The greatest thing about sacrifice is giving in to the addiction.
All that hard work to keep yourself away obliterated in one careless moment. But in that moment, nothing else matters.
Brenten Kelly had been breathing rallying – working at DirtFish, attending countless rounds of the American Rally Association National Championship as a reporter. But he hadn’t taken a bite, not since 2017.
He’d missed it, of course he had. It took taking on 2026’s Oregon Trail Rally in a Ford Fiesta R5 to realize just how much he had.
“I missed it immensely,” admits DirtFish’s managing director. “I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I got in.
Kelly hadn't traversed the famous Boyd jump in 11 years prior to launching the Fiesta R5 over it last week
“I told everyone this leading up to the rally, but last year someone came up to me, who I’d been interviewing for years, and they’re like: ‘Hey, do you think you’ll ever rally?’
“And I was like to myself: ‘Oh, I’ve been out of this way too long. That was a wake-up call that I’m just a dude with a mic – and I love being that guy. But I wanted to be a rally driver as well.”
Brenten may not have rallied for the best part of a decade, but he’s a rally winner in his own right and a podium finisher at National level. But if you stay out of the game long enough, the next generation becomes unaware.
Oregon Trail was all about getting back into it, but most of all having fun. Partnered by co-driver Stefan Trajkov in a Steven Redd Racing Fiesta, that’s exactly what he achieved.
But as ever with rallying, the story’s not that simple.
“We got stuck behind a horse trailer on the way to the first stage going like 45 in a 55 for like 10 minutes,” Brenten laughs.
“As you’re passing [the first stage] Maryhill, there’s no passing lane. It’s a double yellow for like eight miles So we’re heading there, and Stefan’s like: ‘We’re gonna have like two minutes when we get there…’ He still had to do pressures and I still had to do cameras.
“So I get out and I start messing with the cameras. He’s doing pressures. I can’t get the camera to mount. I turn on one camera, it freezes. I turn on the second camera, it freezes, and like everything is Murphy’s Law, where whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
Oregon Trail Rally's mixed-surface itinerary made for a tough start to the comeback
It’s far from the best way to prepare for your first rally stage in nine years, but Brenten made the start-line and got through the four Tarmac stages which started the rally – a relief, considering it’s not a surface he favors.
Once onto the gravel, he can relax into the event. But there’s a new problem.
“I did a test at the [DirtFish Rally] school and it felt great in the car,” Brenten explains. “I did it all on completely bald tires because I wanted to save money, you know, like why go out on new tires?
“But once we got to the gravel stages, I went out and I was like: ‘The car’s not rotating at all!” It wasn’t working.
“With the bald tires, you could turn in and it would rotate and you’d stay on throttle and keep rotating and you’d do massive counter-steers and stay in the power. But with the good tires, it was like a little counter-steer and the car would just correct and you would be straight again.
“So the bald tire test really threw me off.”
Once that issue was understood, Brenten could get acclimatized with the machine between his finger tips – a car he says needed grabbed by the scruff of its neck to make work. That took time to adapt to.
“I expected it,” Brenten says, “but I wasn’t ready for that. And even by the end of the rally, I still only feel like I was getting like three to five corners or sections where I was on it.
“At no point did I ever feel like I had a stage that was 100% put together.”
There's nothing like seat time to get in the groove; his stage times fell as he went further into the rally
Although the mantra for the weekend was fun over competition, the temptation to benchmark himself against eventual rally winner Javier Olivares was too great to ignore. A match-fit driver in a younger, Rally2-spec Fiesta was always going to be faster but Brenten’s confidence grew and he started banging in top-three stage times.
And he was fastest of all on one split, which he was rightly proud of.
Brenten would eventually finish the event fourth overall and second in class; an encouraging result considering all the factors he had to learn.
And as for that objective of having fun, do you really need us to confirm that for you?
“Everybody that was involved was very cool and made it so fun,” Brenten smiles.
“The team were great and really cared about what we were doing – it wasn’t like we just rented the car and off we went. Stefan was also awesome to have – he co-drives with Green APU and Alastair Scully so it was great to have someone who knows how these cars need to be driven pushing me on.
Having an experienced co-driver like Stefan Trajkov alongside him helped with reacclimatization
“No matter what happens next, I can say I went and drove an R5 car at Oregon Trail Rally after being out of the car for almost, like you said, a decade. It was so fun.”
Mission very much accomplished. But mow that Brenten is a rally addict again, he surely won’t be leaving it another nine years until he’s back out?
“I got a quote for the next event yesterday already,” he grinned. “There’s many people trying to convince me to keep momentum and keep going.
“Obviously, as everyone knows in the sport, it’s not cheap. If rally was free, everyone would do it nonstop. I don’t have an event picked out, but I would like to do another before the year is over.”
Entering a rally is fundamentally a selfish exercise as it’s done to satisfy the driver and co-driver. But the experience did provide Brenten with some valuable lessons for his media endeavors.
“That aspect of being locked into competition, I really forgot,” he admits. “It was a great wake-up call for covering the events and what I’m asking the drivers, both in terms of questions and the fact I’m pulling their attention away from the race.
“It really changed my mindset with some of the things I’m doing media-wise.
“It was also awesome to have nine DirtFish employees competing,” he adds.
“Looking back on the early days of DirtFish, probably 50% of the field – and that might be an underestimate – are alumni of the school. The growth of the sport over here is amazing to see.
“It’s great to know that DirtFish has been such an influence on that and continues to be such an influence on that in every aspect.
“There’s so many media people and volunteers that have been out to the school. There’s so many people that haven’t been to the school that just want to wear the DirtFish gear because it’s a rally brand now. It’s so cool to see that.
“It’s exciting, both from a media perspective and now hopefully for me as a driver at times again.
