I've driven a lot of things in my day. Trucks loaded past the springs, four-wheelers sideways on gravel, one memorable night in a '72 F-100 with brakes I didn't fully trust. But I've never sat shotgun in a proper Open-Class rally car, and after reading Road & Track's piece on riding along with Conner Martell's Subaru, I'm about ready to drive however many hours it takes to fix that.

The story is exactly what it sounds like. A journalist strapped into the co-driver's seat of a Subaru built for the American Rally Association's top class, and the car turns a forest stage into something between a carnival ride and a controlled wreck. Gravel roads I'd take at 25 mph in my pickup, this thing eats at triple that, sideways, over crests, with trees close enough to count the bark.

And that's the part that gets me. Rally isn't a track with runoff and tire walls. It's real roads, closed off, usually gravel, lined with the kind of hardwoods that don't move when you hit them. The co-driver reads pace notes fast enough to make your head spin: "six right over crest, tightens, don't cut." The driver commits anyway. Tell you what, that takes a brand of brave I'm not sure I've got at 45.

It also explains why Subaru keeps winning in American rallying. The formula hasn't changed much in decades: turbocharged boxer engine, all-wheel drive, suspension travel for days. A WRX you see at the grocery store is a watered-down cousin of these things, but the family resemblance is the whole marketing plan, and I'd say it's working. Folks buy the street car because the race car keeps proving the hardware on Sunday, or Saturday night in the woods, more like.

Road & Track describes the ride as violent in a way track cars aren't. No smooth tarmac, no clean apexes. Just constant impacts, the car jumping and landing and getting wrangled back straight before the next corner arrives too soon. Martell makes it look casual, which is the wildest part, because nothing about that seat is casual.

I've got my fall Ozarks run coming up, and I keep thinking about how much of that country is exactly this kind of road. Gravel, washboards, blind crests, a creek crossing or two. I'll be taking it at pickup speed with a thermos, not race speed with a roll cage. But somewhere between Steelville and Eminence there's a stretch where, just for a second, you can feel what those rally boys are chasing.

If a ride-along program ever opens up at an ARA round within a tank of gas of Missouri, I'm signing up before I tell my wife what it costs. Some things you just have to feel in your spine.