By spring of 2021 I was on a path to healing myself. I was on a solid weight loss track, meditating was helping my mental health, and I was rebuilding our home. I was still missing something, and that was having fun with cars and friends again. For a long time, cars had been a struggle for me. I would buy something with rose colored shades, only seeing the finished product and not the hundreds of hours of labor needed to get it there. Enter Rainbow Dash.
In 2019, I had punted on trying to get a crazy build done for the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an event where you buy or build a car for $2000 and have to autocross it, drag race it, and have it judged by a concours judging panel. In 2017, we put our Datsun 240Z with a 428k miles 5.3 LS drivetrain from an old taxi van on the podium. For 2019 we were just aiming to win the party, so I had my friend Michael grab me a $1500 AMG Mercedes off craigslist in Charlotte and we threw it in the trailer on the way down. All I needed the car to do was last the weekend so I could play around and sell it afterward. Turns out we sold it at the event for $1500.
So we were in Florida with an empty trailer. Earlier in the year our $2000 Challenge friend Mark had passed away and his Mustang was available at the event. We made a deal with his teammate Tod and when I took my daughter over to see it I was explaining – to a 5 year old – the difference between muscle cars and pony cars. That’s when Abby smiled and said “it’s a My Little Pony car.” With the help of friends, we loaded up the car for the 1000 mile ride home. This was my 2020 easy button. Then everyone knows what happened in 2020.
In spring 2021 then, I decided I really needed to get back to the track. I wanted to give autocross a real shot, so out came the Mustang. It had a tattered flag design on the hood, and I’m not Captain America so I wetsanded that off. Running with Abby’s theme, the Mustang was named Rainbow Dash. I painted a blue/yellow/red fade up the center of the hood and slapped on some large vinyl stickers that were made in the form of Rainbow Dash’s cutie mark – the mark on the hindquarters of My Little Pony characters.
The car was wearing 315/35/17 Hoosier A7 tires all around and they poked out over an inch, so I covered them with fender flares and designed and built a C-Prepared legal spoiler. In June, I took it to an autocross test day with my friends Jonah and Lilac and that was absolutely the most fun I had with cars in a long time. The car was having trouble staying running and I only got one clean run in, but it felt great to be having fun with my friends and cars again. My best friend Paul came up to race with his C-Prepared Camaro a few weeks later and we diagnosed Rainbow Dash with a dead fuel pump the night before the event, swiped the pump from my gasser project, and had it fixed by bedtime to load in the morning and go. That event was a mess. We had to pit as far away as one could and still be at the track, it was a miserable downpour, I bailed from grid and loaded the car back up, and we went home. As miserable as it could have turned out, we still had a great time together.
I took it to one more event that summer, reconnected with a couple car buddies, and hung 6 seconds on the nearest CP car’s time. I was back in my groove of having fun with cars and friends, and it was all because of My Little Ponycar – Rainbow Dash. After experiencing those events, I decided a dedicated autocross car was not for me and sold RD to help fund the Skyline chase, but I’ll always have that summer. I would likely still be struggling to have fun with cars if it were not for that silly bright loud obnoxious Mustang.
-Patrick
