Events

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There’s a moment during a road trip where you enter a flow state — when you turn off the outside noise, and tune into whatever’s in front of you. In these moments, we’re completely present. And all we need to capture them is distance, drive and a way forward.

Warning: This story contains some very real experiences and some very unreal imagery.

This story is a permission slip. Later this summer, this year, or this lifetime, you have hereby been granted permission to fail. We encourage it. Go forth and break things. Get stuck. Paddle out and bail. Eat dirt. Finish last. Whatever it is you want to do, go. Get out there, and fail at it. 

Or perhaps we should say, fail into it.

There is, perhaps, no car manufacturer more committed to growing motorsports than Mazda; and no car more responsible for that than the MX-5 (Miata). On any given weekend, there are more Mazda’s raced than all other manufacturers combined, with much of this volume attributed to the MX-5 at both the professional and grassroots levels.

In 1903, few people drove cars in the United States. The automobile had been around for less than a decade and was seen as a gasoline-powered flash in the pan, to those who had seen one at all. Five years before Henry Ford introduced the Model T and made cars widely accessible to the general public, two men and a dog embarked on the first successful cross-country road trip, and inspired a nation to dream about the power of what a car could do.

Establishing the National Park system was one of America’s greatest ideas. Preserving wilderness areas and making them accessible to all Americans is a noble cause. But over the past few years, the nation’s parks have seen an explosion in interest. This is a good thing! Visiting one of these areas is a monumental experience. But let’s be honest, sitting in a line of RVs for hours trying to get into one of these parks is a monumental pain.

The “blink of an eye” takes about 125 milliseconds. It takes about 50 milliseconds for you to form a first impression of a new face. For a hummingbird, it takes 12.5 milliseconds to beat its wings. What does it take to win an MX-5 Cup race?

One millisecond.

The first car club in America was a group of kooky inventors. You may know some of their names: John Lambert, Henry Ford, Charles and Frank Duryea, David Buick, Alex Winton, Louis Chevrolet, Ransom Olds. They were sharp, eccentric men who were feared by their neighbors, humored by their wives, and deeply doubted by every banker in town.

In December 2016, Eddy Gotink and five fellow off-roaders set out on a round-trip journey to one of the northernmost points in Europe—North Cape, Norway—by way of Copenhagen, Vaxjö and Stockholm.