Me and the miata

They say you never forget your first love...kiss...first time ha-... yeah you get the idea. I certainly never forgot my first fast car. I was 15 and it was a '96 Mazda miata. Silver racing stripes, blue/green paint, turbo kit, 250 to the wheels. It belonged to an older retired friend of mine who decided to take me out for a little ride. 10 mind blowing minutes later he pulled into a parking lot and asked if I wanted to take it back. 10 even more mind blowing minutes later I had driven my first RWD car, first turbo car, and fallen in love. That car probably got me interested in cars and imports more than any other factor.

When I was 17 my old friend was selling the car. I didn't have the money to buy it but my girlfriend did and she picked it up to replace her stock 1.6L miata. She daily drove it for a couple of years and did nothing more than put new tires on it.

When I was 19 she traded her father for a trailblazer so that she had something that could haul more than a passenger and a backpack at the same time.

When I was 21, her father mentioned that he was thinking about getting rid of the miata to focus on his corvette. 10 minutes later I finally owned the car I had been dreaming about for 6 years.

Amazingly the miata was still in pretty much the same form it had been in when I drove it. Same paint, same turbo kit, same engine, about 50-60k more miles though. The reupholstered leather seats were a lot more aged and the engine was down on power quite a bit thanks to well aged rings and a lot of abuse. It still had its factory suspension, a set of late-model miata rims, and a hard dog roll bar. I bought it to use as a weekend fun car however that never happened thanks to a couple factors. First off my girlfriend was daily driving a Ford F250 which drank gas and was a pain to park. I loaned the miata to her for a couple months to drive instead. Several months later we were getting close to completing our RB25 conversion on the 240SX we shared as a track car when we decided that we each wanted a car for ourselves. Since I already had the miata and she had more money into the RB25 car she bought me out of it and I took the money to upgrade the miata. You might think that I would have been dissapointed in losing my weekend car but I really didn't mind. For one I realized quickly that at 6'2" it took some determination to drive the miata for long periods of time. I also realized that there was no way the miata was ever going to be an elegant weekend cruiser. Hyperactive, fun to drive, jellybean styled go-kart, but never elegant. With that in mind I decided that going full-race was the way to enjoy it to the max of its potential.