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Dave Shively

Dave Shively's outdoors column appears Sundays in the Steamboat Pilot & Today. Contact him at 871-4253 or e-mail dshively@steamboatpilot.com.

Steamboat Springs — I couldn't get the thought of racing my vehicle out of my head as I pulled into Friday's Rally Colorado practice stage, my '01 Subaru humming with new transmission fluid after its 30,000-mile, manufacturer-recommended service.

The two camps already were pitted against one another. California-based RockStar Energy Drink Syms Racing support vehicles for the Rally America Championship tour's No. 1 and No. 4 racers, Andrew Pinker and Tanner Foust, faced Vermont-based, Subaru Rally Team USA pit for No. 2 and No. 3 - Travis Pastrana and Ken Block.

To the untrained eye, they're all driving the same Subaru WRX STIs. Having seen other Subarus once or twice along Lincoln Avenue, I had a question for Foust.

"What if you raced my Subaru instead of yours? How long would it last?"

"It wouldn't," Foust replied. "The first thing to go would be the tires. They would pop - you'd get a puncture pretty much right in the first couple of corners, and then the brakes would go next, if you didn't have any jumps. If you had jumps, then you'd have some kind of suspension failure."

Touche. I guess $200,000 of modifications makes some difference.

"Well, how about if I were to drive your car, Tanner? Do we even speak the language?"

"Right five minus short into left four minus over small crest, right four into left three don't cut into right three over ruts, long, tightens over crest 50," is a sample of the monotone cadence of directions Foust's co-driver, Chrissie Beavis, reads and has translated into his split-second decisions on the rapidly unfolding course.

Beavis was digesting code like "!R4 + > stay out rox," from the 15 pages of notes for an unseen, technical eight-mile stage of the 18-stage, 110-mile race that finishes today.

Beavis, 27, the only female currently competing on the Championship tour, was born for the task. Her father pioneered a California rally circuit, and her mother started racing in college in Scotland, so Beavis was flagging courses at age four, became a stage captain at 14 and was racing the day she hit 16.

As both a driver and a navigator, she knows the unique relationship between the two.

"That's the idea, that the driver gets to visualize right before he enters that line of road," Beavis said of the co-driver role. "But it seems like (trust) builds up."

Just how much trust does it take?

"You could be at night in the dark flying a jump where your headlights are straight in the air," Pastrana said, "and you're going 120 mph in the snow with a cliff on one side and trees on the other assuming that the road's still under you because that's what he said. Now, if you'd been down that road 10 to 20 times, you'd know you're fine. But with rally, you're like, 'I hope this is right.' If it looks like a hairpin left and he says it's wide-open right, we're wide-open right."

Based on that reply, I won't be thinking about race conditions for my own lay-driver wheels anytime soon.