Racerchicks also do it in
the dirt!
by
Kristen Tabor
Drag racing, road racing,
autocross, solo, and speed world challenge—the
“fairer sex” has broken the gender barriers in
these male-dominated forms of motor sport. And
yet, there’s still one more glass ceiling to
be shattered: the obscure, extreme sibling to
tarmac motorsports, performance rally.
Performance Rally or Stage
Rally is, essentially, racing on gravel
logging roads in safety-modified, street-legal
production vehicles. There is no qualifying,
no practicing; the first time you see the
road, it counts. Competitors are driver and
co-driver. The co-driver’s job is to read the
route book or course notes, keep the driver on
the right road, keep the driver focused, and
keep the team organized. The driver’s job: to
get to the end of the stage as fast as
possible, keeping the car on the road and
avoiding distractions like the changing nature
of the road surface, the weather, spectators,
stray wildlife.
Cars start the stage at 1
or 2 minute intervals. Bad weather? Great!
Rough roads? Awesome! The unique challenge of
performance rally is the fact that you have to
drive flat out on roads you’ve never seen
before. Rallyists have an old saying: Road
Racers see 10 corners 10,000 times. Rally
racers see 100 corners once, maybe twice, if
the stage is run a second time. But even then,
everything has changed with the passage of 50
or more hard-charging cars.
Most motorsport events take
place in an arena; performance rally takes
place in the forests, often away from any
major population center. This makes it a
challenge for the casual spectator to
experience rally, although the die-hard fans
seem to have no difficulty getting to the
spectator areas. SCCA’s ProRally Championship
series takes place in areas such as Bemidji,
MN; Houghton, MI; Lancaster, CA; Hillsboro,
OR; and Shelton, WA. SCCA regions across the
country also have regional and divisional
series, specific to that particular area. For
instance, SCCA’s SoCal region has the
California Rally Series, or CRS, one of the
most long-standing rally programs in the
nation. The NorPac division, my home division,
also has one of the most long-standing
traditions of rally in the nation; this is the
group that put on the Olympus Rally, a past
round of the World Rally Championship.
Rallyists consider
themselves a family. Often, you’ll find
competitors in the same class helping each
other out fixing their cars in service; no one
likes to beat someone because they couldn’t
get their car fixed, we’d rather settle it out
on the stages. It’s this family atmosphere
that has made it so easy to get into rally. It
is not unusual to see whole families, from
grandparents down to little babies,
participate in rally, whether it’s as a
volunteer worker, service crew, support staff,
or competitors. It’s also this atmosphere that
helps to encourage new people to compete.
You will most likely find
most rally women in co-driver or service crew
positions. It’s also how some of the current
crop of female rally drivers got their start
in rally.
To be sure, there have been
others that have come before: Michele Mouton
and Anne Moss on the international stage, Gail
Truess and Janice Damitio on the US stage. But
rally poses challenges for women that just
aren’t there for men. For one, it’s banging on
the car on the side of the road when you’ve
run into a tree or a rock. It’s changing tires
in the mud and the rain, swapping out a
transmission or suspension pieces, repairing
brake lines that have burst, replacing control
arms or repairing them. It’s getting down and
dirty and hands-on. You can’t stand back and
wait for someone to help you; you have to
learn how to do it yourself with minimal
tools. (There is a story about a team blasting
through the woods at mach 1 when the turbo
lets go. The driver gets the car pulled over,
and the co-driver whittles a plug for the
turbo oil line out of a stick, using his sock
as a gasket.) It’s also trying to find
somewhere to relieve the bladder-pressure out
in the woods! Men don’t realize how easy they
have it.
Most women don’t work on
their cars themselves, and don’t even think
about the mechanical side of things until it’s
time to get the oil changed, if even then.
While it’s not necessary to have good
mechanical skills to compete in rally, it’s a
plus if, when something breaks, you can at
least fix it enough to limp it to service.
It’s important to be able to change a tire
quickly in any weather condition. And it’s
important to be able to listen and process
information quickly and accurately while
piloting a racecar.
Not many women want to
spend their weekend out in the woods flogging
a car down an unimproved, primitive road at
break-neck speed, in the dust and dirt and mud
and sun and rain and snow and hail… but I’m
one of them!
For me, it’s the lure of
perfect car control at the limit of my comfort
zone. It’s the challenge of keeping up, or
even beating, my brothers. It’s the flash of
trees by your windows, the cheers of
spectators, the sense of exhilaration upon
finishing a stage with a competitive time.
It’s the sideways action, modulating the
throttle and dancing on the pedals to make it
around the corners without losing momentum,
seeing the speedometer hit 80 or above and
knowing that I could go just a little faster
and make up a couple more seconds; it’s the
sense of danger at driving that fast in that
landscape, the sense of responsibility I have
for my co-driver, to drive the best I can for
our team. It’s indescribable, except to those
who have already felt it. |
