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.