I Drove 3000 Miles To Spend One Afternoon With The Best Motorsports Fans In The World

Every time I buy a cheap car, I try to do something interesting with it. Some of my past adventures include rallycrossing a Buick Roadmaster, off-roading a first-generation Taurus SHO, and simply conquering a Michigan winter with the worst possible winter car - a 1992 Mustang V8 convertible. When I bought my 2002 Infiniti I35 late last summer I didn’t have any specific mission in mind, but after a couple of weeks behind the wheel I sensed it would be an outstanding sport sedan for a serious road trip.

The only problem was it had done 163,000 miles during its 14-year lifespan, and when I bought it, there wasn’t a single scrap of paper showing the teeniest bit of maintenance history. Such mileage isn’t necessarily a death knell, but without any idea of prior maintenance, tempting fate with a 3000-mile road trip isn’t always a great idea. Sure, the Top Gear boys embarked on some epic trips with barely-there cars, but they traveled with a gigantic support group to either fix the cars or fly them home in the event of catastrophic failure.

I’d be making this trip completely solo, with my only back up being a cell phone that proved useless on some of the rural roads I took, and a big ass bag of tools to handle virtually any repair. That also proved useless, because in typical road trip fashion the one tool I didn’t have was the one I needed for the only mechanical failure of the trip.

My destination for this jaunt across the U.S. was Atlanta, Michigan and the SnoDrift rally - the first event of the Rally America season. I talked about this event last month in an article about stage rally in America, and though I hadn’t planned to attend this year, bashing that article out on the keyboard got me properly motivated. My schedule only allowed me to attend the first day of the two-day rally, but as I parked the Infiniti in Atlanta’s tiny, snowy downtown stretch, I was reminded just how awesome this sport - and the fans - can be.

I’d met up with a couple of friends earlier in the day, and we actually arrived a couple of hours early for the 2pm Parc Expose. This was a chance to see all the cars before the SnoDrift’s slippery stages took their toll, but arriving early gave us the opportunity to chat a bit with the volunteers who help make the event happen. We’d been talking with a veteran racer and long-time SnoDrift volunteer for about 20 minutes when he suddenly handed us stacks of numbers and the starting order for the competitors.

“When they start rolling in, it’s going to get busy,” he said. “You guys have been here before; just look up their number on this sheet to see the starting order. Put these numbers on their windshield and I’ll get them parked.”

And just like that we became SnoDrift workers, getting competitors lined up in the proper order for the first day of competition. I’ve arrived early to numerous Nascar races; nobody ever gave me a starting order and asked me to help get the drivers parked. So not only did we get to see all the cars pre-race, we were up close and personal with the competitors - from the Subaru crews with strong sponsorship support to the guys in the Fox Body Mustang who were clearly there for the sheer thrill of constant power-on oversteer.

By the time we were done, hundreds upon hundreds of people had filled the Parc Expose to see the cars and the crews. Several teams invited people to climb inside their cars for photos. Others were talking project cars with fans. Music was pumping though a set of loudspeakers. The smell of racing fuel was all around. Volunteers were still doing their thing to make sure everyone knew when and where to be, but for a while it wasn’t really a pre-race event. Rather, it was just a bunch of car guys and girls having one hell of a good car meet in the most unlikely of places.

That alone was worth the journey, but then I spied a first-generation RX-7 getting ready to head out for the spectator stages, shod with fender flares and aggressive snow tyres. I scrambled to grab some photos, and in the process came upon the smoothest Volvo V70R I’ve ever seen. And then around the next block was an older Porsche Carrera 4. I love the racing action, but seeing what the spectators dare to bring out into the snow is just as epic. That kind of passion is without a doubt what makes rally fans the best motorsports fans in the world.

I was only able to watch one stage before I had to call it a day. It was an open hairpin that had spectators packed along both sides of the road, and no matter the car, they all cheered like the insane fans they were. I struck up conversations with people who’d been attending the rally for over a decade, to folks who were there for the first time. Traveling 1300 miles one-way I figured I’d take the title for furthest traveled, but then I met a group from Spain (yes, Spain!) who were visiting friends in Montreal, and they all ventured to Michigan for the action.

And just like that it was over. I learned through social media that the finish was quite spectacular, with just half a second separating first and second place. I mention social media because that’s how I learned the final results - Rally America seems to have very little interest in promoting their own events, and for the life of me I cannot understand why. Such a lack of interest is certainly frustrating for fans, but for small teams looking for sponsorships I can only imagine the head-banging fury that must come from such a disappointing lack of support.

In any case, I was back in the Infiniti two days later for a marathon drive back home, crossing the Great Lakes and the American high plains to cover 1252 miles in just under 17 hours. It wasn’t a record-setting time, but with over 3000 miles logged in the Infiniti, it was something of a revelation for cheap, fun used cars in America. I’d bought this car for just $2600, and aside from a used set of winter wheels, I invested a whopping zero dollars in maintenance. It handled low-speed back roads and high-speed interstates with ease, running 80mph and more for hours without complaint. It averaged just over 30 miles per gallon in the process; the heated seats were always warm, and the stereo kept me jumping when I started to get drowsy.

In short, this cheap Infiniti I35 was an epic road-trip companion for an epic racing event with epic fans. And I can’t wait to do it all again next year.