Where We're Going, There ARE NO ROADS.

Okay, we didn't get a Delorean time machine and race in the future, but I think Doc Brown and Marty would have approved.  As most racing stories go, this one also starts out around 5am.  Today's tale starts at fellow SCR-SCCA racer's place downtown Columbia where his 2006 Ford Focus awaits.

It's dark at 5am when you leave and dark at 8pm when you get home.

We took a three and a half hour trip south into Georgia to meet up with the Middle Georgia Region of the SCCA at their second Rallycross event of the 2015 season.  You've seen us talk about autocross a lot, and this is very similar.  The course is laid out with orange cones and one driver at a time you try to get through it as quickly as possible.  The key difference here is it is off road, on unpaved surfaces.

Most of the course was damp but not overly soaked, which make it a little less dusty and dirty than I was expecting.

Controlling the car was a complete change from autocross with the surface constantly changing.

There was one awesome little puddle.

There was a variety of surfaces as you went through the course including hard-packed dry dirt that was slippery, and then puddles of mud, which turned out to be slippery, and then some slightly dryer mud, which changed it up and was slippery, and then finally some good old regular dirt that was, um, slippery.

Nice partly cloud day for driving.

Rallycross events are quickly growing in popularity with the SCCA around the country, but as it gets quite a bit more dirty and more abusive to cars, it's still not nearly as popular as autocross.  Today's field was less than 20 cars consisting mostly of Subarus with their awesome all wheel drive, a few Focuses, a Civic, a few Miatas, a Toyota pickup truck, and a Mazda 3.

Brian on Left, Philip on Right.  Thanks again for the co-drive!

Opting to split gas costs, Philip and I co-drove his Focus and it was an absolute blast! Without all the grip of a paved parking lot, the car was constantly being thrown from side to side, sliding about between the cones (normally) or right over top of them (quite frequently too).

Nice new orange accented wheels.

It's really hard to describe just how much fun rallycross is.  All I can say is that I highly recommend everyone go buy a $1000 used piece of junk car and go find a rallycross and throw it around in the dirt for a while.  It was way too much fun and if there were events closer than 3 hours away in any direction I would probably have to do this every month too.

The painters tape comes off revealing the Focus' new graphics.  

Classes are based on front, all, or rear wheel drive.  We were in Stock Front-wheel-drive class (SF).  We looked at the times at the end of the day but didn't care.  Everyone wins no matter how fast you go.