For five days a week, Dillon Van Way lives life, just like most University students.
The architecture freshman rides his bike around campus, goes to classes and does his homework. When the weekend comes, however, he doesn’t go out to Tigerland with his friends or to a concert — he travels across the country and races rally cars in the Rally America National Championship.
Rally car racing is a sport in which drivers race cars on roads of gravel, dirt and snow. The Rally America National Championship is a six-stage event in which the top drivers in the country participate.
At 17, Van Way became the youngest person ever to win the Rally America National Championship — a record he still holds.
The championship was no beginners luck, though. Van Way has been racing for a long time and even has a family history in the sport.
“My dad raced motorcycles,” Van Way said. “I started when I was 6 years old.”
Van Way, a Lafayette native, was homeschooled throughout his youth to have time to practice and compete in motocross races.
He has been racing on a competitive national level since he was 8 years old and experienced success with the sport. In 2008, he rode in the Navy Moto X World Championships, which was his first taste of competition against the best in the sport.
Once he turned 16, Van Way switched his racing focus to rally car racing. Van Way still races motorcycles to stay trained and prepared for rally races.
“It wasn’t really the plan,” he said. “I was definitely going to pick up the rally racing as a hobby, but I tried it and it was a lot of fun, and I did pretty well at it.”
Pretty well might be an understatement. After winning the Rally America National Championship
 as a 17-year-old, Van Way returned the next year for a second-place finish despite many difficulties, including a crash in which his car rolled.
“It’s not like a common thing or anything,” Van Way said of rolling his car. “I’ve done one a year. Hopefully that’s over with.”
Van Way didn’t plan on racing in the Two-Wheel Drive class, which is sort of minor league to the more elite Open class, after this year. He planned the jump to the Open class, but Ford Racing offered him a sponsorship if he spent 2011 racing in the Two-Wheel Drive class.
“It’s cool to have Ford Racing out scouting you and now sponsoring me,” he said.
Despite staying in Two-Wheel Drive, Van Way is excited and says he plans on coming back hungrier than last year to win a title.
“We’ve made a few changes, and now we’re on Ford Racing,” he said. “We’re going to come back ready to win.”
Even though Van Way is dominant in the sport, he doesn’t fit the rally car racer prototype. He said most of the guys he races against are older, usually in their 20s.
“They’ve got you beat in experience, so of course they mess with you,” he said. “But it’s fun. Everyone pays attention to you when you race.”
If Van Way is fazed by his relative youth, it doesn’t show. To go along with his first-place finish in 2009 and second-place finish in 2010, he is ranked No. 8 overall in the Championship standings, which includes racers from other classes. One of the racers above him on the list is X-Games BMX legend Dave Mirra, who is No. 2.
The first of six stages in the 2011 Rally America National Championship got underway Jan. 28-29 in snowy Atlanta, Mich. — a terrain he admitted he doesn’t get to train for often.
wDespite the conditions, Van Way broke in his new 2011 Ford Focus with a first-place finish.
“It’s awesome,” he said. “It really gives good confidence — not just for me, but for the whole team.”
In the next six months, Van Way will travel across the country to compete in the next five stages of the Championship. He will go to Missouri, Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Maine in hopes of capturing another first-place finish.
Until then, Van Way is back to riding his bike to class and doing his homework — two activities not quite as exciting as traveling across the country to whip a 2011 Focus around tight bends at high speeds.
Van Way keeps it in perspective, though.
“I’ve dedicated a lot to racing, but I’m still in school,” he said. “I’ll do the racing thing as long as I can, but I definitely want to have something that’s a little more reasonable to fall back on so that when sponsors don’t help me, I can help myself.”
 
Contact Albert Burford at [email protected]