Behind The Wheel

Sometimes hard work doesn't pay. Senior editor, Josh Jacquot was working hard on a photo shoot the day the phone rang, so I was back in the office. Because I was sitting by the phone, I got the driver's seat of Hyundai's Production Class Tiburon rally car. Our hard-working lensman, thanks to his diligence, was sequestered in the screaming ballast seat, while I tried time and again to hurl us off a cliff on his side of the car.

Hyundai Motorsports has been competing in the SCCA ProRally championship for more than six years and has brought home five manufacturer's championships and 34 overall wins in that time. The turbocharged, all-wheel-drive Open Class Tiburons have been the cars to beat for the last four years. Despite outward appearances, ours was not one of those Tiburons. Ours, prepared for the Production Class, was basically a stock Tiburon with some really good shocks. Production Class cars are required to keep the stock drivetrain, stock brakes and even most of their stock interior. Limited-slip differentials are allowed in Stock Class, but we didn't even have one of those.

That didn't stop us from being cocky, though. Coming straight off a one-race win streak in the Datsun Rally Beater (see "We Promise You an Adventure" in the July issue), we figured we were now an unbeatable team. You might think Hyundai Motorsports would be happy to have an unbeatable team on board, but for some reason the group seemed a little uncomfortable when Jacquot proclaimed our 100 percent chance of victory.

Hyundai Motorsports' PR manager Toni Honsowetz was like a broken record. "Just bring the car back in one piece so we can let the next person drive it." Does she worry this much every time she hands over the keys to this car?

Our air of confidence notwithstanding, I was quaking in my driving suit at the thought of driving a front-wheel-drive car on Oregon Trail's notoriously slippery roads. The logging roads are all perched on the sides of hills, hills which are all steeply crowned, with their ill-defined edges rolling off into big, scary dropoffs lubricated with moss, wet leaves and various local slime molds. And, of course, there are lots of trees, tree stumps and deep, slushy sawdust.

It's not like I've never driven a front-driver, but in the dirt, none of my front- or rear-wheel drive instincts seem to work. It is common rally knowledge that front-wheel drive is faster than rear-wheel drive, but everything I knew about driving in the dirt told me that couldn't be true.

Luckily, Hyundai brought along Tim O'Neil to try and cram a little FWD knowledge into my head before the start of the race. O'Neil owns and operates the New Hampshire-based Team O'Neil Car Control Center [www.team-oneil.com], a fully equipped rally training center that is quickly gaining a reputation as the fastest way to knock two years off your rally driving learning curve. With one of his standard two- or three-day courses, O'Neil surely could have taught me everything I needed to keep the Hyundai out of the ditches. Instead, we had two hours.

O'Neil preaches left-foot braking as by far the fastest and most effective way to drive any rally car, but especially a front-driver, and on the drive to our Olympia, Wash. practice road, he briefed me on the technique. Basically, you keep your right foot on the gas and your left foot on the brake and use your feet to steer the car. Sound crazy? You bet. O'Neil makes sense of it all by looking closely at what happens to the car as you try to go around a corner. Usually, as you first turn in, the front tires will dig in and turn the car, but after that initial bite, they will lose grip and the car will start to understeer if you are going fast enough. It turns out that if you use the brakes to transfer enough weight to the front wheels right when they first bite, they'll grab hard enough to tuck the nose into the corner and fling the tail out. Carry enough speed into the corner and you can ride that slide around until you are ready to power out onto the next straight. Playing the weight-transfer game, however, requires constant fiddling with the gas and brake pedals, hence the need for a foot on each.

All the theory sounded great, but actually making it happen turned out to be a tremendous mental battle. Driving the Hyundai on the wet, crowned roads of the Northwest was about as similar to driving the Rally Beater in the desert as driving a forklift is to flying a helicopter. In our two hours of practice, I only did it right about five times and came so close to running over our fearless photographer Tim McKinney that I could literally smell the brand of shampoo he had used that morning. Yeah, we're going to win...

O'Neil's classes are all at least two days, because, as he explained, you need to let the new technique sink into your head for a night before it can click and work properly. Sure enough, after two nights of mentally driving those same gravel roads, I took off down the first stage and everything clicked. The first real stage was an amazing, flowing roller coaster of gravel. Nobody had told the organizers about Jacquot's pre-race victory proclamation, so we started dead last. This meant there were plenty of tracks for us to follow. The fast line, it appeared, was the one where you drop the inside front wheel off the inside of the road. I tried, and sure enough, cornering on the skidplate seemed to work quite well.

Oregon's weather conspired to make driving very interesting indeed, alternating from rain to snow to sun and back again several times during each stage. Turning big, tall rally tires with its stock engine and gearing, the Tiburon was not exactly what you would call a powerhouse, but it withstood a most severe beating with nary a hiccup. In total, the poor engine must have spent 10 minutes on the rev limiter. With my left foot on the brakes all the time, getting over to the clutch to grab third gear was simply too much for my haggard mind to handle, so instead, I rode second gear through most of the rally. Despite being ridden so hard, our only mechanical problem was a rear brake line that started leaking two stages from the end. With only four minutes to effect repairs, O'Neil and crew simply blocked off the offending line with some pliers and we finished on three brakes. As for Jacqot's victory prediction? He was right.