Driven to speed

Nikki Dahlman shouted "floor it now," and the driver stomped on the pedal, sending the '91 Nissan Pulsar GTI-R lunging across the parking lot toward a carousel of orange pylons.

"Brake, hard!" she barked as the boxy two-door hatchback neared the pylons. "Keep it tight, keep it tight," she said as he began the 360-degree turn around the pylons. The tires squealed as forces of gravity and speed threw the reporter in the back seat against the side of the car.

A swerving slalom run, a short straightaway, a few more hard turns and the driver completed the course in the parking lot at Midway Stadium in St. Paul. A flashing sign at the finish line indicated he'd done it in just over 35 seconds. He was panting from the exertion. The reporter was trying not to vomit. Dahlman, who already had been through the course more than a dozen times instructing other students, was unaffected. She calmly explained how the driver might have trimmed off a second or two.

"Brake harder. When you brake, you should feel the seat belt jamming your chest. Then stay tighter and a little slower on the carousel; you probably lost a second there going wide. But 35 seconds is good," she said, patting his shoulder.

During the workweek, Dahlman, 28, is a teacher at the extended campus of Richfield Middle School. Her husband, Matt Dahlman, also 28, does 360-degree interior photographs for Twin Cities real estate websites. On summer weekends, the two of them take on alter egos as race car drivers.

Along with several hundred other Minnesotans and about 70,000 drivers nationwide, they speed through temporary courses set up in parking lots in a sport called autocross. Autocross is an organized competition in which drivers race against the clock on courses that emphasize driving skills over speed. (Expert drivers were reaching 50 miles per hour at most on the serpentine course at Midway Stadium.) Cars are divided into more than 20 classes. People show up at races or training events with everything from highly modified sports cars to beat-up Volkswagen Golfs.

Nikki Dahlman is one of the instructors in the Minnesota Autosports Club, primary organizer of Twin Cities autocross events. She and Matt share a race car at events, and are among the top competitors in their class.

Nikki is one of the few women involved in the sport. "When I first started here, I was the only one," she said. "These days I have a little company."

Rule No. 1: Slow down

On this particular spring Saturday, she was instructing newcomers at a novice school organized by the club. About 50 students showed up with their cars to spend the day testing their skills and their cars' limits. Dahlman and several other instructors from the club rode along, telling them when to brake, when to accelerate and how to get through turns with a minimum loss of speed.

The students ranged from an elderly couple from Fargo in their Toyota Prius to Doug Sisk of Apple Valley, who drove his immaculate Shelby Cobra replica to the event. (A Cobra is a sleek convertible with an enormous American V-8 under the hood.)

"This is my first time in autocross and I have already learned a lot," said Sisk, a high school teacher. "No. 1: Slow down. You have to control your speed. I lost time spinning sideways."

Steve Garnjobst, vice president of the Minnesota Autosports Club, said that in some form or another, the organization has been around since the early 1970s. It has about 200 members, but club events are open to nonmembers, he said. Competitions take place in larger venues than the Midway parking lot and the courses are about twice as long. A typical venue is the parking lot at Valleyfair in Shakopee.

Dahlman first got interested in cars watching her grandfather work on his vintage Chryslers and DeSotos at his home shop. She took auto shop classes in high school, and when she graduated from college in 2002, one of her gifts was a two-day course at the Mid-Ohio School in Lexington, Ohio, one of the nation's top performance driving schools.

"I really loved Mid-Ohio," Dahlman said. "When I came back, I started getting into autocross here as a way to keep learning and driving faster."

Competitive couple

Nikki and Matt met in 1999 as students at the University of Minnesota, where both were ardent hockey fans (so much so that they were married on the ice at Mariucci Arena in 2005).

Initially, Matt attended autocross events, took photos, helped change tires, but didn't drive. A couple of years later, with Nikki's encouragement, Matt participated in a novice school and then started competing.

Because they share a car, they race in the same class. They both frequently have taken first place in their class, Stock D, which is the most popular among Minnesota's autocross drivers, said Garnjobst. In this class, the only allowable alterations to a car are to its tires and shocks. Garnjobst said that a couple of years ago, the Dahlmans were at the top of the class, winning consistently. Matt Dahlman was class champion in 2006. "But the competition has gotten a lot tougher in the last two years."

The Dahlmans also challenge each other, and Nikki is always quick to remind Matt that she was his first autocross instructor.

"We're really competitive," Nikki said. "And because we use the same car, our times are usually very close."

Depending on how much drivers invest in their cars, the sport is fairly affordable. The typical cost of attending a novice school or entering an event is between $20 and $50. Because the autocross courses are usually fairly short -- the one at Midway was less than a mile long -- drivers don't use much gas. Other than the car itself, the biggest expense is tires: Hard braking and squealing through turns take a toll on rubber. The Dahlmans have one car that they drive only for autocross events and they spend about $800 for its racing tires.

"We go through one set of tires each year, running nine events," Nikki Dahlman said. "We probably take 12 runs per day, at about one minute per run. So that's two hours of driving total to go through the tires."

"That's why we can only afford one hobby," Matt Dahlman said.

Chris Welsch • 612-673-7113