You know what really grinds my gears?!

[Senor_Taylor]

Ricers.

You know, I used to not care too much. If you want 10 degrees negative camber and ugly wheels with stretched tires, sure.

Now that I have a Miata again and I'm meeting other Miata people, they are all ricers. I go to a car meet on Tuesday nights and it's just Subaru people with their Hello Kitty bullshit hanging off their mirrors, cars with 20+ stickers on the windows, or a Miata slammed with cambered out wheels and stickers all over it, but they don't have the money to fix their blown head gasket because they spent it on race land coilovers for mad stance points. When you talk to them, all they want to talk about is their plans to turbo their car, tune it, lower it, etc. It's exhausting. Why is this appealing to people? Why the hell do you want to scrape on every bump in the road in an AUTOMATIC Miata? (yes, someone has an auto Miata with a blown head gasket that they drove to multiple meets.) I think over half of the Miatas I run into nowadays are modded to the point where they handle worse than they did before, and I feel like it's shifting more and more into that direction every day. Everyone cares too much about how their car looks and not about the other 99% of their vehicle. These people will pop their hoods so you can see their painted valve covers and silicone hoses, but they can't talk to you about anything deeper than that because they don't actually know anything. Of course, they know EVERY type and model of wheel out there, but they don't even know what kind of package their Miata is, or how to change their own brake pads.

Maybe I'm just now noticing this, or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, but I'm disappointed by how few "real" car people there are out there without having to go to the track.