SPEED C o l i n Te r n u s ’ 2 4
And the back end stepped out. The back end of a car. The back end of my car. My car that was traveling eighty God-forsaken miles an hour around a turn. But not just any turn, the most dangerous turn on the entire track: the infamous Sonoma turn ten. My car that just got loose on the most dangerous turn on the entire track at eighty miles an hour. My car. With me in it. I am now half a second away from wrecking my car, decimating my confidence, and making myself the fool of the autosport community. But to understand how we got here, we have to go back. Way back. Back to my childhood, back to the days where wonder and magic and intrigue still filled the world. My love for automobiles was apparent in my childhood (my parents like to say that my first word was “car”), and I would spend hours upon hours racing little matchbox cars around on the couch, their little ungreased wheels making a cute little squeaking sound as they barreled through imaginary turns, their old bitter-tasting paint chipping away as they jostled for position. I can still smell their metallic scent today, a bitter but warm smell of days long past. They left tracks on the couch, little grooves where their tires disrupted the grain, creating little skid marks and in some cases mapping out boundaries for the tracks. Those matchbox cars likely have more miles on them than most cars on the road, their paperclip-like axles still holding strong to this day. I used to play with them till my knees were marked with the pattern of the carpet they rested on, a bumpy and red texture. Yet to get the full context we need to go even further back. Back to before I was born, to my father and his brother, and their amateur Spec Miata racing careers. Spec Miata is a fascinating racing division. A large sum of drivers cram themselves into these tiny automobiles, these tiny Mazdas, and compete with reckless abandon to gain that revered first place. This was the world that my father and his brother dove into. At this point, they had steady jobs and a disposable income, so they decided to buy into Spec Miata. It really wasn’t much of a purchase, with the most expensive part of the process being buying a hard top for the car (which initially came with a convertible soft top that was not suited for racing), and paying for a driving school in order to obtain the necessary licenses and knowledge for racing. The start of a Spec Miata race is something one has to observe in person. There are about thirty cars or so all running within feet of each other, their small engines making the most monstrous sound you’ve ever heard, and their tires squealing and 46 | TA B U L A R A S A