Free Jason Priestley by Jason Priestley

into our jobs. Kevin Caffrey was best boy electric on 90210 . I walked into his office one day and saw a bunch of racing posters on the walls. “Dude, I’ve always wanted to race rally cars,” I told him. “Is there a rally series here in Southern California?”
    â€œI’m sure there is, let me find out.” Kevin looked into it and found out that there were all kinds of races in the area, sponsored by the California Rally Series.
    Rally races are car races on rough dirt roads driven by teams of two. Each car leaves the starting point at one-or two-minute intervals. The various “stages” of the course are connected with “transits” on public roads, where the cars must obey the posted speed limits and rules of the road. The courses go hundreds of miles in two-day rallies. The team with the best combined times from every competition stage wins. It’s a very popular sport worldwide; I had been following it since I was a kid.
    I finally had enough money to buy a rally car and start competing. Kevin and I started looking for the right car. Eventually, we settled on a Honda CRX that we bought for about three thousand bucks and tinkered with endlessly. We “campaigned” that car for a year. That’s not a political term; in performance rallying, “campaign” simply means to race. Performance rally races were held on weekends, day and night, on the distant outskirts of Los Angeles, way down dirt roads you’d never seen before and had no idea were even out there. The roads were so remote and primitive they were maintained by the Forest Service, and barreling through those ridges late at night could most definitely be dangerous.
    Kevin and I would haul our car to the track in a trailer, unload it, prepare it, jump in, and race as fast as we could. I drove while he navigated. Our Honda was cheap and slow, but we raced the crap out of that car all over California for an entire year. Ridgecrest, Glen Helen, Gorman, Santa Rosa, the high desert. This was grassroots, mom-and-pop racing. Rally racing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!
    One weekend I was going out of town to promote the show and told KC he should take a turn as driver. “You drive it this weekend, buddy,” I urged him. I left, and of course he immediately drove our car off a cliff and wadded it up. We had to literally cut the car in half and scrap the wrecked half. We searched all over California for another wrecked CRX so we could basically weld the two halves together and have a car again.
    The two of us were just having fun together, competing in these races for a good time. It was very much a hobby, and not an extremely hazardous one. Our car just didn’t go fast enough; it maxed out at approximately 135 miles per hour and had a full roll cage, race seats, and seven-point harnesses. Of course, we also wore full-on racing suits and helmets. Somehow, somewhere along the way we started winning our class, and eventually even won some rallies. Next thing we knew, Toyota called and said, “How would you like to race for us next year? We’ll set you up with a Celica GT4. We’ll build it out for you, and you go campaign that next year.”
    â€œYeah, sure. Okay!” We both jumped on this offer. KC and I had become very close; we worked long hours on the show together during the week and raced together most weekends. None of my cast mates were particularly interested in racing, and I was careful not to talk much about it at work. That was the whole point, to me, of racing: to take me away. Driving leaves you no room to worry about anything else. It concentrates mind and body in a way that nothing else I had ever tried did. Racing was all-consuming; it required every bit of my focus and attention. There was no room to think about the show when I was in a race.
    I loved being on 90210, but the hours were long and the pressure on me was intense. Just like everybody else