What It Feels Like to Crash a Rally Car

I’ve had more crashes than birthdays. My family always prioritized fun, flogging whatever vehicles we had. At two years old, I started on a homemade go-kart with a five-horsepower engine. The next day, I rolled it. Dad slapped a roll cage on it the following morning. By three, I’d crashed a skid steer. At nine, I borrowed mom’s car for a joyride and ran over our mailbox. I rolled a dozen off-road vehicles before I officially got my driver’s license.

But my crash at the 2005 Colorado Cog Rally, that was different. That was the crash that taught me the difference between calculated risk and pure stupidity.

I was driving a 2005 Subaru WRX STI, my co-driver Christian Edstrom beside me with his championship-level precision. We’d been partners since my first rally in 2003, and he’d kept me on such a tight leash that I was actually learning. I was still a rookie, still crashing. After our first year of carnage, funded entirely by me personally, Subaru basically said, “We think you’re awesome, and we want to sponsor you, but we don’t have the budget for the amount of crashes you had last year. We’d rather you finish tenth than crash the car.”

I listened. That morning in Colorado, after the first day of racing, I was third in the standings, 15 seconds off first place and five seconds off second. The Subaru reps gave me the go ahead: “We’re taking the restrictions off. Go for the win.”

Four and a half miles into the first stage, I rolled seven and three-quarters times.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about rally driving: You live and die by the stage notes. These are what your co-driver calls out to tell you what’s coming—slowing crest left five minus into right four plus, for the corner of my shunt—and I know now you trust those words more than your own eyes. But cresting that hill at 120 miles per hour, I didn’t think it looked like that much of a turn.

I was wrong.

The second I hit the top of that crest, I saw the corner. A hard chicane that hadn’t looked like much from below. It was exactly what Christian’s notes said. There was no time to change anything. I saw the inside bank and made the split-second decision to try and straight-line it as best I could.

Christian never looked up. He knew based on what I said, which was, “Oh fuck.”

“If you hold your breath, I hold on,” he’d told me early in our partnership. “If you say ‘shit,’ I know it’ll be okay. But if you yell, ‘Oh fuck,’ I don’t bother looking. I just grab my belts and hold on for the ride.”

We clipped the inside—just a mound of dirt on the corner—and immediately started rolling. Violent doesn’t begin to describe it. I watched Christian let go of his pace notes, crossing his hands over his chest in the universal crash brace position. We both saw those notes fly across the cabin, hit my side, bounce back to his, then fly out my now-shattered window entirely.

Travis Pastrana and his co-driver, Christian Edstrom, posing with their car.

When I saw the notebook go out, I noticed my hand was out the window, getting pulled by centrifugal force. It was too strong. We rolled twice with my hand outside before I managed to pull it back in.

Fifth roll: Boom. A hard hit followed by a moment of nothingness. I thought it was over so I looked at Christian and shouted, “Are you alive?” But we were still in the air, still crashing. Then we hit and rolled another one and a half times. The world went quiet.

The first thing that goes through your mind during a crash that prolonged isn’t fear—it’s responsibility. A co-driver had died at a rally not long before, and safety standards, while good, weren’t what they are now. As we spun through the air, all I could think was: This is my fault. Christian had done his job perfectly. I was the one who overrode the notes based on what I saw instead of what he’d said. That guilt is why I kept asking if he was okay.

We were both uninjured, just dizzied from the spins. Once I realized that, I shouted, “Holy shit. That was a helluva ride. Wahoo!” That’s odd to most people, and the Subaru guys definitely gave me flack for that being my knee-jerk response to destroying their car. But it was my first major car crash, and I was so happy the safety equipment was everything I had hoped for, that Christian was okay. Going from thinking you’re going to die to only feeling dizzy—that’s a huge win.

In a video of the crash, there’s a guy in a vest you see scurrying out of the way. That’s a photographer who’d been shooting from what he thought was a safe distance, and yet a tire with suspension still attached landed where he was standing. He got four photos of us flipping before he ran. I heard he never attended another rally.

From that point, we crashed less. The amount of seat time, work, and effort that went into making sure I was driving the notes correctly turned it into the learning experience it should have been from the beginning.

The car was totaled, obviously. The roll cage was destroyed but did its job. [Norwegian rally driver] Petter Solberg had signed the roof, “To Travis, flat out,” and they were able to cut that piece out. I still have it.

This crash has influenced Hollywood, interestingly enough. The stunt team behind [Ryan Gosling’s] The Fall Guy wanted to set the world record for rollovers—as part of the production, not the film’s plot—so they pulled up the very video of me and said, “Okay, we gotta roll it eight times.” The first take was only seven and a quarter so they redid the stunt. The funniest part? The video isn’t titled correctly. Some rally drivers have rolled, like, twenty-plus times.

These days, I race with Rhianon Gelsomino, who joined as my co-driver during the pandemic and brought world rally championship pedigree to our operation. The homework is insane, but Rhi’s precision has elevated our entire program. We recently set stage records at Goodwood Festival of Speed, competing against cars I grew up idolizing. Since Rhi’s been right seating, there’ve been fifteen wins, one crash. The math has definitely improved.