I think it is a universal truth among car enthusiasts that we identify the epochs of our lives with the cars we owned at the time. That’s not to say that normal folks don’t do the same — after all, nearly everyone changes vehicles when an important life event or new life direction arrives — but for people whose free waking moments involves thinking about cars and doing things with cars, these inanimate hunks of metal become markers of the things we’ve done, the people we’ve done it with, and the emotions that we felt when doing those things. We imbue cars with stories, something few people do with something as important in our day-to-day lives as, for example, cell phones.
My 2021 Ford Mustang came into my life as everything was changing. I’ve always joked that I can always remember the year I met Lily as it’s the same year my car was built. I can’t say that I’ve had a tranquil relationship to this car: this was the car that was supposed to get me my first trophy at Solo Nationals, yet I basically quit autocross after a particularly disappointing Solo Nats in 2022 and moved on to time trials. I consider my autocross codriver, Brandon, to be basically a co-owner of the car at this point, as he’s driven the car more during competition than I have, and the car currently lives full-time in his garage.
Outside of a handful of drives a year, the Mustang sat in a garage ten minutes away from my apartment simply waiting for either me or Brandon to take it to an event. Many times over the past few years I thought that the correct answer punt the car I never drove out of my fleet and replace it with something else.
Then this year, everything fell into place and I took the Mustang out for a long race track road trip with the one I love.
What is Targa?
What exactly is Targa? You may be familiar with events like Targa Newfoundland, which are fast stage rallies on public roads, and the Sports Car Club of America’s (SCCA) version is decidedly not that.
You may be familiar with an event called the One Lap of America, wherein competitors travel around the country to different race tracks and compete in different disciplines, from fastest lap competitions around a race track, to drag racing, autocross, and wet and dry skip pads. The biggest selling point for this event is that it’s a test between man and machine: teams have to travel very long distances between race tracks, so the car not only needs to be fast on a race track but also comfortable for long transits and reliable enough to last a week without mishaps.
SCCA Targa is a lot like the One Lap of America in that you’re traveling around to different race tracks, but the intensity of the Type 2 fun is ratcheted way down with more focus on Type 1 fun. Instead of traveling across the country, you travel to different race tracks within a smaller region. At each race track, there are practice sessions and competition sessions, with enough seat time that two codrivers can have an equal crack at each race track without hurting their competitiveness as a team. There is an emphasis on hanging out after we’re done at a race track, with food stops, fun points of interest, and of course plenty of sipping beers and shooting the shit in the evenings at the hotel.
That’s not to say that the Type 2 fun has been completely eliminated. I was completely worn out at the end, and was amazed that some of my competitors had the energy to finish out their weekend with the CMP Time Trials on Saturday and Sunday. There is still a lot of transit driving, and even though there is slack time in the schedule, if you have to fix something on your car you’re still hustling to get the car ready for the next day.
Getting Lily on board
Last year, I skipped running the CMP Time Trials event as I decided that I’d rather be home for my first wedding anniversary instead.
Because the SCCA Targa segues into the CMP Time Trials, attending the Targa Carolinas would also run right up to our wedding anniversary. I wanted to be with Lily, so the natural follow-up was: could she join me on the Targa?
I pitched this idea to her well before registration for the Targa Carolinas opened up. She hesitantly agreed. The biggest stumbling block was that I’ve never run a Targa before, and there was precious little information online detailing exactly what to expect. For someone who really likes to plan ahead, the uncertainty was excruciating for her.
But we agreed to do it together at least once. Lily’s been a real trooper when it comes to indulging my motorsports escapades, from joining me at a frozen lake for ice runs to joining me at a very wintry time trials event at VIR. Was it any better that this year’s Targa trip pegged the other end of the thermometer? (Probably not.)
Targa preparations
Originally, I wanted to buy a car for the Targa. When left to my own devices, I naturally gravitate towards the silly and ridiculous. I asked my friends on Facebook to suggest cheap yet unexpected track car options, and they delivered in spades.
I eventually thought that the hot ticket would be to buy something like a Jaguar XJ8 — something big and powerful but also comfortable. And most importantly, automatic.
Lily didn’t drive stick shift. I tried teaching her one time in the Mustang and she got to the point where she could drive up and down the block, but since she never needed to drive stick, she didn’t have any motivation to keep at it. I had figured that she simply wasn’t ever going to be interested in driving manual transmission cars, so we didn’t go any further.
On Facebook, my friend Cindy suggested just taking the Mustang for the Targa. Cindy also took care of the one major hurdle preventing me from taking the Mustang. The Toledo Pro Solo was the same weekend as the Targa Carolinas, and the agreement that I had with Brandon was that our Mustang was an autocross car first, and an everything else car second. That meant he had first dibs on the car if he wanted to drive it for the Toledo Pro Solo. Cindy offered Brandon a codrive in her Mustang Dark Horse, freeing up my car for the Targa.
Preparations for the Targa began in earnest after the Mustang returned from the DC Pro Solo. Lily and I took the car out for a couple of times to practice driving stick. She got the basics down but still wasn’t entirely comfortable with stick shift in heavy traffic.
As for the car itself, I took the autocross shocks off the car and put the OEM Magneride shocks back on so I could legally run my square 19×11″ wheels. I mounted on those wheels a set of 305 width Bridgestone RZs, a tire that I thought could survive the round-trip drive down to North Carolina and back while still being quick on track. And since I had a square setup, I could rotate tires on the Targa, something I couldn’t do if I was stuck with the OEM staggered wheel setup.
To top it all off, I flushed the brake fluid and installed the most expensive set of brake pads I’ve ever bought in my entire life. I had a lengthy conversation with Sam at Stranoparts about brake pad options and decided that I was willing to pay for the stopping power and relative streetability of the Pagid brake pads that he ran on his Mustang Mach 1.
The night before we left, we packed everything we thought we’d need in the trunk of the car and behind the front seats. In addition to our luggage, I packed a jack, my travel tool kit, an air compressor, spare hubs, and extra fluids. Lily packed some chairs, a picnic blanket, a portable electric fan, and a bunch of books and snacks.
Starting in Charlotte
We headed to Charlotte a day early so we could explore the city on our own before the Targa started. We checked out downtown Charlotte, visiting the Discovery Place Science Museum and a nice little cafe. That evening, we stopped by Home Depot for some last minute supplies and ended the evening with a very nice Italian meal. It would be the last meal in a long while where vegetables featured prominently.
The Targa started on Wednesday morning at Charlotte Motor Speedway (CMS). I started the morning off by getting lost around CMS, somehow ending up underneath the front stretch grandstands, much to the amusement of the track workers I ran into. One of them took pity on me and hopped in his truck to lead me to the infield garages. On the way to the infield, we ran into another Targa team that was in the process of making the same navigational error I made; they turned around and joined our sad little caravan of shame to the track infield.
We pulled into a garage, unloaded the car, and checked into registration. At the drivers meeting, we were asked for our team name. We considered The Token Asians or The Diversity Hires as team names but went with Kung Fu Panda Express in honor of two of our favorite things.
In lieu of the Tracksprint competition that was supposed to take place first thing in the day, we were given extra practice time and something called “Touring Laps Plus.” Basically, we could do some higher speed pace laps around the track and passengers were allowed. I had Lily hop into the car and we took a couple laps of the Charlotte roval.
Cruising around the top of the banking at 65 mph was all the thrills Lily needed at the track. It’s one thing to see the banking of the track from the infield — driving it was something else. 24 degrees of banking is nothing to scoff at, and cruising around at highway speeds was enough for Lily.
Thanks to the extra practice session and a little bit of YouTube research from the night before, I got up to speed pretty quickly with the road course. I thought I struck a pretty good balance between speed and caution during the competition runs, putting down the second fastest single lap of the day with a 1:36 lap.
It was a pretty hot day, so Lily sought shade while I was out there on track. Thankfully, we had access to pretty much everywhere in the infield and she spent her time in the spectator booths behind pit lane. There were plenty of electric fans in those booths, and they helped take the edge off of the heat.
We finished our competition sessions a little bit after noon. Lily and I packed the Mustang and we headed off to our first transit checkpoint: a BBQ restaurant less than ten minutes away from the track.
Once we finished eating, we hit the road and headed towards the next track, NCCAR. I was tired, so I had Lily take over driving the first of several transits that we’d be doing on this trip.
Heating up at NCCAR
Thursday morning, Lily and I checked out of our hotel and headed to NCCAR.
The North Carolina Center for Automotive Research has a test track that was never intended for time trials or road racing. There are no permanent braking marker signs and basically no track curbing on most of the corners. That hasn’t stopped plenty of organizations from holding track days here, however.
I had never been to NCCAR before, and YouTube had very few decent lap videos of the track, so I didn’t know what to expect. Upon arrival, I knew that Lily was in for a pretty rough day: there were no buildings there save for a single, locked no-longer-temporary mobile office trailer, no restrooms other than a few porta potties, and no shade save for a thin line of trees atop a berm overlooking the paddock and pit area. After we unpacked the car, Lily set up shop underneath the trees with a picnic blanket.
The first competition event was a track sprint in the clockwise direction. My latent, decaying autocross skills led me to a finish that was uninspiring for the autocross regulars there and passably impressive for the non-autocrossers present.
Then came the time trials competition, which was run counter-clockwise around the the track. It took me a while to figure out my braking points and my apexes during the practice sessions. The track installed temporary braking marker signs for just the front straight and corner number signs at roughly the apex of each corner on the track; these and a couple slivers of track curbing were the only track reference points I used.
It got pretty darn hot as noon approached. I found myself rolling up the windows and turning the air conditioning on in order to get respite from the heat. During one particularly long stretch of down time where track workers had to clean up oil that had been dropped on half of the track, I joined Lily at the picnic blanket under the trees.
It was during this quiet period that I spotted something remarkable in the middle of the field.
Yes, it was a collection of the very first electric vehicles commercially sold or leased in the US in the late 90s! All of them were there save for the GM EV1. This was something that particularly excited me because the very first web site I built back in high school as part of a class assignment was a website discussing these very cars.
There were more electric cars sitting at the edge of the field.
Once the competition runs were over, I stopped by the main administrative building for the site next to the entrance to check out the fun cars that they had sitting outside there.
The post-track stop for the Targa was another BBQ joint along the way to North Wilkesboro. Lily and I decided to eat sooner rather than later and stopped by a Chick-Fil-A for lunch first before starting our transit. We arrived pretty late to the BBQ joint and had ourselves a light supper. There was another unofficial Targa stop at a local distillery, but Lily and I skipped that and went straight to the hotel.
Later on that evening, a whole bunch of Targa folks congregated outside the hotel front door with a bunch of folding chairs and beer and we shot the shit until one by one we each retired for the night.
Into the oven at North Wilkesboro Speedway
We rolled into North Wilkesboro Speedway bright and early Friday morning.
This track is what originally sold me on running the Targa Carolinas. While most of my friends were heavily indoctrinated by the early The Fast and The Furious movies, I was inspired by Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. (Lily and I recently watched Talladega Nights and, to be honest, it doesn’t really hold up as the masterpiece I remembered it being when I was a kid, haha.) When most of my friends were playing Gran Turismo 2, I was playing NASCAR Racing 2.
It was from playing the video game that I knew about North Wilkesboro Speedway. I was dismayed when the track was effectively abandoned and left for dead, and followed along with the track’s revival, starting basically from Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s campaign to scan the track for iRacing all the way to its reinstatement on the NASCAR schedules. And here was my chance to drive one of my favorite tracks in the video game! I couldn’t pass it up.
The only way into the track infield was through a gate on the back straightway. Once there were cars running the oval, we would be trapped inside the track until a break time during the middle of the day.
There were two competition events running at the same time. In the paved infield, an autocross course was set up. There were two-lap time trials sessions on the oval, with cars released two at a time for hot laps. All of the cars paddocked in a pit stall in pit lane, and competitors could choose when to run either the autocross or the oval laps whenever they chose.
Fortunately for Lily, the media center, a tiny little red brick building by the pits along the front straight, was open and — most importantly — it was air conditioned. After watching the action for a little while, she retreated to air conditioned comfort while the rest of us sweated buckets outside.
I did the bare minimum number of autocross runs to get a half decent time, which was something like five runs first thing in the morning. I then spent the rest of my time doing what I came here to do: drive on the oval.
The oval was a lot of fun and quite challenging. It was a constant battle between trying not to brake too much on corner entry and trying to get on the throttle earlier on corner exit. With a thundering V8 under the hood of my car, I could squint my eyes and make believe I was piloting a stock car around the race track.
During my fastest time trials session, the front splitter of the car separated and started dragging along the pavement. So sadly my time on the oval was cut a little bit short, though to be fair I did end up turning something like 18 laps on track, so I still got plenty of seat time.
I spent a good deal of time taping up the front splitter with some tape and then took the car on another two lap time trials session to make sure that the splitter held together.
Competition over, we were allowed to drive our cars onto the oval and take pictures. I took a picture at the start/finish line, but this picture in Turn 4 is my favorite.
There was a poker run rally right after North Wilkesboro that would take us towards Carolina Motorsports Park, but Lily and I decided to treat ourselves to some Mexican food in town first. Fellow competitor Tim joined us for lunch and desert. It was not a quick meal, so in the end, all three of us missed the completing the poker run in the afternoon. Food was worth it, though.
Lily and I still tried to hit up at least the first few stops on the poker rally, even though we were too late to grab cards from the now departed checkpoint crews. We stopped by this fantastic overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The next stop was the Mast General Store, a store that has been nearly in continuous business since its opening in 1883 and is on the US National Register of Historic Places. Lily and I took our time browsing through the entire store, leaving with some popcorn, stickers, and a single glass bottle of absurdly sugary soda pop.
By this time, it was getting late, and we decided to abandon the rally route and make a beeline straight for the race track. We stopped by a Home Depot outside our hotel to buy more tape for reinforcing the front splitter and a grocery store to buy plates and utensils for the “potluck” party at Carolina Motorsports Park (CMP).
At the track, we feasted on smash burgers and sausages cooked up by fellow Targa competitor Brian on a portable gas griddle and talked shop with the small group of competitors and SCCA workers that joined us.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire at Carolina Motorsports Park
Saturday was hot. Making things worse was the location of the race track, which sits on the edge of a geographic land “bowl” that means heat tends to settle into a dome and simply cooks everything.
Tim, having driven his car to CMP the night before so he could rightfully claim that his Supra made all of the track transits, arrived in the morning with his air conditioned enclosed trailer. We paddocked next to him so that we could partake in his luxurious setup as the temperatures rose during the day.
It honestly wasn’t that bad first thing in the morning. This is a track that I’ve driven several times before, so it didn’t take long for me to figure out what made the Mustang happy here. But once practice was over, the temperatures started rising, and my best lap came in the first morning competition session.
By the time the second morning competition session rolled around, it was difficult to maintain consistent pace across three consecutive laps. This didn’t bode well for the folks there that weekend for the CMP Time Trials event.
There was an awards ceremony during lunch for the Targa participants where we all got our Certificates of (In)Completion. Team Kung Fu Panda Express took home a Certificate of Completion with the honorific of “Most Appropriate Cultural Appropriation”.
The post-Targa road trip
Lily and I packed the Mustang and continued on to our next destination: Matt and Mandy’s place outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. I was great to see my friends and to see how their three kids have grown in the two years since I’d seen them.
It was still super hot outside in Raleigh, so we had a lazy weekend just hanging out around the house, leaving only once to go out to eat in the evening when the heat died down.
On Monday morning, we said our goodbyes and headed back home. Without stopping, this would be an 11-hour drive. Lily and I swapped driving duties back and forth during the drive and did our best to limit our stops to fuel, but we did afford ourselves one longer stop for dinner.
I don’t know how many couples celebrate their wedding anniversary with a day of driving and a dinner stop at Taco Bell. I’ll simply say that I’m a super lucky guy to have found someone — who isn’t a car person at all! — who was willing to go on this adventure with me.
Settling into this new chapter
I was chatting it up with Brian, fellow (perhaps now former) S2 competitor and arch nemesis in a blue Shelby GT350, on Saturday morning at CMP when I mentioned that I was pretty happy with how the Mustang fared during the Targa. He laughed and said that this was perhaps the first time ever where “I should sell this Mustang” never entered the conversation.
And he’s right. I’ve long acknowledged before that there wasn’t anything wrong with the car itself, but failing to live up to my own expectations were what soured me on the car. It’s taken me about two years of therapy and a lot of self-reflection to become okay with the fact that I’m not the hardcore driving competitor I was before and to accept that things are different now.
As an autocross car, the Mustang has always been a square peg in a round hole for me. That’s not to say that competing in that car at National events hasn’t been fun — the competition whenever I’ve run the car has always been deep and very challenging — but the Mustang was never as entertaining to drive as my Street Touring prepared Mazda Miata and the cost of consumables was much higher.
I was much happier lapping the Mustang around a race track. The car felt much more in its element here, and winding out the motor to redline in fourth and fifth gear was very intoxicating.
The Targa was the exclamation point on a slow burn from being an autocrosser to being a track day bro. The Mustang was perfect for the Targa. It felt like for the first time that I’d jived with the car in the same way that I once did with my Miata.
There’s also the small fact that Lily and this car are inextricably linked in my mind. Our first date was right before Solo Nationals, and the Mustang was delivered right after Solo Nationals. The first road trip we took as a couple was in the Mustang, heading up to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Mustang would see sparing use afterwards as primarily an autocross and track car. It was the Targa, five years into our relationship and five years into our ownership of the car, that we took another road trip together in the Mustang, and wow, what a trip it was.
It’s almost poetic as a set of bookends from where we first started out as a couple to where we are now as husband and wife.
And so one era of my life began as another era of my life ends. The Mustang, a symbol of a new era sticks around and earns its keep, while the Miata, a symbol of my previous life, goes away. The departure of the Miata is a story in of itself…
