Steamboat Springs – The world is speeding past Travis Pastrana’s window at 100 mph. Or maybe it’s 105.
No matter. Whichever it is, it still feels slow, too slow for this adrenaline addict who took the action sports world by storm this summer with a freestyle motocross win at the Denver stop of the Dew Action Sports Tour before launching a gold-medal trilogy at the X Games in Los Angeles.
You remember Pastrana, the guy who suspended time long enough to pull off the first – and only – double backflip on a motorcycle in competition history. He followed up that “best trick” motocross performance with the requisite gold in freestyle moto X competition, then shocked the motorsports world by laying claim to the gold medal in the first-ever rally car race at the X Games. The shock has subsided.
That’s because the 22-year-old from Annapolis, Md., has taken his rally-car skills to the next level, apparently for good. With two races remaining, the Rally America National Rally Championship points leader enhanced his stock with a victory at the 2006 Colorado Cog Rally in Steamboat Springs on Sept. 24.
The decisive win at the muddy Colorado Cog Rally was the second in a row for Pastrana and Team Subaru co-driver Christian Edstrom in the Rally America series.
“That’s the problem with the rain,” Pastrana said of the sloppy Colorado course. “You still go fast, but not nearly as fast as you know the car is capable of. Some of these stages we average 90 to 95 mph, when the conditions are right.”
While the weather might not have been up to speed for the throttle-pumping dirt jockey, the prevailing notion at last week’s race was that conditions are quite right for rally racing in America. Led by Pastrana’s success, the traditionally European-dominated form of auto racing is positioning itself to usurp soccer as America’s next transplant-sport success story.
“I like to see the homegrown talent doing well,” said J.B. Niday, Rally America’s managing director. “It’s nice to see the European talent come over and really show us where we stand in the world, but I do like having the American drivers do well. If the sport is really going to become popular in this country, we really need to see the American talent succeed.”
Already a renowned freestyle motocross rider, Pastrana is rapidly emerging as rally racing’s golden boy as well. The sport’s sanctioning body in America hopes that the new face of the X Games – which saw an overall viewership of nearly 1.4 million fans when the sport ran live Aug. 5 on ABC – can help carry rally racing to similar levels of success as motocross or even NASCAR with domestic audiences.
“This is definitely the year that rally goes big in America,” Pastrana said. “People just don’t know about it yet. Kids think, ‘If I want to be a car driver, I have to do something in a circle.’ But if they see that there’s something with an option – to jump cars and fly through the trees – I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more guys getting into it.”
Colorado is among the target markets for the Dukes of Hazzard-style racing on unpaved roads in highly modified but street-legal all-wheel-drive cars like Pastrana’s Subaru WRX STi.
As one of nine stops on the Rally America series, the Colorado Cog Rally takes place on unimproved and unforgiving Routt County roads closed to traffic as drivers follow course directions from their co-drivers and race the clock in harrowing slide-ways style at speeds up to 150 mph. It’s the kind of dirt-road driving many SUV drivers wish they could do, only in a more controlled environment that includes roll cages and five-point safety harnesses.
“If you’ve ever gotten sideways on a gravel road and asked, ‘I wonder how fast you could do this,’ that’s what rally is,” Colorado Cog Rally chairman Jim Gill said. “The idea of the sport is to drive right on the ragged edge without going over. And it’s a fine line between edges.”
Pastrana has walked both sides of that line in Colorado, rolling his rig 8 3/4 rotations last year. Oddly enough, he still considered the Colorado rally his favorite in last year’s series.
“I was able to do well last year up to (the crash) because it’s a lot like motocross on this course, where you can almost see around the next couple of bends. So it’s a high-speed event and you have a lot of confidence,” Pastrana said. “You’ll scare yourself a bit and you don’t want to crash, but you know you’ll crash in a field as opposed to in the woods or off a 500-foot cliff. Crashing here is more like a really gnarly roller-coaster ride.”
Pastrana, whose father was a Marine and whose mother raced motocross, might be the man to light the rally racing fuse in America. His antics span beyond flipping cars and motorcycles to skydiving and BASE jumping, spawned from a childhood that included his first go-kart at age 3 and first rollover accident at 4. He learned to drive a stick shift at 9 so he could spin doughnuts in his uncle’s Corvette before graduating to a Jeep rollover at 11. Inversion, apparently, comes naturally.
More natural is Pastrana’s affinity for motocross, a sport he took up at his parents’ prompting at 3 and took over the top – to his mother’s anguish – at the X Games in August. The reflexes and feel for terrain he has developed sliding two-wheelers around on dirt have aided his success on four, he said, but ultimately they remain different sports.
“Driving is a lot more mental and motocross is a lot more physical,” he said. “The parallel is the mind-set going in. Rally is a precision sport, where if you’re not scared a few times every stage you’re probably not going fast enough. You have to be willing to push yourself that way.
“Motorcycles are something I’ve had a passion for my entire life and I love them, but this is a whole new challenge. Learning how to drive a car, sliding around and even something like listening to your co-driver when you think you’re going to die and you’re sideways and he’s still reading the (map) notes and you have to keep listening to him even though you are panicked and thinking about this situation, you have to think about the next situation, the next turn, or you are going to lose time. So there are a lot of aspects of this that are different and fun.”
It’s evident that Pastrana has a different definition of “fun” than the typical Sunday driver, but the dedicated drivers spending as much as $30,000 a race to compete on the Rally America series are confident their love of the sport will become contagious.
“There’s an emotional connection that’s easy to make when you’re watching a car sliding around,” said Tanner Foust, a Steamboat Springs resident who won the 2005 Cog Rally and did much of the stunt driving in the “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Fast and Furious” films.
“There’s so much movement and so much interaction that you really get an idea of what the driver is going through, unlike road course racing or NASCAR racing, where you can’t see every input the driver is making to try to save that skid or whatever.
“The image of rally racing here in the States hasn’t quite developed yet, but I think that’s changing. Sliding cars is sliding cars, and as humans and car fans I think we just love it.”
Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
