| ilvtofu | 03-17-2014 02:11 PM |
Road & Track: When did two-seat sports cars stop being “manly”?
Pretty good read, my favourite line is the one about what men are supposed to be driving in 2014. Quote:
So, I’m in Louisville last week, and I’m rolling along Broadway. They say the LED running lights are bright, on Broadway, and now that the Lexus RX350 comes standard with those aforementioned ridiculous fad-of-the-week items, what they say is correct. There’s a perfect example of a Mazdaspeed Miata behind me, in that very deep red that you could get. It’s top-down in the fifty-degree weather, carving through the empty spots in the clogged lanes. Some Millennial is driving, grinning like an idiot.
“Look back there, at that hoopy frood in the Mazdaspeed Miata,” I said to my companion.
“Ugh,” she groaned. “Why is that guy driving a girl car?”
“Since when,” I said, “is the winningest car in SCCA history a ‘girl car’, particularly when it’s been treated to a light-pressure turbocharger and additional spring rate?”
“Since forever,” she responded, “and isn’t the Miata the winningest whatever in whatever because there are whole races that are nothing but Miatas, making it highly likely that a Miata will win?”
“Don’t count out the pace car,” I responded, “which at Mid-Ohio is the powerful yet grippy Honda S2000.”
“Whatever. That guy back there is in a girl car. Don’t tell me you’d drive one.” At that point, I wisely did not respond, because I would drive the hell out of a Mazdaspeed Miata.
The only reason I didn’t buy a Mazdaspeed Miata when they were new was because I already had a Boxster S, which is what my comp-sci teacher would have called a “superset” of the Miata. I suppose that’s a girl car too. I know that during the summer it’s extremely common for young fellows in Mustangs and whatnot to come racing up next to me on the freeway, only to recoil in annoyance when they realize that the long-haired brunette driving the silver Boxster with the Brey-Krause rollbar is, you know, me.
Sorry, boys.
But I digress. When, exactly, did two-seat sports cars fall out of favor with the Marlboro Man set? It has to be a fairly recent development, certainly more recent than, say, the Carter Administration. I know this because my father bought a brand-new, bright-yellow MG Midget in 1979, from the British Leyland dealer outside Baltimore, MD. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but my father is and was a very traditional American dude. His purchase of the Midget didn’t trail his honorable discharge from the Marine Corps by all that many years. He played baseball in college. I think he punched a guy once for just looking at my mom. We’re not talking about a Sensitive New Age Guy here.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/cm/roada...sferrariAd.jpg
Yet he didn’t feel a bit self-conscious driving a tiny British roadster around Washington, DC. And I mean tiny. If you think the current Miata is a little girly, you should have seen the MG Midget. It was nearly two feet shorter than the Miata and made less than half of the power enjoyed by owners of Mazda’s iconic roadster. It had a weird froggy face and a chrome luggage rack. It had the federally-mandated 85-mph speedometer and I don’t think it was capable of pegging it. I’m not sure how a car could be less masculine, really. I suppose it could have been pink.
Dad looked like a circus bear in the thing, but no more so than all the other dads, and all the other dudes, in Midgets and MGBs and Fiat Spiders and Triumph Spitfires and the various other low-power sporting droptops of the Seventies and Eighties. Nobody thought there was anything weird or wrong about grown men saving up their money and buying cars with the approximate footprint and power of today’s riding mowers. Heck, there was a whole group of dads who spent every weekend driving, and wrenching on, tiny little British roadsters. We called them the Sports Car Club of America and although the historical literature for that Club might be heavy on the 289FIA Cobras and the Corvette Grand Sports, in real life it was mostly two-hundred-pound men in eighteen-hundred-pound cars “powered” by the BMC A-series.
Many of the people who founded that club were servicemen who brought MGs and whatnot back from World War II. Nobody thought it was particularly unusual that the fellows who had invaded Normandy and driven a stake through the heart of the Nazi regime (check out “Saving Private Ryan” for what is probably a toned-down version of what actually happened) were passionately interested in 50-horsepower two-seaters that would have just about fit in the trunk of a proper Cadillac or Packard. Nobody back home ever said, “Hey, Bob, I realize you once took out a Wehrmacht pillbox with a P-38 can opener and a box of damp matches, but you sure look like a sissy behind the wheel of that MG TC.”
No, I think this whole manly-men-don’t-drive-little-sports-cars thing is a recent development, and a completely ridiculous one at that. Perhaps it’s the fault of the Miata, which was so reliable from Day One that no greasy hands were required for happy ownership. I’m personally inclined to blame that trio of German two-seaters that showed up shortly afterwards. The Z3, Boxster, and especially the SLK had such tremendous appeal to women that it got to the point that you couldn’t find a man who would admit to owning one. “Oh, that black Z3 over there, with the Dinan supercharger and the Hoosier tires on steamroller wheels and the ‘Airborne: Death From Above’ bumper sticker? That, uh, belongs to my mom.”
After a decade or so of those desirable-to-the-distaff-driver Deutsch droptops, the girls-drive-droptops stereotype that was initially conceived for the Volkswagen Rabbit “basket” convertible had expanded to include everything with a fabric roof short of the Dodge Viper. Porsche went through the trouble of making a Boxster with a metal top just so their owners could be spared the “shame” of having a fair-weather-friendly automobile. The resulting car, known as the Cayman, is just like a Boxster, only not quite as good, if you ask me. But you’d never know that from reading the Internet, where lavish praise is showered on the “additional rigidity” of the steel roof by people whose idea of performance driving is grinding around a freeway off-ramp at five over the posted limit, with underinflated tires.
Of course, the Cayman still has a bit of a twee reputation, because it’s related to the Boxster. The whole thing’s gotten out of hand. In fact, I’m not sure what men are even allowed to buy in the year 2014. We can’t have Miatas or Boxsters or anything like that, because those are for girls. But the opposite of a Miata, which is something like a GMC Yukon XL, is also for girls. In between is the Camry, which your mom drives, and the CR-V, which your wife drives, and the Aventador, which you cannot afford.
Enough. It’s time for American men to stand proud and admit that we’d desperately like to own a Miata or, as they say in the car-rental biz, similar. I’m going to form a group– Cool Alphas (referring to “alpha males”, of course) Preferring Roadsters Intentionally. That’s right, the group will be called CAPRI and any member who, in the face of hostile questioning, claims that we named it after the Euro Capri of the Seventies or the bubbleback five-liter RS will be ejected. Our spirit animal is that timid but torque-steer-mad little Australian import Ford brought over years ago just so everybody would understand how good the Miata actually was by contrast. Remember that Ford owned a third of Mazda back then. That’s right! It was a conspiracy!
You don’t need to actually own a Capri, or a Miata, or a Jowett Jupiter, to join CAPRI. You just have to be willing to spread the word: if the tiny two-seat sporting roadster was tough enough and cool enough for our great-grandfathers, it’s tough enough and cool enough for us. We’re taking masculine roadster ownership to a whole new level. The first meeting will be at the Dairy Queen next Thursday night. But we can’t stay out too late, because my girlfriend wants to watch that Zooey Deschanel show and I’m supposed to bring back Blizzards.
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