I had an odd experience on a recent Miata trip between Portland, Oregon and San Francisco, California.
Nothing went wrong.
No, let me explain. Since the early 1980s I've had open two-seat roadsters, mostly British and Italian, all well-used and some slightly abused before I found them. And part of the process of ownership of an old M.G. or Alfa Romeo was to go through it, solving all the previous-owner problems I could find and making the car not only a little better, but a little more "mine" than it was before I started the work.
The proof of the pudding, so the saying goes, is in the eating; for my M.G.s and Alfas, even though I regularly used them for the daily commute, the proof was always in some long drive. There's something deep in the psyche that a long drive calls to, a sense of seeing things and being places that take you outside your daily routine. And while while I've never made a road trip as long or as fraught with potential danger as editor Zurschmeide's recent completion of the Alcan 5000 Rally, a 1700-mile round trip in a 12-year-old sports car is more involved than a decision to stop for donuts on the way home from the library.
You'll be reading more about the reason for this trip in a future issue of FOREVER MX-5, but for our purposes, let it be said that the top went down at 9:30 AM in San Francisco, at the corner of Van Ness and Lombard (sadly, the straight part of Lombard, not the famously twisty downhill section), and only went up at dusk. Which probably contributed to the punch line of this story... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The Miata was...well, you all know what it was like. So far the work I've done to this '96 Brilliant Black NA has been limited to a nice new set of rims and tires, putting previous-owner hacks right (replaced the leaking radiator, fixed the broken clutch hydraulics), and doing a bit of what I used to call "pre-emptive maintenance" in the days of using the M.G.s or the Alfas for long-haul driving (in the Miata's case, replacing the timing belt and thermostat a few miles early, just to be safe). This worked, mostly; the only on-road failures I've ever had in seven years of making this trip regularly were with German cars, not British or Italian.
And yet with the other old cars I used to drive between Portland and San Francisco (some of which I still own), there was always the sense, in the back of my mind, that something I hadn't foreseen could break, seize up, wear out, or just plain fall off somewhere on the trip. And one night several years ago, near the Oregon-California border, I got a flicker of what the real consequences of such a failure might be: my headlights swept past a large, tan shape standing on all fours near the center median of the highway. I thought, "I really don't want to hit a deer," and I immediately I tucked the car to the right to give the animal some room. I eyed the creature carefully so I could avoid it if it made a panicked leap in some unexpected direction (all the while thinking of my old SCCA racing instructor's advice to aim for the spinning car, and wondering how it applied to hooved quadrupeds).
So I was shocked when the "deer" turned to face me, flicked its long tail, tucked its ears back and bared its fangs at me. It wasn't a deer: it was a puma, the largest American predatory cat.
And about a half-mile later I realized that if my fuel pump had failed or the injection belt snapped and I had to get out of the car and walk to the next town, I might have a lot more than sore feet to worry about.
But that was then, and this was now. As I pointed the Miata northwards towards home, thinking of the 12-year-old drivetrain and chassis with 115,000 miles on it, I wondered about the long, desolate stretches of the coast that awaited me. I was prepared, bringing my usual emergency kit with me: a few tools, waterproof/snowproof shoes, extra layers of jackets and my Thinsulate-lined leather gloves if we got stuck in the snow, plus a few liters of drinking water and an energy bar or two, in case I had to wait for emergency equipment. I didn't; the worst problem I had was that my windshield-washer nozzles are too plugged up to spray an effective pattern for getting rid of road grime kicked up by passing cars on the occasional damp spots on the highway.
And as I pulled into my own driveway about 10:30 that night, I realized that what defined this trip was that nothing went wrong with the car. Nothing. Not a hiccup; not a misfire; not a loose suspension bushing or starter motor connection or alternator diode failing at the edge of the Pacific. Oh, sure, the car was dirtier than it was when I hit the road in the City By The Bay, but after 770 miles, that was to be expected.
I, however, was sick as a dog. Turns out half the people at the conference that I attended in California called in with the death flu the following week. So I can't blame my body aches, sinus pain and unshakable cough on driving for seven hours with the top down. At the edge of the Pacific. In February.
But it WAS the first time in memory that I'd made one of these trips where the driver came home in worse shape than the car.
We just added a new video featuring Geoff Cochran as he drives his Spec Miata around the newly repaved Portland International Raceway. This was part of a demo the local Spec racers put on for the Mazda Portland Grand Prix press preview. 
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