My name is Matt Gallagher. I'm 37 years old, I live in a split-level house in Homewood, Alabama, and I have a spreadsheet problem. Every January first, I open a fresh Excel file and title it "Miata Build Budget." By March, I've stopped updating the "Actual" column. By December, I delete it and start over. The total usually lands somewhere between "that's not great" and "please don't tell my wife."
This blog exists because I finally stopped deleting the spreadsheet.
Hood & Pod is where tuning meets daycare pickup. It's the story of one guy's life split between an NA Miata with no radio and a minivan he refuses to buy — though his wife Jenn bought one anyway, and he respects it. I'm not a professional driver. I'm not a master mechanic. I'm a supply chain manager who spends his weekdays optimizing logistics for Vulcan Materials and his weekends chasing lap times at Barber Motorsports Park, which is exactly 19 minutes from my driveway. If you've ever tried to explain to a five-year-old why your car doesn't have a roof, or found yourself calculating whether your wife's Sienna is actually faster than your track car (it is, and I have the spreadsheet to prove it), you're in the right place.
The Cars
Two cars share the garage at 214 Oakdale Drive.
The first is a 1994 NA Mazda Miata. 1.8-liter engine, four-point roll bar, MCS single-adjustable coilovers, Toyo R888R tires, and no radio. I built it over three winters in my garage, which means three winters of Jenn asking whether the dining table would ever be clear of parts again. It weighs about as much as a well-packed suitcase and makes a noise like an angry sewing machine above 6,000 RPM. I won an SCCA Time Trial amateur class trophy with this car last year — though I'll be the first to tell you it was a light field, and the other guy's radiator gave up before I could beat him fair. The trophy sits on Jenn's bookshelf between Lily's spelling bee medal and our wedding photo. It's not the fastest car at Barber. It might be the most honest.
The second is a 2019 Mk7.5 Golf GTI. Turbocharged four-cylinder, DSG transmission, a child seat in the back, and a cold air intake that makes a whistle every time I leave a stoplight. My five-year-old son Max thinks it's a ghost. This is the car that does daycare pickup, grocery runs, and the occasional track session when the Miata is on jack stands — which, statistically, is about 40% of the time. It has a seven-inch scratch on the front bumper from the morning my daughter Lily learned to ride without training wheels. I haven't fixed it. I don't plan to.
Jenn drives a Toyota Sienna. I respect the Sienna. The Sienna has a better power-to-weight ratio than my Miata. We don't talk about this.
The People
I live with three people who did not sign up for a car blog.
Jenn (38, third-grade teacher) is smarter than me about money, which is why the household budget works and the Miata build budget exists in a separate, parallel financial universe that she graciously tolerates. She once correctly diagnosed a vacuum leak by sound alone, which impressed even Reg — and Reg is not easily impressed. She drives the Sienna. She is the reason any of this works.
Lily (7, competitive speller, bike-rider) is the reason the GTI's front bumper has a handlebar-shaped scratch. She asked me once why my car is so loud. I didn't have a good answer. I'm still working on one.
Max (5, aspiring dinosaur expert) calls the Miata "Daddy's broken car" because it doesn't have a roof. He's not wrong. He also thinks the GTI's DSG transmission is "the car sneezing," which I have chosen not to correct because it makes me laugh every time.
Two other voices show up regularly in these posts. Reg (Reggie Harmon, 64) is a retired racing team engine builder who runs a one-man ECU tuning shop in a Hoover strip mall between a vape shop and a dry cleaner. He speaks in five-word sentences and has forgotten more about air-fuel ratios than I will ever know. When a technical question exceeds my abilities, Reg walks in and tells me what I'm doing wrong. His signature line: "Air-fuel ratios don't care about your feelings." Nico (Nico Reyes, 38) is an automotive photographer and former CTCC test driver who shoots motion-blur track photography from the grass at Barber. His photo essays appear in "Through the Lens" and make my writing look worse by comparison, which I've accepted. His signature line: "The car is saying something. I'm just writing it down."
What This Blog Is (And What It Isn't)
Hood & Pod is not a car review site. I'm not going to rank the top ten sports sedans under $40,000 or tell you the 0-60 time of the latest BMW M3. Other people do that better than I ever will.
What I'm doing here is smaller and, I hope, more useful. I document what it's like to live with these cars — not just the spec sheets and the lap times, but the Tuesday-morning reality of a car with no air conditioning in Alabama in August. The conversation you have with a seven-year-old who asks why your car is so loud. The moment you're adjusting tire pressures in the paddock and remember you forgot to defrost the chicken for dinner.
This blog sits in the gap between Gears and Gasoline's road trip documentaries and Savagegeese's deep technical reviews. I don't test cars. I live with them, modify them, break them, fix them, and write down what happened. Every install comes with a real cost breakdown and the mistakes I made along the way. Every track day comes with the lap times and the spreadsheet that proves I'm still getting Turn 14 wrong. Every story about the kids is a story about what happens when car enthusiasm has to share space with car seats, soccer practice, and a wife who would prefer I not die in a thirty-year-old Mazda with no airbags.
Who This Is For
If you've ever installed a cold air intake and sat in the driveway afterward just listening to the sound at idle, this is for you. If you've ever tried to explain to a kindergartner why your car shakes when it's cold, this is for you. If you've ever tracked your project car spending and then deleted the spreadsheet because the number was too honest, this is for you.
I don't care if your "build" is a cat-back exhaust and a sticker. That's a build. I don't care if you've never been to a track day but you've watched hours of Barber footage on YouTube. You're already part of this. There is no gate here to keep.
This blog does not serve people who only care about horsepower and lap times. It does not serve collectors or auction-level buyers. It does not serve anyone looking for "how to negotiate with a car dealership" — that was the old Hood & Pod, and it's gone now. What remains is a garage with the door open and the coffee on.
The Signature Phrase
I'm not building a race car. I'm building a car I can race.
That's the line that runs through everything here. The Miata is not a dedicated track weapon. The GTI is not a show car. Both of them get driven to the grocery store, to school pickup, to the track, and home again — sometimes all in the same day. The goal is not to be the fastest. The goal is to build something you can live with, something that makes the everyday drives feel like they matter, something your kids will remember when they're old enough to drive themselves.
If that sounds like your life — the compromises, the spreadsheets, the strange joy of explaining a manual transmission to a kindergartner — then stick around. The garage door is open. The coffee's on.
— Matt Gallagher, Homewood, Alabama