Riding With Travis Pastrana in a Subaru Rally Car Is Chaos at Its Most Graceful

The Drive

18 hours ago

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I am not a thrill seeker, and nobody would ever describe me as one. I drive slower than anyone I know who cares about cars. On the other end of the spectrum is Travis Pastrana. He's the foremost authority on risk-taking, and he's here, at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed's Forest Rally grounds, conducting stage runs with lucky passengers in the Subaru WRX ARA25 rally car. This is the same machine that competes in the American Rally Championship's Open Class, and it's one of the fastest vehicles that will tackle the 2.1-mile course over the weekend.
Goodwood is and isn't a serious competition. Outwardly, it's an all-ages celebration of cars, motorsport, and the cultures that surround them. But the hillclimb has a leaderboard, as does the rally stage. The second that those times are posted on a massive screen for the public to see, it gets serious, even for the factory-backed teams that theoretically have nothing to prove.
'They're 'demo' runs,' Rhianon Gelsomino, Travis' co-driver, said to a small group of journalists on Sunday afternoon. 'But they go on the board and then post them on YouTube. With competitive people, the first thing they do is go and find their time.' Rhianon Gelsomino explains how she records pace notes. Adam Ismail
Rhianon said that the WRX's times on Friday were only about a second behind those of the top-flight World Rally Championship cars from Toyota, Hyundai, and Ford that were also contesting the stage this weekend. That's a pretty striking similarity, considering how different the two classes are, and that they'd never get the chance to compete with each other under normal circumstances.
Modern WRC cars weigh 2,600 pounds and make 365 horsepower and 330 lb-ft of torque; they're also quite short, which means they're better suited to chase the optimal line on a narrow stage. On the flip side, ARA Open Class cars produce about 45 fewer horsepower, but 50 lb-ft more torque. That would seem to give the latter an upper hand on a Goodwood course that Travis described to me as 'tight and slow,' but the WRX's extra 300 pounds makes a huge difference, as does its extra length. A Toyota GR Yaris WRC car is 17 inches shorter than a production WRX, and the ARA25—with its massive fenders and aggressive aero—is even longer than that. While Travis was driving this Subaru WRX ARA25 Open-class car for Goodwood, he normally drives the ARA25L in the actual championship. The 'L' stands for 'Limited,' as it's more similar to a production WRX. Adam Ismail
I'm no rally coach, but I'd guess Travis had to be leaving a little something on the table during our go. There's no other way to explain deltas of 10 seconds or more between his slowest and fastest runs. That's the penalty of my presence, quantified. But god , it didn't feel like he was letting up. Sitting in the car together, before the countdown hit zero, he was telling me how slippery certain sections of the stage were, comparing the surface to ice. 'You'd honestly do better with winter tires,' he said on a sticky and surprisingly sunny July afternoon in England.
The next roughly two and a half minutes were both the shortest and longest of my life. Short because I struggle to recall specific sensations, and I selfishly wanted to go for another ride; long because I felt like we were on the ragged edge through the whole damn thing. You're almost never pointing straight, for starters, and the acceleration is astonishing. The phrase 'no margin of error' is used a lot in motorsport, but let's be honest—in most circuit disciplines, it refers to the margin between triumph and defeat. In rally, it means that too, but it also means the difference between staying on a path barely wide enough to fit a sedan, or a wreck. You can watch Travis' fastest run of the weekend at the 45-minute mark in the video below.
I've probably traveled twice as fast on asphalt, but it feels much quicker when you could almost reach your arm out and graze a hay bale with your hands. There was a portion about halfway through where we briefly blasted out of the forest to pull a donut around a barrel, and it just emphasized that calculated, precise flamboyance of rally driving that makes it so special.
Just before our journey came to an end, Travis gave me a friendly warning that he liked to lean on the banking on the outside of the final chicane to help position the car. What followed were a pair of elbows-out shunts to the right side, then the left. He apologized that they were a little more forceful than he planned, which I thought was unnecessarily kind. Honestly, I expected more bumps like it, but sharing a car with him was a very graceful chaos.
Subaru hosted me on this trip to Goodwood, and I'm grateful to them for the ride. But even if I'd never met Travis, I'd still have loved my time at the Festival—and especially the rally portion. Traveling to races, meets, and concours events, you might see one or two of these cars. But nowhere else will you be able to walk right up to a Delta, Celica, Impreza, 037, RS200, 205, Evo, Escort Cosworth, Quattro, A110, or Metro 6R4, all in the same lot, and then see them compete. (That's to say nothing of Toyota, Hyundai, and Ford's modern WRC machines there, too.) This year marked the 30th anniversary of Colin McRae's 1995 WRC drivers' title, and some of his cars were present. Adam Ismail
The ease of access at the rally area, which is just past the far end of the hill climb, also seems generally better than elsewhere at the Festival, where the crowds are considerably larger and the cars themselves are cordoned off. The paddock is pretty much open for fans to browse and, if you grew up worshipping these machines like I did, it's just heaven. I'd say that Goodwood is worth a visit for any car or motorsport fan, but the Forest Rally Stage is a must visit if you love rally—whether you seek thrills yourself, or consider it best left to the professionals.
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