Introductions All Round

Hello faithful readers of Car Throttle. I'm the new kid in town, my name is Tony Borroz, and head guy Adnan asked me to introduce myself to all of you, and to explain just what I'm doing here. It a sordid and grease-stained tale, but really, this is all my dad's fault.

My father is a now-retired tool and die maker, and I grew up in a family that had mechanical stuff all over the place. To make matters worse, it was a sportscar family (a term that I still firmly believe is one word, not two), and to make it even more masochistic, a British sportscar family. Lucas electric jokes are no joke to me, especially if you've ever had a Triumph or an MG or Sunbeam crap out on you on a dark and rainy night on some back road in the Pacific Northwest. I have, and it's not exactly fun. When the cars were working, it was more fun than a hot tub full of mermaids, so I look upon cars like sedans and

minivans with a sad shake of my head.

And it wasn't just sportscars, oh no, it was racing too. May saw us following the Indy 500 with rapt attention, June was all about arguing over Le Mans (did I mention I'm Italian and everything is an argument to me?), and all year long it was Indy cars this and Grand Prix that and NASCAR (back when they were real stock cars, and were raced by guys with names like Petty and Jarrett and Allison, before the corporate shills crept in and sucked all the personality out) and rallies. Week in, week out. Racing, as Hemmingway said, is the only true sport, all else are children's games played by men in costumes.

Because, let's face it, sportscars are just detuned track cars (if you're getting the right ones anyway), and racing is where it's really at. Punctuate the racing with blasts up the Columbia River Gorge or up and over Germantown Road or a quick sprint up Chuckanut Drive or Wahiawa-to-Waialua via the old cane roads or The Golden Gate to Pillar Point early on a Sunday morning and that's been my life (professional or otherwise) for the past XX decades.

Books? Magazines? Don't ask ... Road & Tracks and Car & Drivers and Automobile Quarterlies and Autocourses and Rallycourses and racing books and sportscar books and biographies of everyone from Tazio Nuvolari to Mark Donohue to Jim Hall that weigh in at more than a ton and a half.

My car? A 1994 Mazda Miata R-Package. One of only 1100 built, and winner of the 1994 & 1995 SCCA Auto-X national championships. The car, not me. I bought it from a guy I used to race against. I'm not that good of a racer.

Photo from Flickr user jasonb42882