(Photos by Dave Nutting) – You may remember us regaling you with stories about riding shotgun in rally cars a couple of weeks back. The good news is that the rally car riding stuff was only half of our day at the vaunted Team O’Neil Rally School in Dalton, New Hampshire. We actually got to spend a couple of hours with instructors driving the school’s Ford Fiesta trainers through a variety of maneuvers and challenges designed to get us thinking like rally drivers and controlling our cars better. These little buggers are beefed with roll cages, skid plates, some knobby tires, and then turned loose with instructors and students. Before we get to any of that stuff, you need to know exactly where we were.

Team O’Neil Rally School was opened by Tim O’Neil, a five time national champion rally racer in 1997. Tim had a

little area where his skid pad and a couple of other challenges could be set up. It has gone from those amazingly humble beginnings to the most vaunted and decorated rally school in the United States.  There are 600 acres of property now, there are 10 miles of trails cut through the woods by Tim and his guys. There’s an off road course and there are opportunities to learn car control and better your driving skills year ’round with winter safety driving classes keeping the staff busy even during the snowy New Hampshire visits by the Snow Miser. You can literally attend Team O’Neil for a day for about $500 and do the Winter Safe School or progress through any of nine steps ranging from a two day rally school for $2,460 all the way up to a five day school for $5,990. In the five day, if you have exhibited the skills necessary you will be running the same course (at full bore) that we did with Block. These instructors have nards of steel to sit shotgun through that!

On top of that, the school offers and “extreme adventure” course that involves all the guy stuff you could imagine between trucks, marksmanship, and woodland living, a personal security course where professionals from governmental agencies, private firms, and other organizations come to learn how to protect their clients, and the off-road course which is straight up gnarly sounding with the trails that Tim has built himself.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE TEAM O’NEIL WEBSITE 

Ok, so what were a couple of schlubs like Nutting and I going to learn from the staff in a few hours of pounding on Fiestas? As it turns out A TON. It was the most informative couple of hours I have ever spent in a car and I would have driven our front wheel drive road racing car way better in college had I known how to actually make a front wheel drive car do what you want it to do in an aggressive driving situation like on a race track or rally course.

Piloting the peppy little Fiestas is the starting point for most of the Team O’Neil student body. These cars are perfect for getting the basics of left foot braking, control, and steering input down. Not “fast” by any means, they get you to speed on the dirt skid pad, through the slalom, and into the pendulum turns that we practiced perfectly. One guy in our group (NOT Nutting or I) did not know how to drive a stick and they taught him in like 10 minutes. That was interesting to watch.

As Dave will describe below, the things you do with a FWD car to get it working and behaving like you want are opposite of the typical BangShift rear wheel drive ride. Use of the brake pedal as a fine tuning instrument is essential as it having quick hands to get the wheel back to center during the slaloms that we did.

Repetition and learning from your errors is the theme here. Once you make a good cut it is about remembering what you did and not doing the old junk you did before. This is not easy but MAN is it fun! Our instructors were awesome and they ranged from guys who had been training law enforcement for years to racers who were leaving the school to head to rally that weekend.

We had an amazing time and Nutting does a great job telling his half of the tale below. We cannot rant enough good stuff about the school. It is one of the coolest things we have ever done and we only got a taste! The multi-day program has to be absolutely beyond measure. Look into it! You only come this way once and places like Team O’Neil give you a rare chance to become a better driver in competition and normal situations. DOOO IT!

Here’s Nutting’s take on our experience at Team O’Neil Rally School –

I have never made claim that I am an excellent driver, but like the majority of the population I believe that my driving skills are “better than average” (Think about that for a minute…), so as I sat in front of a whiteboard at the Team O’Neil driving school and listened to one of their expert instructors lay out the plan for the next two hours, which included a traction circle, slaloms, and a Scandinavian Flick, my first thought was, “I’ve got this”. Yeah, if only that were true. As I learned throughout the next few humbling hours, driving a front wheel drive small-engined car on wet gravel and dirt is as similar to driving a rear wheel drive V8 on pavement as, well…fine, I really don’t have an analogy here, so let’s settle on “Nothing all at like one another” and move on with the point: Driving a FWD car in general is completely the opposite of what your finely-honed-through-donuts-in-abandoned-parking-lots-with-an-old-muscle-car instincts would expect.  Here’s a quick example to prove my point: – You’re in a traction circle and the car begins to understeer. Easy to correct with a bit of throttle input and perhaps some steering input, right? Wrong. With the front wheels asked to perform double duty of both steering and power output, understeer is the name of the game, and adding more throttle input will reduce the amount of traction the front tires have, creating yet more understeer. So, you left-foot brake, modulating the brake input to kick out the rear, effectively steering with your left foot. Oh, and you’re on mud, so any input you make is delayed. As the Team O’Neil instructors so kindly informed us, there are typically two types of drivers that they see: Stabbers and Lifters. Stabbers are those drivers with a left foot like a light-switch: On or Off. Perfect for a clutch, not so great for left-foot braking, where you really need a foot like a dimmer switch (Oh hey, part of Dave’s brain that forms analogies! Welcome back!). Meanwhile, Lifters are people that lift the throttle when the car oversteers past the desired point, a bad habit of those that drive RWD vehicles. Being a “special” kind of person, I was blessed with both Stabber and Lifter traits thanks to zero talent and my decade-plus of G-body ownership. While I didn’t put the car in the woods, there were a few close calls as I began to unlearn every bad habit I had developed over the years, which is the point of the class. Technically Dave did not put it in the woods, but he sure tried! As Tim O’Neil explained to us, he has participants start in a FWD vehicle BECAUSE it runs counter to what is intuitive to most drivers, forcing you to concentrate on what the car is doing and think about how to make it go where you want. While I’ll admit fighting this at first, at the end of the day I found myself thinking about where I wanted that little Fiesta to go and what input (Gas, brake, or steering) I needed to get it there. Sometimes I even succeeded. Oh, and I totally did a better Scandinavian Flick than Lohnes, which is all that really matters.