I was never supposed to be a “Miata guy.” My life was a procession of Blue Oval work rigs and roundel-studded coupes through my mid-twenties. But fate had bigger plans. In 2015, it intervened at a car show in rural America.
Lewiston, Idaho sits just across the border from where I grew up, deep in Washington’s wheat country. The town nestles into a valley where the Snake River’s wide banks wander on through. Weather in the valley is forever fair, a sliver of rural California gone missing. Golfing, fishing, and righteous John Deere cutoff tees flourish. The local pulp mill fills the valley with a jock strap potpourri but provides wages that allow the working class to buy good toys – bass boats, two-strokes, side-by-sides, and every flavor of V-8 Sixties muscle. This is Gearhead America.
Each year, at the height of summer, when the valley fills thick with pulpy air, its residents gather. Barriers block either end of the city’s main drag, looping Lewiston’s downtown into the country’s slowest speedway. Cars circle the block for hours, only stopping to line up a burnout or slowing to allow just enough room for a big-block Mopar to romp.
The scene’s straight from some Springsteen daydream, as unlikely a setting as you’d find for a 1994 Mazda Miata, pristine as the day it rolled off the Hiroshima assembly line. But there it sat right on the main drag, not a single American soul glancing its way.
“What’s the deal?” I asked a young lady who sat at a booth next to the car. “Fundraiser for the basketball team,” she said. “Some old lady donated it. Only $10 a ticket and you win the car.”
What are the odds, I wondered? I eyed the empty raffle jar and did a double-take. After haranguing my wife for a single $10 bill, I dropped a ticket into the jar.
If you’re keeping track, high school basketball season wouldn’t start until months after Lewiston’s Hot August Nights wrapped. To further ratchet up the anticipation, the prize drawing wouldn’t occur until the final home game of the Summit Catholic Academy’s season.
Something like seven months after that fateful cruise-in, in February of 2016, I got the call. From more than 500 entrants, a young writer’s ticket was plucked from a jar. For once in my life, I won. No need to bother with the Powerball anymore. The little blue Miata ate up all my luck.
And what did a young Bimmerphile make of his single-owner blemish-free Miata? Mostly I still remember that feeling, fizzy and giddy as a champagne bender, like I’d swallowed up all the luck in the world. Still drunk on joy, I zipped the Miata far from rural Idaho, across the border and through the Cascade Mountains, back to my condo in Seattle. I remember every minute of that 300-mile drive.
From minute one, the car felt special, even if I lacked the context and vocabulary to explain why (before I wrote about cars to pay the mortgage, I worked on the Forza Motorsports franchise). The Miata’s steering ratio was quicker than my E30 M3, yet the steering rack asked for far more effort than most of the farm trucks I ever drove, a quality that betrayed the Mazda's compact proportions. The suspension was somehow compliant and sharp, qualities I thought incongruous by my own experiments with suspension tuning.
Within the first miles behind the wheel, I discovered a joyous little chassis, one eager to slide down a gravel sweeper on its tiptoes, composed as anything. That’s the great thing about the Mazda Miata: it doesn’t take more than a few turns with the top down and the sun shining to “get it,” if only you give the car a chance. And until this car, I’d never driven a Miata, much less considered owning one.
And this particular Miata, it turned out, was something of a unicorn. Draped in rare Laguna blue paint, the 1994 model came equipped with the NA Miata’s more desirable and reliable 1.8-liter four-cylinder, paired to a five-speed manual. The car rolled off the line without the creature comforts that – to some – dull the Miata’s purpose by adding weight and complexity; the windows in my car roll down by hand; no air conditioning or air bags are equipped.
This was essential motoring like I’d never known.
That barebones spec held some clues to the car’s origins; I found out from a member of the Catholic Academy’s staff that this very same car had never been purchased by an owner. Instead, it was won with a single raffle ticket in 1994. How’s that for serendipity?
The first owner entered a raffle on behalf of her husband, a doctor who pined for a convertible Porsche but couldn’t find room in the family budget. The good wife entered, and won as if by will. She called the raffle’s organizers regularly to inform them she’d be winning the Miata when the drawing came. She let her family and friends know it too, in the months ahead of the raffle draw, nearly every time she spoke to them on the phone, I was told.
And so it was. The doctor and wife drove the Miata up and down the dirt roads and small main streets of rural Idaho, but especially to mass on Sundays, where it was remembered as a local celebrity. The car was driven gently and garaged religiously. By the time it got to me, some 22 years later, it had collected fewer than 60,000 miles on the clock, but had served its family for more than 20 years.
Then the car changed hands.
In those early days after the raffle, I ripped on the Miata without remorse. I tossed the keys to anyone who gave it a passing glance, too, and told them to whip the thing like a rented mule. There’s a video on one of my old phones of the car producing a one-wheel burnout that lasted more than a minute, a Viking funeral for its set of aging all-seasons. “It’s worth $10,” I thought. “And besides, it’s only a Miata. Give her hell!”
It went like that for months until my life changed. I left the job at Turn10 for another at Xbox then a job at Road & Track.
I sold my ’69 Porsche 912 to finance the move across the country, but couldn’t quite find it in me to give up the Miata. I’m still not sure why. Instead, the car stayed on the street near my buddy Chris’s place in the greater Seattle area (there’s not enough cold beer on earth to repay his kindness), where it suffered a few run-ins from the, uh, more distasteful residents of King County, who were desperate to slash at the Miata’s soft top in search of something to pawn (strangely, they never considered taking the Kenny Loggins tapes, or simply opening the unlocked doors to free up valuables).
On rare return trips to Seattle, I’d get back in the Miata and rip around my old home for a weekend, then bid it farewell for another few months. The Miata grew weathered but never asked for a thing in return.
Then my in-laws took the car and enjoyed it for about a year before the pandemic turned normalcy into ruin. My wife and I retreated from New York, where R&T makes its sausage, and sought our hometown in Eastern Washington. I was reunited with the Miata in earnest and fell back in love.
Seeing it again for the first time in more than a year felt like reuniting with a childhood friend. How you notice all the new wrinkles on their forehead, the gray hairs that weren’t there before. There’s both strangeness and familiarity. But after 10 minutes it feels like nothing ever changed, like you’re both young again.
The Miata’s always had that quality. By its simplicity, it returns me to simpler times.
For Christmas that year I treated the car to a timing belt kit from Flyin’ Miata (these are good, knowledgeable folks, please buy things from them), my first real investment in the car that cost just $10. On Flyin's site, I selected every single dropdown tab, nearly doubling the price of the order, happy to treat the Miata to all the maintenance I’d deferred for years.
I discovered that a Miata is an absolute joy to work on by virtue of its simplicity and inline-four layout, closer in experience to a day spa than the fifth rung of hell that most German cars offer during routine maintenance. Even still, I installed the seal on the water pump wrong and when I fired the car back up, coolant came pissing down on my father-in-law’s pristine garage floor (years later, I’d spill about six quarts of dirty oil on that same floor, which wasn't one of my finer moments. Sorry Bryce).
I slumped away, had dinner, poured another beer, and tore the whole thing back down again. With a dab of Permatex and by the grace of God, the job was done. It’s experiences like those – tripping over your own shoelaces but finishing the race anyways – that always seems to galvanize my relationships with cars. It’s important to break broken things then fix them again, I think. Unless you’ve worked on a car, you can’t really love or understand it. At least that’s my take.
After that hiccup, and the subsequent joy that little roadster brought me over the pandemic summer of 2020, an invisible, unconscious switch flipped. I stopped scheming about how to get rid of the car, how to swap it for something German that felt closer to my identity as an enthusiast. Instead I embraced the Miata.
The car always aligned perfectly with the belief that any object in your life should be run until the metaphorical tires scream, then put away caked in brake dust. Maintained, sure, but never so precious that when you ball the thing up, your first words after crawling from the flaming wreckage aren’t, “Shit yeah! What’s next?”
For years, the $10 Miata was that object to me, thankless and thrilling. But seven years after I dropped a ticket in a jar, the car means much more. By sticking around for life’s shifting tides, one of Mazda’s ubiquitous and excellent roadster weaved itself into the fabric of my life almost by accident.
Maybe that means we aren’t always the people we think we are; I’ve owned the Miata far longer than any of the dozen or so BMWs that flitted through my life. The teenage and twentysomething versions of myself would surely resent the “Miata Guy” tag, but what did they know about anything other than cheap whiskey and chasing girls? I’m happy to be a Miata Guy now, owner of a car that amplifies some brand of carefree bliss, who doesn’t take themselves too seriously, but still wants to slide through every apex with style.
When I look back at that photo of myself winning the $10 Miata, I see a kid with no clue about what his future would hold. But he’s standing next to a little blue roadster that was willing to show him the way, and hopefully carry him far beyond.
The only member of staff to flip a grain truck on its roof, Kyle Kinard is R&T's senior editor and resident malcontent. He lives near Seattle and enjoys the rain. His column, Kinardi Line, runs when it runs.
