Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream, and his was so powerful that our friends south of the border declared his birthday a national holiday. Albert Einstein credited his Theory of Relativity to a dream he had as a young boy. Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney both famously said many of their songs came to them in dreams.
Meanwhile, two regular schmucks working at a car magazine had a dream. Not one that would change the social fabric of society, clarify the relationship between space and time , or cause music lovers around the world to sing along. No, our dream is to drag a street-legal race car to the easternmost point of North America, on a rock out in the North Atlantic, to compete in a week long tarmac rally called Targa Newfoundland.
Admittedly, our dream in no way benefits mankind, but it should make for one of the greatest driving adventures available on this continent, if not the world. Driving flat out on twisty public roads in a Scion FR-S, one of the best handling rear-wheel drive sports coupe to hit the market at any price, is truly what car-guy dreams are made of. Or at least these car guys. The fact that we get to modify our loaner FR-S ourselves also means we’ll be able to dial it in to our needs and tastes while forming that special man-and-machine bond every driving enthusiast and garage tinkerer can relate to.
And thanks to the magic of the Internet, we’ll be sharing the entire adventure with you, both here on Speed Academy but also via our primary media partner AutoGuide.com. We’ll be keeping AutoGuide’s audience up-to-date via a series of videos and stories as well as daily video blogs during the week of Targa, plus we’ll be producing a longer documentary-style video afterwards. We’ll also be starting a build thread over on FR-Sforum.com, for those of you who want to follow along step-by-step and engage in some conversation with us, and you can also look for a couple of Targa adventure stories on Speedhunters in their popular sexy-picture blog format.
But before any of that can happen, we need to rebuild our Scion FR-S, a car that was used in Scion Canada’s Tuner Challenge the last year or two and then returned to stock trim, other than a roll cage that wasn’t going to suit our needs. So enjoy the first in our series of Targa prep videos, as we transform this amazing little sports coupe back into a properly sorted road-legal race car that’s capable of handling the punishment the legendary roads of Newfoundland will throw at it for 5 grueling days in mid-September.
