Day 8 started with the regular morning driver’s meeting in the host hotel lobby, with everyone realizing that it would be our last of this trip and soon asking, “Where did the time go?” Understandably, Goodguys’ Ed Capen, our organizer and handler for the week, made a point to tell everyone not to call him the next morning asking where to meet!
After the meeting, we all headed out to our first stop at Steve Cook Creations in nearby Oklahoma City, a full service hot rod and custom shop. Cook had some of his local customers bring their hot rods to join the party, and his wife Kim provided us with all sorts of baked goodies that she had slaved over until 3:00 am that morning.
From Cook’s place we drove just down the road to Ted Davis’s Car Collection, an impressive multi-purpose shop that not only houses some incredible collector cars, vintage race cars, bicycles, and early century memorabilia, but also a host of machinery to build pretty much anything you can imagine. This includes molds to cast parts (engine blocks, heads, or whatever) out of aluminum or cast-iron. This was really quite the shop, and Davis gave us a personal tour of the place explaining every car and aspect of the shop.
Then it was the bittersweet last leg of the Tour, a 170-mile-ish drive to the Texas Motor Speedway in Ft. Worth. My non-overdriven Mustang’s inability to keep up with the speed demons leading the pack combined with my ability to get distracted turned out to be a good thing because we missed the severe storms that the rest of the tour encountered.
Not only did we miss the hail storms but I got a chance to bond with some other ponies and Rob Kinnan took my all time favorite picture ever! When we saw the speedway, we pulled over to take some photos before checking into the final host hotel across the street, parking the Mustang with all the hot rods that we had gotten to know and become fond of. There was a finale dinner planned for that night, but I had made a previous commitment to attend the Performance Driving School at Carolina Motorsports Park so I had to leave to hit the road for the 1,000-mile trip to that, with only 24 hours to make it.
It was hard to hug and say goodbye to all the wonderful people I now consider my new friends. This Road Tour was quite a bit different than the rallies that I’m used to doing, but it ranks up there with one of the best times I’ve had with my Mustang. On the surface, this kind of trip is about the cars, but in reality it’s all about the people, the friends you make. I’m looking forward to doing it again next year!
Special thanks to Ed Capen for keeping the heard together, Goodguys for organizing such a great tour, Kicker for keeping the music loud, Speed Direct and BFGoodrich for the smooth ride, Performance Plus Connection for pink spark protection, Old Air Products for keeping us cool and Stono Body Works, Scott Drake, National Parts Depot, Bert’s Market, JBA Exhaust and Impact Image Group for all the support that keeps my Mustang rollin’!