The J-Turn

- Season 1

(2013)

Jessi Lang heads to Washington state for her first foray into rally driving at Dirt Fish Rally School. There, Don Wooten teaches her the fundamentals of rally car control in the school's Subaru WRX STI, whose 4-cylinder, turbocharged engine produces 300+ horsepower. From the skid pad to the slalom and the boneyard, Lang tries her hand at every course and, by the end of the day, declares herself ready for The Wedge. Situated as a full rally stage, The Wedge offers real rally driving, and making one mistake can equate to wrapping your car around a tree. Find out what ...

Jessi Lang gets schooled on counter-terrorism driving tactics in the Executive Protection course at the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving. There, she learns how to properly ram blockades, take out other vehicles, avoid accidents, and escape life-threatening situations using a variety of driving maneuvers. From the Dead Man Driving drill, to lane-change reverse 180s, to high-speed backing through an autocross course, Jessi tries her hand at the tactical mobility strategies used by the world's most elite military, government, and police personnel and, at the ...

Jessi Lang finds out what it takes to be a rally co-driver. With the help of Scion Racing Rally driver Andrew Comrie-Picard and his co-driver Jeremy Wimpey, she learns the basics of recce, how to write pace-notes, and how and when to call them. As Jessi quickly learns, being a good co-driver means being many things at once-- a navigator, a rule-enforcer, a time-keeper, and a pace notes reader, to name a few, and is one of the most demanding roles a racer can play. To show Jessi the ropes, the team uses Scion's new xD rally car, which debuted earlier this year at the ...

Jessi Lang heads to Florida to race a Nissan 240SX on one of the world's most epic tracks: Daytona International Speedway. There, she meets with her team from "Little Flatout Racing" and begins preparing for the fourteen-hour Chump race. With the help of Kevin Smith from KSR Performance and Fabrication, their Nissan 240SX was specially modified to suit the team and included custom pedal extensions, special flooring to reduce heat, air ducts to cool the driver, and a custom fuel cell, to name just a few modifications. The team also added roll-bar enhancements for ...

Jessi Lang meets up with Motor Trend's testing team to bring you a firsthand look at the instrumented testing procedures that each new vehicle undergoes. Using the 2013 SRT Viper to demonstrate each aspect of the test, Jessi meets with Motor Trend's Testing Director, Kim Reynolds, to experience the vehicle dynamics through the Figure 8. Then, she meets with Scott Mortara for acceleration testing, where together they show that properly launching a car requires much more than simply stepping on the gas. See how the manual transmission, 640 horsepower Viper behaves when ...