10 • September 28, 2011 • Snoqualmie Valley Record
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VALLEY PROFILE Changing the game Staff Photo
Instructors and staff at DirtFish Rally School strive to give their customers a life-changing experience while learning the fundamentals of rally driving.
Ride of your life Marking first anniversary, DirtFish Rally School emphasizes life-changing lessons
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Photo by Sean McDonough
September 2011
here’s dirty jobs, and then there’s what Bria Lund does. Gray September clouds roll overhead as Lund details the last of the cars in a lineup of DirtFish Rally School’s fleet of sports sedans, making sure to scour the floors of caked soil. “Usually my legs are covered in mud,” she says. “I get some stares.” Instructors get the cars so dirty, “Sometimes, I feel like they do it on purpose,” Lund said. Still, she knows what she signed up for—the name, after all, is “DirtFish.” It’s a messy task, but “I quite enjoy it,” Lund said. “I know it’s behind the scenes,
but it’s a well-needed job, so I’m happy to do it.” The result of all this hard work is only temporary. Lund’s midday scrubdown, done during rally students’ lunch break, will be undone in a flurry of mud and gravel a few minutes from now. It’s an extra touch, part of DirtFish’s emphasis on the customer experience. By finding spic-and-span Subarus that students can dirty all over again, “They know that we care for them,” Lund said.
Customer service That attention to duty and detail is what DirtFish President Ross Bentley calls “the wow factor.” DirtFish will mark its first year in business in October, a big and busy one. In its first year in operation, DirtFish has seen more than 2,000 customers get behind the wheels of its Subaru sports
sedans. Vehicles have racked upwards of 6,000 miles in that year, without ever leaving Snoqualmie. “The growth has been faster than any of us predicted,” Bentley said. Rally car racing is a sport that has been big in Europe for years, but is just going mainstream in the United States. Differentiated from road or circuit racing, in which drivers race wheel to wheel at high speeds on closed tracks, rally takes place one car at a time, typically on gravel or dirt such as forestry roads. In circuit racing, the driver sees one turn hundreds of times. In rally, the driver sees a corner only once, then tears off to a new one. Rally and the attendant sport of rallycross, or rally racing on a closed circuit, is growing in America thanks to the popularity of things like the X Games and video games. SEE DIRTFISH, 22
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