How to realize a dream by racing a rally car on a budget

I'm up to my shins in icy water. It's dark, my head weary. Every exhaled breath reminds me of a 1980s Jaguar with a blown head gasket. I'm so cold my fingers can barely grasp the "OK" board, signifying to other drivers that despite my 2009 Honda Fit being beached in a mud bank, I am, in fact, uninjured. As is my co-driver, James Guitar, a man with the greatest name in the world and an identical twin brother so identical that even they forget who's who.

"Just get back in the car," he yells.

I do as I'm told, with my tail tucked between my legs like a puppy being yelled at for peeing on his master's suede slippers. "Why am I here," I ponder, as a white Subaru WRX tears by into the night, turbo chirping in its entire splendor. I've wanted to compete in a rally since I was five years old, but at this precise moment, covered in this much mud, I want to run off into the forest and bury my head in a giant puddle of Scotch.

Back in March this all seemed like a good idea. Here I am, a former IndyCar driver, open wheel champion and sports car racer tackling a Rally America event. I’d be in Honda Racing’s front-wheel drive Fit, with power topping out at just 117 hp. What could possibly go wrong?

B-Spec is the lowest wrung of the performance ladder. The cars are basically off-the-lot, with the only changes being the addition of a roll cage, rally suspension, racing seats, some knobby gravel tires and stripping the car of its superfluous bits like the door trimmings and the radio. In the case of my Fit, given current B-Spec National champ James Robinson's appetite for winning, I'd also have a welded up differential.

You can buy a used Fit for around $10,000. Even those more inept than I with a wrench could morph it into a B-Spec rally car for around another eight grand. Then, throw down your entry fee – a thousand bucks for the regional Rally America class or roughly $2,000 if you want to enter the big boy national championship – and you find yourself on the same gravel roads, in the same race, as Ken Block and David Higgins. It's that simple. As far as racing goes, it's about as cost effective as it gets – where else can you spar with the rallying equivalent of Jeff Gordon for that little money?

Here's what you need to know about rallying: You compete in multiple timed stages on multiple days, with cars staggered every minute. In the case of the rally I was entering, the Lake Superior Performance Rally in Houghton, Mich., we would run sixteen stages over two days – ten on Friday, six on Saturday. Most of day one's route would take place in the dead of night, on stages up to 15 miles in length on routes we'd never set eyes on. How would we know where the road goes? Our co-driver, in my case Les Paul, reading from pre-written pace notes.

These notes would be recited like this: “Four left, tightens to three over crest, into five right don’t cut, 100.” The numbers one to six dictate the radius of the corner – one being the tightest, six being hold it flat and hang on. “Tightens” tells you that the corner will sharpen up, and “over crest” is, well, pretty self-explanatory. “Don’t cut” warns you that there may be a submerged hazard like a rock or tree stump on the inside of the bend. “100” then signifies the distance in yards to the next bend.

All this information is read up to a couple of corners in advance, so you're driving turns that have been called out much earlier, all the while listening to your co-driver on what to expect further up the road. It's not easy, and a slight mistake ensures you greet a reasonably sized oak tree.

Beyond the co-driver's nightmarish job of reading directions while not throwing up is his or her ability to add. Between stages, you are given a precise time in which to complete your drive to the next stage. You must arrive at the following checkpoint, sometimes over an hour away, at that exact minute. So, if you're given a 57-minute transit and you checked out at 6:37pm, you must arrive at check-in at 7:34pm. A minute late gets you a ten second penalty; a minute early a one minute penalty. Note to self: Don't speed. But don't dawdle.