BRZ around a rectangular course, Michelle helped me figure out how to initiate a slide by braking with my left foot. From there, we progressed through a series courses where I learned that some of my hardwired driving skills did not apply here.
I kept thinking back to when I learned to drive a Model T. I was driving a car. There was a steering wheel, brakes, a throttle, etc. But they were arranged in such a way that my own driving-related muscle memory became a hinderance to me actually making the car do what I wanted. In the BRZ, the impulse to maintain stability, to avoid unloading the suspension, to throttle out, to catch and correct a slide aggressively with my hands—all wrong, all making me slower.
Dirtfish offers three-day schools, but due to my being chronically unable to understand how days work, I was only able to squeeze in a single day session. If you’ve been lucky enough to receive instruction at a school or HPDE event, you more than likely know the feeling of getting it right, or “feeling it click” or whatever. Michelle was probably the best instructor I’ve ever worked with—I can see why she’s in high demand as a co-driver. She’s very calm and easy going, but more than that, she’s a good teacher. Within minutes, it seemed like she had me figured out, like she knew exactly how to present what she knew about driving fast on loose surfaces to me in a way that was clear and actionable — for me specifically. She told me her husband estimated that she had over 20,000 hours of time in the right seat of a rally car, and I believe it. Because she was so competent, I got to feel like I was “getting it” a decent number of times. Then I’d inevitably get overconfident and fuck up, then kind of reign it back in. Progress felt slow, then really fast, then slow again.
In my experience, you don’t get that on a race track. Even with a great instructor track progress slower, if maybe more linear, but it doesn’t come in big “hell yeah” chunks like it does in a rally car. On track, because speeds are much higher, risks are bigger, and you, or at least I, have to work my way up to and through my limits. You can’t just unsettle the car to see what happens on the track, I can’t anyway. Maybe you can.
The pull of rallyworld is strong. Everyone I talked to at Dirtfish seemed to know everyone I’d ever seen within ten feet of a thrashed Subaru. Like most nichey pursuits, there’s a nice community around it. But talking with Michelle during breaks, the appeal of the actual driving part of rally grabbed my attention. I love the idea of circuit racing, hitting a mark lap after lap, managing traffic. My two door-to-door racing experiences in LeMons were life-altering. But as my instructor explained it, in rally, you mostly don’t get a chance to replay or perfect a given corner or section. You’re working from a co-drivers notes, and even if you remember what’s coming up ahead from recce, conditions may be substantially different by the time you get there. You’re not likely to be perfect. You’re going to encounter a thing and do your best to handle it, hopefully you get to encounter another thing. Ideally, you everything a little faster than the other cars in your class and get a nice little trophy. That idea is deeply appealing to me.
Every time I get into a rally car, I get out thinking I need to find a way to own one and compete. I don’t know if that’s in the cards for me, but at Dirtfish, I got about as good an introduction to this style of driving as I could have in a day. As experiences go, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.
