What happens when you put a bunch of car nuts in some cool cars, hand them a road map and credit card, and wave goodbye? You get, the 3,600-mile Trek 2 Texas.
It began as an interesting premise for the staff of Sport Compact Car, Import Tuner and Turbo-a reliability test, if you will, for the aftermarket products that get bolted on our long-term project cars. The Trek 2 Texas proved to be one of the best long distance road trips imaginable-an adventure that took us through some very cool little towns and visits with some of today's major tuners and aftermarket parts companies. In five days , we went through, what seems like, gallons of Red Bull and lots of other healthy crap like chips, sunflower seeds and beef jerky.
With stops in Phoenix, Tucson, Alamogordo, Roswell, Midland, Ft. Worth and Houston, the trip was a whirlwind event. Our stops along the way took us to MTX, Ultra Performance, Jacobs Electronics, Enkei Wheels, and then onto the World Import Challenge.
We succeeded in meeting hundreds of new faces, and gave away a ton of freebies in the process, thanks to Enkei Wheels, Eibach Springs, Nissan North America, Mitsubishi Motor Sales, Mazda North America, Modern Image, Wings West, Bergenholtz Racing, Golden Apple, Clutchmasters, Energy Suspension, AEBS, A'pexi, Konig Wheels, Associated Electrics, Meguiars and AEM. In all, we had a 13-car caravan into Houston, led by our Mitsubishi Montero and Nissan Xterra support vehicle.
Those on hand to greet the convoy, got up an close and personal look at SCC's Project Celica GT-S, Project Mitsubishi Eclipse GS, Project Mazda MP3, Turbo's Project Lexus IS300, MotoRex's Skyline R-32, Nissan's Project Maxima SE Turbo, Vortech's supercharged Integra GSR and a turbo Festiva with a GTX engine swap from CWS Tuning in Canada. Other rides that caught up with the Trek 2 Texas in Ft. Worth included a custom 300ZX and Nissan Silvia from Enkei Wheels, and an all-new Protg 5 sport wagon from Mazda, complete with NOS and a killer audio system.
And, while we saw mostly sunny weather during this trip from Orange County, Calif. to our final destination in Houston, Texas, Mother Nature had other ideas. As we arrived into Houston, the local weather people were reporting rainfall in feet, not inches!Needless to say, that put an immediate damper on the World Import Challenge event. While the weather cleared up for most of Friday, and the best teams in drag racing had arrived, the promoters decided to reschedule the event for later this year.
The staff of Sport Compact Car, Turbo and Import Tuner launched the Trek 2 Texas from the McMullen Argus building in Anaheim, Calif. Our first stop would be at Mitek Corp. in Phoenix, the audio makers of MTX Coustic, Street Wires, Xtant, DCM and more.
Once there, we all got a behind-the-scenes look at the engineering, packing and manufacturing process of its audio equipment; we marveled at the size of its audio showroom...you could land a plane in that baby!
Thanks Rico Felice, Colin Baugh, Manny Kitajawa, Eileen Prather and Joe Andriano of Mitek for all your assistance...and for having a barbecue ready for us when we arrived. We were some hungry campers.
Tim Dwyer of RM Racing joined the convoy at MTX in a Ferrari 360, followed by several of the shop's custom NSXs. The bright yellow Ferrari was an obvious hit among the mostly Honda crowd. Larry Saavedra and RM Racing PR man, Rob MacPherson, gave away a small truck load of Hot Wheels, T-shirts from Vortech, key chains from Wings West, pens from Eibach and more decals that any one person needs. In all, it was a great afternoon as we soaked up the desert sun.
Aside from a slight delay outside of Riverside, Calif., it took us about six hours to reach Phoenix; from there we headed due east to Tucson to meet with Ultra Performance and get a good night's sleep.
John Prescott is the practical joker of the group; no one was spared a taste of his humor. It's Tuesday morning and we're headed to Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Looking for something interesting, the convoy pulled into the parking lot of a tourist shop off I-10 after seeing signs for "The Thing!" As it turned out, if you've never seen "The Thing" you should drop by the next time you're in New Mexico; it's worth the buck it costs to go inside. The Xterra got an official set of New Mexico bullhorns mounted on its grille.
The convoy picked up some speed, in order to spend more time at our next stop in Roswell. Unfortunately, the New Mexico State Police had other ideas. But officer Jennifer Schurman was a really trooper (couldn't help the pun) and an absolute professional-she let us go on our way after realizing we were just a bunch knuckleheads in really cool cars.
Finally in Roswell-not an alien creature anywhere. Damn. We saw a lot of alien trinkets and stuff-but not E.T. Then we're off to Midland, Texas.
Trek NotesReally long road trips serve to remind us of many things, including how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful country, of how diverse our lands are, and of how multi-faceted are its people.
It also reminds us that perhaps more car company engineers should probably ride in their own seats for 6 to 8 hours before endorsing them to their supervisors; we learned what works and what doesn't, details we'll talk about in future issues. There is that almost symbiotic relationship that builds between road-tripper and mount, a mutual trust and co-dependency that grows more certain with every mile.
The further east from Southern California we drove, the more the cars were treated like celebrities, with gas stops taking extra long to answer questions from the curious (usually "where y'all goin'?") And, once in Texas, everyone we met insisted on telling us about the hugely fast Boss Mustang they had back in the day.
We had the pleasure of having our entire convoy pulled over by the New Mexico State Patrol on the way to Roswell after some trucker-apparently not a fan of imports-reported us as "driving at excessive speeds." But officer Jennifer Schurman, who pulled the convoy over, was memorably professional, polite and well spoken, and after running tags and licenses, sent us on our way. For that we handed her an official Trek 2 Texas T-shirt and an offer to pull us over anytime we were in town!
A most welcome surprise was Cam Waugh (his Festiva is featured in this issue), with wife Kendell and daughter Hanna, who met us at Jacobs in Midland Texas after driving from Regina, Saskatchewan, eh. You may remember his turbo Festiva from a recent installment of "The Street," and, after seeing (and piloting) his car, it drove its way straight into our magazine. Cam and family followed us all the way to Houston and back to Las Cruces, where we said goodbye.
Shunning the trip's gringos, several of the more adventurous types chose to experience "El Taco Loco," in some semi-decrepit town deep in the bowels of the New Mexico desert, food lovingly served from the side of a converted school bus. The tacos were, of course, delicious, and despite all the gringo warnings, our bellies were better for it.
The strange thing about spending several thousand miles in a car for eight days straight is that you grow very critical of some of its faults, and accepting of others; although the MP3 was down a bit on power, its bumpin' system and ability to play MP3 CD's made it a trip favorite.
All the cars performed up to par, especially the Celica and the turbocharged and Jim Wolf-tuned Maxima SE. The MP3 is by far the most popular-maybe it has to do with the audio system! Evan Griffrey of Turbo found a good stretch of land to unleash his IS300 project.
We arrived at Jacobs, late and tired, but altogether. There's another barbecue, plenty of music, people and free dyno runs. Midland, Texas smack dab in the middle of nowhere, but locals love it, and we kind of liked the quiet atmosphere, too, especially after having to deal with Prescott's video camera in our face the past thousand or so miles. Trevor Kaplan from Vortech is having a great time, and his supercharged Integra is living up to its reputation as being very reliable, even in this heat!
We met up with the guys from Enkei Wheels in Ft. Worth. Marketing manager, Chris Ditty, and his staff went out of their way to make our short stay a pleasant one. Mother Nature decided to rain on our parade, but no one really cared.
Chris joined on the road into Houston, and brought along a Silvia for its booth. Mazda joined us, too-and brought the new Protg 5 to the event. The weather got crazy, with a hurricane blowing into Houston, promising to stay awhile. We had a breath of good weather, but that didn't last long. By Saturday things got rough, and rain was being measured in feet, not inches. Several big-rigs were completely submerged in the Houston area. The event, obviously, got postponed. But we completed our Trek 2 Texas and in doing so, met up with some of the coolest people along the way. As of this writing, you could log onto www.sportcompactcarweb.com to get even more details about the trip!
Fuel and rest stops were a good place to stretch the legs and take in some tourist stuff. Cam, Kendell and little Hanna were still hanging tough in the 100-degree heat of Texas, even though the Festiva didn't have air conditioning.
The weather started turning bad once we made it to the Houston city limits. There to meet us was Hurricane Allison in all her fury. The rain was measured in "feet" not inches...18-wheelers were completely submerged by Allison. We were lucky, we had at least one good, sunny day in Houston.