Step one: Unbolt the passenger seat in your cousin Jeb's pickup. Step two: Climb in, and lay on the floor while he does doughnuts in the Wal-Mart parking lot. This is what it feels like to ride in a WRC car as it flies down a gravel stage in the Finnish forest.
Subaru World Rally factory driver Petter Solberg is young, boisterous and smells much better than Jeb. He also has better car control. Because Solberg's co-driver Phil Mills is human ballast, they place him low and back in a surprisingly comfortable, but nonetheless very disorienting reclined position. He only has to see the road well enough to keep in synch with the pace notes he and Solberg made on the same road a few days earlier.
Before coming to Finland, I used the phrase "WRC-scale effort" to describe Subaru's U.S. rally team that competes in the U.S. ProRally championship. Now I see how wrong I was. When you count the drivers, co-drivers, team managers, service crews, gravel note crews, PR staff and the cappuccino distribution team, the Prodrive Subaru team alone brought nearly 70 people to Rally Finland. They also brought 1,056 Pirelli rally tires--enough to ensure a supply of every possible compound and tread pattern for three cars during the three-day event. Rallying is big business here, but even on the business side, it's all about the competition.
Prodrive's David Lapworth is evasive on the subject of budgets, admitting only that they spend "tens of millions of dollars," on a season, "but not as many tens of millions as Peugeot." That extravagance bought Peugeot a championship last year--the first year the championship didn't go to Mitsubishi or Subaru in five years.
Unlike Mark Lovell's WRX rally car, which remains very stock on the inside, Solberg's racer is virtually unrecognizable. The driver's feet are in an elevated footbox with oversized, bottom-hinged pedals; the shifter consists of two thin carbon-fiber paddles behind the wheel, while the big carbon-fiber handle in the shifter's old home locks the rear brakes and simultaneously disengages the back half of the all-wheel-drive system. Then there are the knobs and switches, the video screen in the dash, the carbon fiber everywhere and the jungle gym of roll bar tubing.
Solberg's technique with the WRC car is also completely foreign. Acceleration, braking and cornering forces blend together in an elaborate dance with the bumps, jumps and the occasional disorienting view of a tree sliding by. I even try watching his feet, hoping to learn some steps from a master, but I can't make sense of any of it.
Sprung surprisingly soft and with plenty of suspension travel, the WRC Subaru is designed to soak up monster jumps like potholes.
Forced to breathe through a 34mm restrictor, WRC cars offer lots of low-end torque and surprisingly little action on top. They make just more than 300 hp, which is much less than the U.S. ProRally cars. Still, because it's so thoroughly developed, the WRC cars end up being faster.
Where Lovell's acceleration, braking and shifting points are limited by the time and space needed to operate the controls, Solberg can do everything simultaneously. When Lovell shifts, he has to lift off the throttle, which interrupts the flow of power and makes mid-slide shifts a tricky proposition at best. Solberg, on the other hand, bangs off upshifts and downshifts mid turn without the slightest effect on the car's attitude.
Either that or he's just really good. At age 26, Solberg has already been driving sideways for 19 years. When he was 7, he got a used Beetle and immediately learned to slide it. "Because I was living on the farm, well, you know how it is," he explains.
Sitting in Mills' recliner of terror, I try to comfort myself with Solberg's credentials. I'm glad he was a Norwegian R/C car champion when he was 13. I'm in awe of his three consecutive Norwegian rallycross and hillclimb championships. And I find it reassuring to hear him talk about his first rally car--a 340-hp Volvo 240. "It was a fucking great car," he exclaims, the words coming with wild-eyed enthusiasm. "I'm trying to buy it back now just so I can have it around."
Still, as we float sideways and nearly weightless over the crest of a blind hill and plummet toward a fate I can't see, it's hard to forget the footage of his WRC Ford Focus flying into the trees at last year's Finland rally.
From my seat, I can't figure out why we're still driving sideways down a perfectly straight road. Then, suddenly, we're at the bottom of the hill, the free-fall stops, the road goes where we've been pointing all along, and we're off.
This is the difference between driving with pace notes and American-style blind rallying. Not knowing where the road would go next, an American rally driver would have to slow for the crest, slide over it slightly sideways, and be prepared to snap the car in whatever direction is appropriate. Knowing the road drops down a hill and then snaps left, Solberg can rotate the car before the hill, while he still has grip, and crest it so fast that he floats over the road on the other side.
When he rallied in Norway, the rallies were also blind, but the pace notes, he says, make things much safer. I wonder how many Americans would understand the safety benefits of flying over a blind hill sideways.