Track season is winding down. The last week of October, I’m going to Watkins Glen for 2 days and to Lime Rock for 1. Then the season ends, and with it ends the Protégé’s tenure as my primary track car. It’s given me 2 relatively trouble-free years. But it’s old, it’s tired, and it’s time for me to move on. Before I do, I thought I’d look back on my first track car, a 1994 Mazda Protégé.

The Protégé was never meant to be a track car. I bought it from a woman whose last name was Schmuck for a thousand bucks. It had 143,000 miles on it when I got it. It has 263,000 now. Even for a beater, it was slow in a straight line, and my friends deemed it the most innocuous car ever.

Even now, in “track” form, it’s pretty inept. It has the 125hp DOHC engine and rear disc brakes out of a ’93 Protégé LX instead of the original 102hp SOHC engine and rear drums. It has the mildest possible shock/spring upgrade, large sway bars, a full exhaust, racing brake pads, and Spec Miata-legal wheels and tires.

Misfortune and joblessness brought the Protégé to the track for the first time. In May of 2007, I took my VR-4 to Watkins Glen, where I proceeded to boil the rear brakes, destroy the tires, and bend 2 wheels (not from spinning, but from bombing through the bus stop and over curbing). Shortly after, I was laid off and in no position to resurrect the VR-4.

Enter the Protégé. For the first few track days it still had the rear drums—meaning that it had no rear brakes at all. I discovered this to be the case during the first track day after installing the rear discs, when I trail-braked into the bowl at NHMS with working rears and pitched the car off the track.

By that time, the Protégé had already established itself as a sort of track-day oddity. It was by far the “slowest” and the worst car at every event. In a sea of Lotuses, Porsches, BMWs, and Miatas—all blending together—the Protégé was as blatant on the track as it was innocuous off of it. And it was fast, much faster than I expected and much faster than other people could believe.

Possessing much more grip than its appearance indicated, the Protégé could lift tires through most tight corners. In the downhill turn 10 at NHMS, I regularly put it on two wheels. I became bolder and bolder with the car, using every last inch of the track. It didn’t matter if I crashed it into a wall; I could throw it out, buy another, swap a few parts, and be up and running in a matter of days.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I was roaring past people. At best, I’d make 1 or 2 passes a day. The Protégé’s victories were solely in holding off the faster cars, the real cars, longer than everyone thought possible.

After 5 or 6 track days, people wanted to know what I had “done” to the car. One driver I spoke to (a former Protégé owner) told me he couldn’t believe how fast the car was for “a little DOHC 1.8L”. When I told him I was running the SOHC, he almost refused to believe it. A Miata driver at Lime Rock that I fought off for 4 laps before blowing the left-hander and pointing him by said, “I don’t understand how you make that car go that fast.”

The Protégé, by late summer ’07, had become something of a symbol for the Pansy Patrol. It represented our most basic attitudes towards cars and driving: We don’t care what you drive, or how cool it looks, or how much it cost, so long as you drive it like a beast. We like to see cars driven to the extent of their mechanical abilities, and we’d rather talk to someone driving his econobox over the rumble strips than to some Porsche Turbo owner sauntering around the track. (This isn’t to say that all Porsche turbo owners saunter. The ones that don’t have our deepest admiration.)

Every time it went out on track, the Protégé proved the old cliché: It’s the driver, not the car. And, every time I took it out, I got a little faster with it. I learned the tracks more and more (especially NHMS); new street tires and a properly working front sway bar also helped.

When the 2007 season ended, the Protégé had logged about 10 track days. It had given me no mechanical trouble, and it had been the best learning tool I could have. Every mistake I made in that car was huge; if I lost 2 car lengths by going into a corner too hot, I had to work for 5 laps to make it back.

In 2008 the Protégé became something else: a goofball eyesore and a perverse circus act.

A month before the first track day at NHMS, I exploded the transmission and was forced to upgrade to the Protégé LX engine and driveline. The new engine, the 1.8L DOHC BP found in slightly different form in the Miata, increased power to 125. I installed a cheap header, and the exhaust broke after the cat, leaving me with a loud but every efficient system. I also bought new tires—serious street tires this time instead of the cheap rubber I had used the previous year.

A week before the track day, I discovered that one of my wheels was broken. I didn’t have a replacement, so Tim welded it as best he could. At the track day, the wheel lasted 1 session before 4 out of 5 spokes broke and I hobbled it into the pits. I figured my day was done and got ready to pack up and watch for the rest of the day.

Then one of the Spec Miata guys offered to let me borrow a spare set of wheels with almost-dead RA-1s on them. Of course, I took the offer.

With the Toyos and the DOHC, the car was immediately capable of much quicker laps. Cars that I struggled to pace with the old engine and street tires, I could now pass. The car didn’t pick up much in top speed (at NHMS, for instance, I still struggled to get out of 3rd gear), but I could brake later, turn faster, and power out more effectively.

The Protégé has never been the same. That day I was parked next to a Porsche GT3. The owner had been ribbing me good-naturedly about the shoddiness of my car. Then we were on track together. He passed me quite easily—with a GT3, race tires, and probably 20 years experience on me, he better have—but there was no more ribbing when we got back into the paddock. I ordered my own r-compounds the next day.

Reactions like the GT3 driver’s started to pile up as I kept getting faster. I had driven the car hard from the start, but I started really using the curbs, the dirt, the sand—anything I thought the Protégé could drive over. I ran at the ragged edge, so close to 10/10ths that lifting off the throttle in the Watkins Glen bus stop would put me into the gravel, so close that if I blew the trail-braking in corner 1 of NHMS I ended up 30 feet into the grass. By mid-June at NHMS, I was running 1:25s. For comparison, the Spec Miata fast lap at NHMS at a club race about a month ago was a 1:18. Seven seconds is a lot, but it’s less than it seems when you consider that a Spec Miata has relatively comparable power, shorter gears, less weight, and an actual suspension and alignment.

The car also started to break. From strut mounts to exhausts to fuel lines to ball joints to belts and radiators, the Protégé began to break down from being driven so hard for so long. I developed a constant wheel bearing problem. Because of the low offset of my track wheels and the high-stress left-handers at NHMS, I failed right front wheel bearings constantly. The cheap crash bolts I had been using to dial in some sort of negative camber would loosen under cornering; I never knew, for example, what steering wheel position would be “straight” when cresting the hill before the bowl at NHMS. Last month I drove through one of my busted wheel bearings. The vibration and stress welded the axle nut to the axle, and it took me almost an hour to chisel it off. Whereas the Protégé was once defined by its resilience, it has more recently been defined by its fragility, always just barely making it through the day.

I never meant for the car to be fast, or for me to be fast in it. At Thunderbolt last month I had a Lotus guy graciously joke with me that I had convinced him to sell his car and just buy a Protégé. Of course, I also drove through the sand at the apex of turn 2 all day, spraying the track with crud for everyone else to deal with. In fact, I drove over every curb at Thunderbolt—I drove to the edge of every curb. Yes, it was fast, but this wasn’t what driving was meant to be. The Protégé wasn’t supposed to be a means for me to learn how to drive with a constant slip angle, lifting tires and crashing over rumble strips throwing up smoke clouds and snapping the wheel to break the tail free. The car was faster that way, but no other car, no real race car, is driven in that manner.

It’s time to retire the Protégé and the body of technique required to drive it. It is no longer a symbol of how a driver’s skill can make a slow car fast. It’s an emblem of how a driver can run a noisy, smelly, unreliable car to the ragged edge, of how aggression can make you faster without necessarily making you better. And that’s not what we’re about at the Pansy Patrol. I know I said earlier that we don’t care what you drive, so long as you drive it like a beast—but driving like a beast isn’t just about being aggressive. It’s about continually developing skills, and in that respect the Protégé has reached its limit and can do no more. I’ll hobble it through the last few events, and perhaps it’ll make an appearance or two next year just for old time’s sake. But as far as I’m concerned, the Protégé era is over. It’s time to move on.