Final adventures in the Miata
Before the Miata was sold to Danny and/or Shane, I took it out for a road trip with the express purpose of just driving the car around for shits and giggles. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be one of the last road trips I’d take with the Miata.
Some friends of mine were attending the Northeast Firestone Recess, a blues dancing retreat in the middle of the Pennsylvania forests. My friend Jeff and Katie had shared amazing stories about the event, and was insistent that I come dance and photograph the event. As one of the DJs, and the one responsible for creating the trippy light setups out in the middle of the forest and other cool locations for the event, he was sure that I would have a good time.
My roommate Kaushik was traveling there with some other dancers from Ann Arbor. I was unsure, having dropped into a bit of a dancing funk and having plenty of things that I needed to get done around the house, if I was going to go until the very last minute. So while other dancers departed for Pennsylvania on Friday, I went to work. I returned home to find my cell phone constantly receiving text messages from the likes of Jeff and Katie urging me to at least come to the Saturday evening dance.
Alright then. Why not? I packed the Miata with a single bag of clothes, my camera bag, and a sleeping bag. I took off towards the east, headed towards the middle of Pennsylvania.
After getting lost down the wrong gravel roads (not exactly the environment for a stiffly sprung, very slammed Miata), I finally managed to find the Recess. Wow, Jeff was not kidding. It was trippy as all fuck. My having arrived two days into the event, I was completely unprepared for how wild and bohemian the whole event was. I did a little bit of dancing, was dazzled by all the brightly colored lights, and took a lot of pictures that turned out quite badly. At the end of it all, I slept the night curled up inside the cabin of the Miata with my sleeping bag, which was immensely uncomfortable, but still beat sleeping outside in a tent in the cold.
Dancing done, I split early Sunday morning, driving to Bloomsberg, Pennsylvania for breakfast at a diner. From there, I took the backroads through Pennsylvania until I reached the western edge of the state, whereupon I took the car back onto the highway for fast transit back home.
It was on these rural back roads with the top down and the exhaust blaring that reminded me that, while I enjoyed the Miata as a competition car, I loved it a lot more as a road trip car and back country carver. But because the car sucked as an autocross car (through no fault of its own, mind you), and because of my desire to autocross in something else, the car had to go. If I had the space and the money, I’d be perfectly happy keeping the car around strictly as a nice daily driver.
Instead, it’s going to a new owner, who will hopefully give it the TLC it needs to make it a top-shelf STR autocross car.
Delivery of the Miata to its new owner
The second to last weekend of October was going to be the weekend where the Miata changed hands. That Friday evening, I packed the Miata with as many of the remaining spares as I could (the extra midpipe and resonator couldn’t fit and will have to be delivered some time next year to Shane, if he even wants the damn thing), and set off for Pennsylvania yet again.
I got to Hershey, Pennsylvania quite late. After finishing dinner at about 1am in the morning, I debated whether or not I was going to spend the money for a hotel room that I would only spend a couple of hours occupying. At first, I decided that the answer was no, so I went and found an empty parking lot and attempted to settle down for the night. After 15 minutes, I decided that I had changed my mind, and that I was willing to pay some small amount of money to avoid replicating the night I had after the Firestone Recess, so off I went in search of a hotel. I spent $120 to spend a mere five hours in a hotel room. I’m a fuckin’ baller here, sheesh.
I overslept a little bit, which meant rushing about when I got up to get back in the car, and back on the road to the autocross site. I had underestimated how long it would be for me to find the damn autocross site, as I took a wrong turn into the wrong parking lot, where the parking booth lady helpfully informed me that the parking lot that I was looking for was in fact right next to the one that I was about to enter, except there was no way to go from one lot to the other. My only recourse was to take a 10-minute fucking detour around the entire complex back to where I made the wrong turn, just to get into the autocross site. What the hell?
With the help of a printed pamphlet telling me how to get there (the mere fact that the parking booth lady had such things printed out is telling for how often something like this must happen to idiots like myself), I made it on site at the Susquehanna Region SCCA autocross just before registration closed. After scrambling to registration and throwing the car through tech without unpacking, I met up with Shane who took an immediate tour of the piece of junk that he had just bought.
We went around the car as I pointed out all of the little things that needed attention on the car. I fixed up quite a few things before I had brought the car over; the most important was the loose side sill on the passenger side of the car due to the disappearance of many of the side sill clips in the body, most of which I replaced with extras I had in my spares and reattached the sill.
Because I had arrived so late, I only had one chance to walk the course. This would show in the final results, as there were a couple of spots on the course where you had know where to look for the corner exit if you didn’t want to end up way behind on your inputs, and I obviously didn’t entirely remember all of the places where one needed to do that.
As it turned out, Shane had absolutely no problems. We were both running the very first heat of the day. After I had taped the paper numbers of the side of the car that pretty much all competitors had to run (seriously, paper numbers?), we rolled to the grid. I offered to drive first and give Shane an firsthand experience of how the car was treated for the first six years of its ownership. I then proceeded to cream the third cone on the course, dragging it all the way to the finish whereupon I removed it from the wheelwell in grid, tearing the just-replaced wheel well liner partially off the car. Ooops.
Shane jumped into the car, and proceeded to put down a good time out there on course. As we alternated drives, I realized that I was having a lot of fun, but relieved at the same time that it was going to be Shane figuring out how to tame the Miata, not me.
All the frustrations from Nationals came flooding back in the four runs I had in the car. Shane was able to distill exactly what was going on with the car. The car had plenty of power and grunt, which was good. However, the car had to be absolutely pointed straight if one wanted to get on the throttle, as the car would slide sideways if power was aggressively applied while the wheel was turned. Exacerbating the effect was the fact that rear end still wasn’t completely planted, skipping over rough areas of the course and necessitating deft touch when applying the gas. The front end was also all skipping over the place, creating the weird sensation in which one would be chasing the back end of the car one moment, and then the front end of the car as it failed to keep up with the inputs needed to correct the back.
That said, Shane is one hell of a driver. Despite running in the first heat of the day, on what were likely the coldest conditions of the day, Shane got faster and faster, until he put down a flyer of a run on his fourth and final run that ended up nabbing him top PAX for the day. He would have had the fastest time of the day, if it weren’t for a lone, pesky ESP Mustang.
Damn. And this is with a car that has, quite frankly, a pretty piss poor setup on it. If I coned away a 10th place trophy in STR at Nationals this year in this Miata, I can only imagine what Shane would have been able to do with this car if this was the car he drove at Nationals — maybe he’d be on the podium right next to Chris Lin in the other-not-the-car-for-STR Toyota MR2?
Either way, the car’s in good hands. Shane will figure out the setup, and drive the wheels off the car next year in 2016. And not a moment too soon, in my opinion, as next year may very well be the last year that the NC Miatas stand a chance at winning STR, as the NDs will be spending the better part of a year developing setups. Ultimately, I think the NDs will prove to be faster than everything else in STR, but I don’t think the NCs will be that much slower. I do think that a well-prepared NC2 or NC3 will be just fine in STR competition, especially once you put a good driver behind the wheel, and Shane may just be the man to do it.
I sure as hell never did the Miata any justice with my own driving, that’s for sure.
Autocross finished, a bunch of autocrossers split off from the site and headed towards Mike Snyder’s shop, SSC Tint and Graphics, for food, drinks, and general mayhem. Suffice to say, the party was well worth the trip from Michigan.
After a night of cooked meats, drinks, and awful karaoke, Shane and I woke up early in the morning to head back towards Baltimore. Conveniently for me, Shane lived just minutes away from the airport, so it was easy for him to drop me off on his way back home.
After I gathered my things and clambered out of the car outside the airport terminal, I’ll admit that it was weird watching Shane drive away in my car with his license plates on it. I know that it’s no longer my car, but for the longest time, that car was central to my life and represented a significant part of my identity. To watch it drive away without me just seemed… odd.