It took some finesse to lift my right leg over the door X-brace before lowering myself into the Recaro race seats, which felt like climbing into an exotic and the General Lee at the same time. After being strapped down into the four-point harness I was ready to rock and roll.

My first lesson was learning how to steer the car with the throttle and brake by transferring the car's weight balance. I was one of the first on the course and rolled out at low speeds with the dog-box transmission and the three locking differentials making lots of clunking and banging noises typical of these purpose-built cars.

The instructor had me drive in a large circle around the cones -- basically a skidpad test. We wanted to drive as fast as possible with the steering wheel only turned a small amount. After I had the car at a good pace he told me to lift off the gas pedal and let physics take control. Weight transferred forward to the inside tire, reducing understeer and causing the car to and nearly hit the center cones.

On the slalom, the main takeaway was to look where you want to go, not where you don't want to end up. Human nature leads us toward what we are looking at-much like a horse without blinders. We were told to watch the instructor standing at the end of the slalom and use our peripheral vision to swerve in and out of the cones. The instructor would randomly raise a cone to signal we should skip to the next cone, teaching us to watch for hazards ahead. After we each had six runs at the slalom the DirtFish crew set up two short courses.

Next up: [try to] apply the lessons learned from the skidpad and slalom to the short courses. This proved to be much harder in application than theory. The more laps I completed the better I got, but could I keep up with a professional rally driver in one day? Not a chance.

Speaking of professional rally drivers, Subaru Rally Team USA was also inside the oval at Fontana using the road course to practice for this weekend's Rally Car Racing and RallyCross for the X Games. Travis Pastrana (who later injured himself at the X Games during the Moto X event), David Mirra, and Dave Higgins spent the day sorting out their cars for the coming X Games driving events. Before lunch I got to ride-along with David Higgins in the same car he stormed to the top of Mount Washington, Vermont, in late June, not only beating Pastrana's time from last year but shattering the 13-year standing course record.

Watching a professional rally driver in action -- from inside the car -- is a surreal experience. The man was literally dancing with the car. His left and right feet were jumping back and forth among the pedals, hands smoothly steering the wheel from side-to-side -- all while grabbing the sequential manual transmission's shift lever and the handbrake in perfect unison.

Then it was time to hit the second small course, which proved to be more difficult. By the last lap I had finally figured it out but it was time to tackle the longer course. The DirtFish team switched up the cones to connect the two smaller courses and we were ready for more seat time with the ex-rally cars.