Originally published on Miataphiles
I have never been a car person.
Back in Montreal, for one reason or another, I used to own a 4.4-litre V8 SUV. I had driven that car through numerous snowstorms and felt grateful that this powerful machine protected me from getting stuck in a ditch. Whenever anything came up I’d simply take the car to the dealership where they’d take care of everything. I didn’t understand what oil changes meant or how winter tires worked. It was all taken care of.
Through the car I became friends with a person who worked as a mechanic. I came to know that he was crazy about cars and would spend all his free time cleaning/upgrading/tracking his collection. One time I overheard someone refer to him as “the guy who used to own a Miata.” I had never been a car person so I had no idea what a Miata was. Naturally, in my head I made the simple connection between a Miata and something cool.
Fast forward many years, I moved to Toronto, which to my pleasant surprise has milder winters with a lot less snow. Living right in downtown, I thought I’d be creative and experiment with a life that relies solely on the TTC. The experiment had failed before the third summer but that’s a story for another time.
I started to look for a car again.
What kind of car was I looking for? An SUV, obviously. What else could possibly protect me from the brutal winters we have here in the north? Well, if that was the obvious answer, then why did I find myself spending an obsessive amount of time scrolling through LeaseBuster without clicking into any SUV listing? Why did I feel uninspired after browsing through every single model available for purchase? Why did I visit a dealership to check out convertibles?
The invisible conflict made it impossible to make a decision. Did I even want a car? I wasn’t sure anymore.
Luckily, something distracted me from this conundrum - I got a road bike.
I had been trying to buy a bike ever since I moved to Toronto. I saw the freedom people seemed to have when they rode their bikes along the waterfront trails, and thought I’d like that too. However, for the first two summers, it just didn’t work out - I went to the shop, tested some bikes, and left with no bikes whatsoever. Now, on the third try, I had to, no, I needed to, get a bike. I was determined.
So I went to the store in April, purchased the only bike available in my size. I put down the money before seeing it in person, since the bike would need to be delivered from a warehouse in California. That’s how determined I was.
It turned out to be a perfect decision. It felt like magic, but I learned everything about the bike with joy. I learned how to switch gears, how the brake works, how to pump the tires, and I even researched the differences between a Presta valve and a Schrader valve. I cleaned the bike, lubed the chain, and charged the lights.
I experienced the freedom that I was promised.
I even got sad when I had to part with my bike for a 10-day road trip in California. I drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco along the Pacific Crest Highway, had as many burgers from In-n-Out as I could, and logged some 2,000 km on a Ford Edge. Spending most of the time on the road by myself in the car, the SUV felt unnecessarily empty. There are many scenic spots along the PCH that I didn’t get the chance to visit, knowing I’d go back one day with a different car.
The only question that remained was which car it would be.
When I got back home in July, I started another round of research. This time the criteria were clear - I was looking for a car I’d take to the PCH, and could survive Toronto’s winter. I’ll skip through a lot of details and only mention that the Miata was not an immediate answer. Remember that guy I mentioned a while back? Because of that, I felt intimidated even to consider a Miata. I was/am not a cool car person. However, I kept remembering that conversation to the point where I Googled what a Miata was, and I was not expecting it to look this… innocent? I also found out that Miata had the RF version, which seemed plausible to be driven in the snow.
I saw a pretty cool RF on Leasebuster, black on black, with a reasonable price tag. The only issue was that it was manual. Fun fact: yours truly got her driver’s license in Virginia. I barely knew how to drive in the snow, let alone drive a stick. However, everything else about the car just felt so right that I was intrigued to learn how to drive a manual.
I found an instructor in the GTA and booked an hour-long session. There is a Mazda dealership nearby, so the plan was to take the lesson, and if I felt good enough, I’d check out the car in person at the dealership before contacting the seller on Leasebuster.
That was exactly what happened, except for one small detail. I saw the car at the dealership, which happened to be the only one available at that time. The salesperson took me on a test drive with the top down, and when we got back, I put down the deposit and bought the car.
That was the day I got Clarice.
I picked up Clarice in the fall and spent almost every weekend practicing. I’d go to random towns outside of the GTA and come back with either a full roll of film or a box of butter tarts. When winter approached, I hesitated whether I should put in the effort to get her a set of winter tires, since I was about to spend a full month away from the cold.
Well, I’m glad that I did because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have thought of looking for local Miata clubs when I got back from my trip, I wouldn’t have found Miataphiles, I wouldn’t have joined the one and only winter tour of 2025, and I certainly wouldn’t have gained so much more knowledge about this car and this community.
Alright, thank you for reading. If you made it this far, I feel obligated to mention that this post is a long way to explain my innocently curious face when terms like tow hook, turbo, torque, etc, come up in a conversation.
I’m not a car person after all.