Today’s Post by Joe Farace
This website’s subtitle is “the home of Tortuga Racing…” and from time to time I receive e-mail asking What is Tortuga Racing?
Tortuga Racing was originally started in 2001 by Mary and I and consisted of the cars that we competed with in various forms of motorsports at that time—a Mazda Miata for Mary and and my VW GTI 337—and with which we participated in various forms of amateur motorsports such as SCCA Solo2, autocrosses, as well as import drag racing.
We wanted our little racing team to have a distinctive name and one that was not already being used. In case you didn’t already know it, tortuga is Spanish for turtle, which gives you some idea of the type of racers we were and are. Our motto was “never last” because while we didn’t think we could win any trophies—OK, Mary thought she could—and competed mostly for fun.
Along the way a talented graphic designer in Las Vegas came up with a logo for our team featuring Tomas, the turtle wearing goggles and sporting racing slicks instead of feet. His look was inspired by the movie series featuring the flying, fire-breathing turtle Gamera and if you’re not a fan of Japanese kaiju films you may not get that.
The Tortuga Racing logo appeared on T-shirts, shorts, tank tops like the one that aspiring model Sabrina is wearing at right and, at the time, were given away to fans of my blogs and this site.
Mary and I had a lot of fun with Tortuga Racing and somewhere in time the exigencies of the real world caught up with us and Tomas went into hibernation.
Tomas was not the only one in hibernation but sometime next year Mary and I want to bring Tortuga Racing back and have begun looking for a car or cars we can both enjoy and compete with but no deals have been made as of yet. And I’ll update this page when that changes.
PS. I’d like to make new T-shirts thisyear but the screen printing company who made the original Tortuga Racing shirts and specialized in small runs is out of business and if you know of anybody who can do short runs of affordable shirts, please drop me an e-mail via the Contact button at the top of the page. I’ll make sure you get one of the new shirts.