A few years ago, a friend of mine went to Dirtfish, a rally driving school in Snoqualmie, WA. They raved about it. Then they went again. And again. Then another friend went, for the half-day course, and he raved about it, too. You can probably see from the photo above where this is going.

For my birthday this year, Ei-Nyung got me a gift certificate to go. Kevin and I had been talking for a while about going to the 3-day AWD course, but I kept waffling – it’d be time away, it was expensive, scheduling it when we were both free was never ideal, etc. A few other friends had expressed going as well, but Kevin & I had gotten the closest to making it work, and so we both pulled the trigger, knowing it’d never be perfect. That ended up being a theme of the week, but in a positive way. More on that later.

But here’s the spoiler: I loved it. I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say it’s the most fun I’ve ever had. And it’s $$$$ – no question – one of the things they do is to show you where that money goes in parts & tires & wheels & all the people who make this happen, because it’s not some huge-margin thing. It’s expensive because it’s expensive. So it’s not gonna be accessible to everyone. But if you’re interested, and if you can swing it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I cannot tell you how blown away I was by how much we learned, how quickly our skills developed, and how what seemed impossible on day 1 was hilarious on day 3.

You Must Unlearn What You Have Learned

I’ve been to a handful of track days at a handful of tracks. I’m not gonna pretend to be some experienced and talented driver – I’m not. But I’m alright. And I’ve spent those trackdays practicing smooth inputs – rolling on and off the brakes, applying throttle smoothly. Steering smoothly. You practice so that your inputs don’t “upset the car”, so that all the tires have maximum grip for the specific thing they’re doing at the time you’re asking the car to do it. I’ve spent a few years working on this, and trying to make it automatic.

This is a huge problem.

On tarmac, you want to brake in a straight line, when you have all your grip dedicated to slowing the car. You then turn in, and want to use as much of the grip as possible to steer (though you’ll roll off the brakes while steering most of the time – as steering consumes grip, you basically hand over the grip you were using to brake). Then you use as much grip as possible to accelerate out of the corner. Lift off the throttle, brake hard, decrease brake pressure, steer.

One of the first things they teach you at Dirtfish is that this doesn’t work at all on gravel.

You lift off the throttle (smoothly, so as not to upset the car). Apply brakes hard to slow. Car pitches forward. Weight goes over the front wheels to provide maximum traction & slow the car. Roll off the brakes & steer. As you do this, the car “settles”, which pulls the weight off the front wheels and rebalances it, but it means now that your steering wheels don’t have enough grip to get the car to turn, and you slide right through the corner.

Instead, you lift off the gas decisively, which shifts the car’s weight forward. Then you turn the wheel, long before you’ve reached the corner. Because at first, nothing really happens. I think this is because as you turn the wheel, the sides of the tires dig into the gravel, and that takes a moment with the car weighted forward. But it’s a terrifying moment. You’ve gone into a corner full tilt, lifted off the gas, not used the brake, then turned. And the car is still going straight.

So the last part is to wait.

You wait for the tires to bite enough that the car then starts to rotate. If you’re used to driving on tarmac, where with a fairly stiff suspension a car will respond instantly this is an incredibly disconcerting feeling. But then it happens – a fraction of a second later, the car rotates. And it will, for some corners, complete its entire rotation without any additional input. You then hit the gas once the car is headed in the right direction. You can do this before unwinding the steering, because by hitting the gas, you transfer all the weight to the rear tires, so the car takes off in the direction it’s facing regardless of the direction you’re steering. Again, unsettling.

But “unsettling” is actually the point. Where on the track, you want a car to be stable – to slowly load a tire and unload it so that you don’t “shock” the tire into instability – the difference between someone gently pushing against your shoulder and someone shoving you – on gravel, because you don’t have reliable traction, you’re constantly shoving the car around to maximize the potential grip for the specific tires you need to “work”. Its constantly unstable, because you need the car’s weight to dramatically move around much faster.

The gravel surface is kind of a damper. It takes all these shock inputs and slows them down. If you did it on a track, there’s no damper, the shock input breaks traction, and you go sliding off. With gravel, without the shock input, you don’t get enough weight transfer to make your inputs effective, and you go sliding off.

This is such a mindfuck when you’ve practiced tarmac driving that it required constant, conscious effort to not fuck it up. And any time my attention wandered for whatever reason – often because I’d done something right and thought I could repeat it with less focus – this bit me in the ass.

The other track guy in the class had the same problem, so it was nice to know I wasn’t alone.

But so the biggest struggle of the entire thing wasn’t that I needed to learn a new skill. It was that I had to unlearn what I’d learned, and then literally learn to do the exact opposite. It wasn’t going from 0 to 100. It was going from -100 to 100.

(Continued in next post)