This year has been rough. I’ve gone from getting married and buying a house, to navigating an ugly divorce and no longer having a shop all in the span of several months. It’s been a wild year, with few highs and many lows. Surely, going on a road trip across the country in a drift car wouldn’t be the worst idea in a summer full of turmoil, right?
My drift car, Blooper, is a 2004 Nissan 350Z with a penchant for being a menace. He has one job: slide. He does that job very well and gets a participation ribbon for everything else. After sleeping all winter, he was moved from my old spacious shop to the new house’s cramped little garage. Evidently, this downgrade made Blooper upset, so he shucked his muffler off at full speed on the first drift run of the year. If that wasn’t enough, he started shutting off on the highway from the local drift track to the point of almost launching over the side of an off-ramp. A death rattle had started, and the track’s performance shop diagnosed engine failure in June.
Engine failure is never convenient, but his timing was especially poor because I’d just signed up to attend Rainbow Road with Out Motorsports in late September at Summit Point Motorsports Park in West Virginia. We needed to drive 1500 miles down from North Dakota, run the course, and drive all the way back in one piece. Car season is precious up here in the frozen north, so the most efficient option was to order a replacement VQ35DE engine to be swapped by the performance shop. A few weeks later, my blue bonehead was drifting happily again.
Our first road trip together in 2022 was a disaster, due to mechanical failure, weather, and logistics, so I wanted to be prepared for this trip. I had his window motor fixed. His wipers were upgraded. His AC was recharged. The ejected muffler…was left in the corner of the garage (weight reduction, right?). I even picked up beautiful, brand-new wheels to take with us. He was detailed and stickered up appropriately to represent his lesbian driver. My buddies Breann and Matt volunteered their Kia Sportage to be the support vehicle to haul parts, wheels, and supplies. Hotels were booked. We were set and rolled out of town on a Wednesday morning to make the long trek across the country.
Someone is going to ask, “Why not trailer Blooper instead?” My trucklet is a Subaru Brat, which is for carrying women, not drift cars, and a U-Haul with a trailer would’ve cost a fortune in rental fees and fuel. Blooper chugs premium and is already a royal pain to maneuver in a gas station or tight parking lot because of the welded diff making the rear wheels skip, but that’s doable since most of the trip was on open highway.
Blooper might be a drift car with a bias to slide, but he’s somewhat comfortable cruising down the highway. He’ll sit at 80mph without caring. Past that speed, the slammed coilovers and trombone exhaust drone will rattle your teeth loose. We went from Fargo, ND area to Madison, WI on the first day without issues. Passing through Chicago on the way to Cleveland brought disaster.
Some people remove the AC from their track cars to save weight. I’ve kept it in Blooper because he turns into an Easy Bake Butch Oven in full sun while idling in the staging lanes. Evidently there was a slow pressure leak, because we started cooking in the middle of construction traffic while passing through Chicago. Cold air turned cool, then warm, then hot. Between dealing with his heavy clutch and baking in agonizingly slow traffic next to huge trucks, I was drenched in sweat and otherwise miserable. I called for an emergency stop once we made it through the city and stumbled out of the vehicle on the edge of heat stroke.
Many Gatorades and ice packs later, we restocked on cold beverages and plotted a route to avoid construction and traffic to Cleveland. The sun started to fall, and the rest of the drive was much cooler. With sapphic pop blasting on his broken speakers, we laid down smooth miles and cruised to the hotel. From there, the last stint from Cleveland to the Summit Point area was half as long as the previous days, and it included beautiful mountain driving on the turnpikes. Blooper was more manageable in the cooler temperatures and loved carving through curves. He even got to play and make noise in a hillside tunnel!
Blooper made some fans on the road, too. At gas stations, people would strike up conversations to ask if he was a race car because of the giant ‘69’ on the doors. Pulling up next to minivans of waving kids on the highway was fun. Breann even shot some awesome roller footage from the Kia when the road was empty. In Cleveland, he met a friend’s Jeep and a fellow Out Motorsports member’s beloved BMW (hi Kit!).
After many days of repairs and three days of driving, Blooper rolled into the Out Motorsports barbecue party on a warm Friday night and unceremoniously plopped himself in the yard next to a group of fellow queer drivers. The first major hurdle of the journey was finished and all of us were ready to unwind for the night before the autocross started the next morning.
Oh yeah – this wasn’t for a drift event. I took my temperamental, muffler-throwing, engine-killing, tire-burning drift car across the country for an autocross event. The only time Blooper had seen cones, he devoured them. He can’t turn without sliding. None of this was going to be pretty. But being able to attend an LGBT-focused motorsport event was going to be the highlight of my sour summer, and neither distance nor mechanical failure was going to stop me from meeting a ton of Out Motorsports community members in-person. Hopefully, it won’t stop you either. Take the trip. Go to the event. If this hot mess can make it to the starting line from across the country, anyone can do it.
Stay tuned for the trackside chaos, in which Blooper lives up to his reputation as a menace.