The world was a very different place in 2017. Nitrocross didn't exist, the word COVID hadn't been invented yet, X was still called Twitter, and not every creature with a pulse had a podcast…
Oh, and Mitchell De Jong was a racing driver.
It's been a long time since the Californian was strapped into a race car, but after last weekend in Richmond, you'd think he'd never been away.
“This weekend has been kind of a dream come true,” he said afterwards. “After being out of the seat for so long, I really had no expectations or any clue how I would go or if I still remember how to do it.
“It was a week of constantly evolving goals, and what was just getting comfortable in the car turned into, ‘oh, we have some pace, and maybe we can go for some good results’.”
The good results came. A comfortable win on the first day, followed by a second place behind two-time NEXT champion Tommi Hallman on Sunday. Results you’d expect after an off-season of meticulous preparation for a seasoned competitor. But De Jong didn’t have any of that, getting the call from Bak40 Motorsports just two days before the paddock assembled in Virginia.
“I didn't have much time to prepare for this, so it was just a ‘see what happens’ kind of thing,” he conceded. “We kind of heard some rumors already in the days before, but really, it happened on Tuesday night.
“It was such a busy, busy day, and really stressful, to be honest, because there was a slight chance it was like, ‘should we do this? Is this really a good move?’ That's kind of a risk. I had a bit of a name before, and if I go and do bad, this also could hurt me. So I'm really happy that we took that leap of faith and had all worked out in the end.”
Before graduating to supercars – the old top class of rallycross racing featuring 600 horsepower turbocharged engines – in his most recent full season, De Jong was a champion in the NEXT EVO class’ predecessor, the Olsbergs MSE Super Car Lites. He took six wins from eight (and taking second in those other two races) en route to the 2014 Global Rallycross Lites title.
The new car isn’t just a replacement for the old one, but an evolution of it, albeit with much more power. Nevertheless, De Jong says it “handles fairly similar to what I remember”.
“There's so much more power, and also knowing how to manage that power, how to manage the systems as well, along with push-to-pass and all these little things,” he explained. “On the first day, I totally forgot about push-to-pass. It was just driving the car and getting used to it. But it's a lot of fun. Everyone loves a bit of horsepower, right? The antilag is so cool, you know, instantly at your foot. So, yeah, it's pretty neat.
“It’s challenging in a different way. The big thing in the past with the supercar was that it was very easy to overdrive and lose time that way, even though you could be a lot more aggressive and use the power to get you out of situations. It's a little bit the same with the NEXT EVO. It's a little bit less momentum, but more point and shoot with all that power, knowing how to use it in the right places. I think that's kind of the game.”
De Jong’s not been sitting around doing nothing during his absence in the last seven years, though. These days De Jong is one of the world’s top sim racers – and that experience has come in rather handy on his return.
“For sure, the sim racing that I've done over the last few years is so important, even though it wasn't really specific for rallycross,” he said. “It was doing a lot of road stuff and oval stuff, and all the different types. Still, you can pull little bits from that, and at the end of the day, it's still competing and trying to get the most out of yourselves on different tracks and combinations.
“And it's much the same with rallycross, where it's also not static. The tracks and the way you drive them are different at every event. So just trying to pull on all those little things.”
He now sits atop of the NEXT EVO standings with those first two rounds in the books, but with his cameo appearance in Richmond coming at the last minute, will he be back for the rest of the year?
“I hope so,” he said. “It's, it definitely has opened some doors, I would say. Nothing is really set, but I think it's a nice push to try to get something together for the rest of it. So I hope to be back.”