The meet is set for 0900 hours - just west of Dade City, FL in the local college parking lot. This is almost 100 miles north of where we live so Dianne and I have been up and on the road since 0730 and it's not helping that I have a hangover from the night before, but I'm full of coffee and aspirin now and ready to go. It looks like this will be a smaller meet than last summer where we had 15 NSXs show up along with about 20 S2000s. This time, maybe a half dozen NSXs and an unknown number so S2000s (I don't frequent their board). Little did we know...
There was already a crowd when we pull in. By 0915, there were the expected half dozen NSXs and no less than 40 S2000s! There were stock S2000s, turbo-charged S2000s, and supercharged S2000s.
Every color made, plus the requisite bits of carbon fiber and the odd primer painted fender. Lots of fart can exhausts except it was apparent that many of these cars really had a use for a free flowing exhaust. They were everywhere.
And scattered around the crowd, our favorite cars.
These cars came to cruise!
As it turned out, this car was to be the leader of our group and its owner was one of the trip route planners. Mad insane kudos to him and the others for doing a great job!
So, it's time to roll! We all draw chits to see what group we'll be in and I draw a Group 2 chit.
After watching Group 1 roll out and then chilling for another 15 minutes, it's time to go. I give camera duties over to my navigator and suggest she try holding the camera above her head pointed backwards and she gets an inadvertently great picture reflected off the back glass!
Along with some more normal type pictures. Behind us...
And in front of us...
A few words about our route. Florida is not exactly heaven for people who want to drive their cars in a spirited manner up and down hills and around lots of corners. For the most part, Florida is flat and the roads are straight. This is how we found ourselves 100 miles from home. The area around Dade City heading east towards central Florida is as good as it gets for fun roads. These are very rural and mostly narrow roads. Our trip planners must have spent days scouting them out and plotting the route and they did a great job.
Our trip route is 120 miles long with two stops along the way. One hundred and twenty miles!
What a drive! The lead car in our group was FAST and so were we. I don't have a ton of driving pictures but OMG, it was insane. I must have hit the redline 100 times or more and it was a drag race coming out of every single corner. I am proud to say that my 10 year old stock NSX had no trouble keeping up with the various S2000s though. I'm sure my tires lost a couple thousand miles worth of (normal driving) tread.
Although the roads were mostly the twisty turning type, we did get some decent speeds for short bits and hit the century mark quite a few times.
At each of the stops, we drew attention like it was a parade!
Here I am, your humble narator along with my lovely co-pilot and navigator (who is making rumblings that she'd like to have her own NSX some day ).
And that's it for today. I'd like to add as a postscript that yes, we were speeding much of this drive. Yes, it was risky. Yes, it was illegal. If we'd got busted, I'd have taken my punishment without complaint. If we'd hurt a bystander, I'd have been guilty forever. But we didn't. Our group leader was very very cool about it. When we came upon a slow car, he would slow the whole group down to let the citizen ahead of us get a lead and then we'd dash for a while and then slow for a while with the obvious effort to not make the citizenry any more alarmed than necessary. I think in the whole 120 miles, I only passed 3 or 4 cars that weren't in our group. While I would not call what we did totally safe or even especially responsible, we did make efforts to keep the carnage down.
At the end of the ride, we all wound up at a pub for lunch and it was good. As it turns out, the end of the trip had us even further from home than the start, but for the ride home I put the roof on, turned up the AC, and set the cruise control for a safe-n-sane journey.
And that's it. Hope someone enjoyed my pics and narrative. Until next time!
There was already a crowd when we pull in. By 0915, there were the expected half dozen NSXs and no less than 40 S2000s! There were stock S2000s, turbo-charged S2000s, and supercharged S2000s.
Every color made, plus the requisite bits of carbon fiber and the odd primer painted fender. Lots of fart can exhausts except it was apparent that many of these cars really had a use for a free flowing exhaust. They were everywhere.
And scattered around the crowd, our favorite cars.
These cars came to cruise!
As it turned out, this car was to be the leader of our group and its owner was one of the trip route planners. Mad insane kudos to him and the others for doing a great job!
So, it's time to roll!
We all draw chits to see what group we'll be in and I draw a Group 2 chit.
After watching Group 1 roll out and then chilling for another 15 minutes, it's time to go. I give camera duties over to my navigator and suggest she try holding the camera above her head pointed backwards and she gets an inadvertently great picture reflected off the back glass!
Along with some more normal type pictures.
Behind us...
And in front of us...
A few words about our route. Florida is not exactly heaven for people who want to drive their cars in a spirited manner up and down hills and around lots of corners. For the most part, Florida is flat and the roads are straight. This is how we found ourselves 100 miles from home. The area around Dade City heading east towards central Florida is as good as it gets for fun roads. These are very rural and mostly narrow roads. Our trip planners must have spent days scouting them out and plotting the route and they did a great job.
Our trip route is 120 miles long with two stops along the way. One hundred and twenty miles!
What a drive! The lead car in our group was FAST and so were we. I don't have a ton of driving pictures but OMG, it was insane. I must have hit the redline 100 times or more and it was a drag race coming out of every single corner. I am proud to say that my 10 year old stock NSX had no trouble keeping up with the various S2000s though. I'm sure my tires lost a couple thousand miles worth of (normal driving) tread.
Although the roads were mostly the twisty turning type, we did get some decent speeds for short bits and hit the century mark quite a few times.
At each of the stops, we drew attention like it was a parade!
Here I am, your humble narator along with my lovely co-pilot and navigator (who is making rumblings that she'd like to have her own NSX some day
).
And that's it for today. I'd like to add as a postscript that yes, we were speeding much of this drive. Yes, it was risky. Yes, it was illegal. If we'd got busted, I'd have taken my punishment without complaint. If we'd hurt a bystander, I'd have been guilty forever. But we didn't. Our group leader was very very cool about it. When we came upon a slow car, he would slow the whole group down to let the citizen ahead of us get a lead and then we'd dash for a while and then slow for a while with the obvious effort to not make the citizenry any more alarmed than necessary. I think in the whole 120 miles, I only passed 3 or 4 cars that weren't in our group. While I would not call what we did totally safe or even especially responsible, we did make efforts to keep the carnage down.
At the end of the ride, we all wound up at a pub for lunch and it was good. As it turns out, the end of the trip had us even further from home than the start, but for the ride home I put the roof on, turned up the AC, and set the cruise control for a safe-n-sane journey.
And that's it. Hope someone enjoyed my pics and narrative. Until next time!
