Your Mom Races Rally: Motherhood, Motorsports and the Revolution of Fun
by Kelly Conroy
“This isn’t what I expected. It’s not even what I wanted honestly. The idea of a car changing my life still makes my eyes roll deeply into the back of my skull. But that’s what happened. That’s what is still happening.”
This is Kelly Conroy’s first book. In it she relates her own very personal story of seeking a better balance in life in order to better cope with the stresses of daily living. Toward that end, in her late 30s she learned of and sought out an unusual activity in which to participate: stage rallying on dirt. Doubly unusual in that, as she writes, ”I was not a motorsports person; I’m not a car person. Ryan [ZumMallen], founder of Carrara [the publisher of this book] is the only car person I know. He’s the only reason I know anything about cars … because I love the way he writes about cars.”
For those who are unsure or unclear, “Stage rally in the US is one of the very few opportunities for novices and professionals to race the same roads.” Specifically, Conroy learned of and was attracted to events such as those sanctioned by the California Rallycross Association and the Northwest Rally Association where each stage is run against the clock not other competitors. But first she had to learn to drive a manual transmission before she could even begin to learn how to drive a rally car!
Approximately the first half of her book is Conroy setting the stage (yes, there’s an intentional play on words there), telling her own personal backstory as she tries to explain the various stresses in her own daily existence. On the surface, her challenges are similar to those many face—balancing work, motherhood, caring for home and young children as she works from home, maintaining the relationship between herself and her husband, etc. But as she tells various details of her story, she truly did face some challenges outside and above those of others.
Interestingly, her education in biological sciences included anthropological studies of humankind’s origins of interdependency such as those discussed at length by Elliot Aronson in his book The Social Animal (written and published over a decade prior to the author of this book’s 1985 birth). As Conroy relates it there are aspects of her own existence that are practically textbook affirmations of things expressed by Aronson.
As Conroy writes of her book, those first chapters are “pretty heavy. It’s the stuff that came before. That was the really hard stuff.” She’s obviously a woman of character and strengths for she persevered leading ultimately to her learning of stage rallying and then learning how to become a participant, a rally driver. And it’s sharing those experiences that fill the last half of her book.
Unlike the usual motorsports-oriented book, this one tells of the author’s personal experiences including integrating her young son, Alder, and daughter, Elly, and her husband, Russ, into the rally world too finding thus providing fun for the entire family because, as she writes in the closing paragraph, ”There is nothing in this life that is just mine. There is no me without we.” Elsewhere she expresses “I do have new motorsports goals. Because motorsports is new in my world still, I want to learn how to drift!”
Copyright 2026 Helen V Hutchings (speedreaders.info)
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