Features

Part 1: Driving in the Desert - or With his Head in the Clouds
It's all in a day's work for rally star Lauchlin O'Sullivan
By David Gee

They say you never forget your first time.

Do you remember your first time in a full-blown, professionally-prepared rally car? Yeah, neither do I, but Lauchlin O’Sullivan does. And why wouldn’t he? After all, the “stage” was a balls-to-the-wall, 12-mile, 156-turn, 4,721-foot climb up gravelly 7% grades while contending with weather and ever-changing light. Oh, and the penalty for making a mistake might not just be wrapping your car around a tree at high speed, it might be wrapping your car around a tree at high speed at the end of a 2,000-foot plunge.

“In one of the Pikes Peak practice runs I took a bumper off trying too hard and that kind of calmed me down a bit,” said O’Sullivan, who will pilot a Vermont Sports Car-prepared Subaru WRX Group N rally car at this weekend’s Desert Storm Rally in and around Blythe, California. “Pikes Peak mountain is a strange place to try to learn how to drive a fast car, one with differentials and everything that comes with a full-fledged rally car.”

For one thing, nearly the entire rally took place above the horsepower-sucking altitude of 10,000 feet. So the power that’s at lower levels just isn’t there. Pikes Peak demands its own pace.

“That mountain seems to beat you back pretty hard if you try to run too hard,” stated the San Francisco-based O’Sullivan. “If you’re going for every second Pikes Peak will eat you up and spit you out, or throw you down the side. So I was just trying to do 80% and have fun in the car and be a good teammate to Rhys Millen who owned the car. We finished third in the rally class, which was amazing, and had a really good time.”

If you would like to see and experience for yourself what a “good time” on Pikes Peak looks and feels like, spend a fast five minutes and check out the award-winning documentary called Climb Dance.

It chronicles the 1988 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb when Ari Vatanen won the whole event and set a record-breaking time with his Peugeot 405 T16. The car was equipped with cameras in the cockpit, on the front of the car, underneath it and above it.

And what a car it was. The Peugeot 405 T16 had 600bhp, huge airfoils, four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering and was constructed with the knowledge gained from the Paris-Dakar and Group B rallies.

But now back to Laughlin, who went on to become a full-fledged factory driver, with a full-on Open Class car. He kept jumping up in horsepower, until it peaked with the Prodrive-built Subaru WRX STi owned by Rally America creator Doug Havir.

O’Sullivan says that’s when the “particulars” of preparing the car got smaller and smaller. “You’re changing things by millimeters instead of centimeters.”

So how do you pilot a rally car with gobs of power?

“You can’t just throw the car all over the place. All of a sudden, you’re thinking more road racing-type lines, but always in a late apex attitude. That way if something does come up you can get yourself out of it. You always want more power. It never scared me.”

It may seem kind of counterintuitive, and it’s kind of different than it is on the street, but rally drivers like O’Sullivan always say more horsepower can get them out of more trouble than it gets them in to.

“Absolutely. Without a doubt horsepower has gotten me out of some trouble. In a lower end car, especially with 2-wheel drive, you are at the whim of so many things, such as road surface. You’re often times merely along for the ride, even in the left seat! With more power and 4-wheel drive you have a multitude of ways of driving yourself out of trouble. I was in some off-road buggies down in Mexico, and they were so slow. It made me realize again how much torque I have in my rally car. That’s the extreme feeling of what I am trying to tell you about. The muscle and torque gives you so many more options.”

So how often do those kinds of mistakes come up in a typical rally event?

“Probably about once or twice if you’re pushing it,” says O’Sullivan, whose first rally event was as an unlicensed, 14-year-old co-driver for his father Michael. “If you’re lucky you have the willpower in your mind that somehow you have a way out and your body reacts and then the car responds as an extension of you. It’s great with a properly set up car. You can actually ‘safely’ wrap yourself around a tree, instead of just hitting it uncontrollably, and that is an amazing feeling. I have actually wrapped a car around a tree that might of destroyed us, and not felt too uncomfortable about it, just knowing I could do it. That’s a strange feeling.”

A strange feeling indeed, and certainly not something most of us can relate to. And that brings me to the next question. How in the world do you train yourself to stay on the gas, when you overcook a corner, or make a mistake that would have 99 and 9/10% of us lifting?.

“I think even worse than just lifting off the gas is the scarier instinct to mash on the brakes. They’re kind of one in the same. Luckily I have a history with my dad. Before I got my driver’s license he would let me take the wheel of his rally cars in the back woods and just get a feel for it. The more you teach your mind the right way of doing it, the more instinctual it becomes for when you need it. That’s why I recommend driving classes for teen drivers. We get them out on the skid pad so they can find out what if feels like to counter steer, and what the car does when you lift, the weight transition and so forth. Most drivers go through their whole lives not feeling that.”

Okay, now we’re getting Lauchlin warmed up. Let’s ask him about what he thinks of the typical road driver he encounters in the Bay Area or elsewhere.

“I don’t speed on the highways or freeways. I’m not a speed junkie when I’m not racing. I think most professional drivers are always looking out for the worst possible thing to happen on the roads. A lot of drivers sit with their seat all the way back, trying to look cool, but to see anything they have to pull themselves up by the steering wheel. All of a sudden their weight is on the steering wheel pulling back and there is no way they can maneuver and they have no vision. So it’s just the simplest of things – proper seat placement and then just being aware when you drive. Luckily I got rid of those bad instincts because of rallying and racing in my younger years.”

Read Part 2 of Driving in the Desert – or With his Head in the Clouds >>