My Modified Toyota Prius Track Taxi is So Fun on the Race Track

Despite sounding like an obscure anime title, the final episode of the Track Taxi saga is one for the ages.

“If it isn’t fun, then what’s the point?” Life is a continual existential crisis; there’s never enough time, never enough money, and never enough self-worth.

That’s the problem with all of SoCal’s tracks: they’re really far away. Rising hours before the sun does, and driving long distances where the silence is only punctuated with nerves — “what was that noise? Is this car going to make it?” — isn’t good for the mind. The listlessness, growing over every bump and crack in the broken pavement that sprawls across Los Angeles, is enough to make anyone go mad.

“It doesn’t help that the stereo in this piece of shit barely works.”

I didn’t grow up dreaming about racing a beat up old Toyota Prius. I dreamed about the Porsche 911 GT3, Corvettes, and small Japanese sports cars with buzzy, frenetic engines. But I spent too much time dreaming, and not enough time studying or achieving much in life. So while I dreamed on a GT3 budget, I was driving with much less.

It was cold when I got to Willow Springs International Raceway. So cold that the oil in my cheap Godspeed coilovers may as well have frozen over. I was testing the limit of the padding in the Prius’ well-worn driver’s seat.

My attitude began to thaw as I lined the Track Taxi up with the other race-ready machinery that had materialized. The Prius began to turn heads, especially when what remained of the interior was swiftly removed and dumped in the paddock. This car needs all the help it can get on track, and weight reduction is free horsepower in a pinch.

As soon as I hit the first corner at Streets of Willow, I noticed the difference. The Prius had a lot of grip. While the Track Taxi’s stock wheels and teeny-tiny tires howled in protest around every corner, my budget-friendly FWD staggered setup had none of that. With 245 section-width Bridgestone rubber up front I barely had to brake, at all, the entire lap. Which is good, because my budget didn’t allow for any sort of improvements in terms of power or acceleration.

The Prius was still dreadfully slow, inching along the front and back straights as if waiting for the breeze to pick up and give it a hand. But the corners were a different story. I could carry all of the speed that the humble Track Taxi would generate through the corners.
I quickly began to develop a rhythm with the car, figuring out how to juice the battery up on off-laps for full-on assaults the following lap. In my mind, I was managing the KERS, like an old F1 car. A really slow, old F1 car.

I had a lot of time to think between corners. I also interacted with a lot more cars between corners. Because of the Prius’ speed differential to every other car on track I barely had to lift, if at all, to let people pass. Their exhaust notes all sounded better than mine, but I was having fun.

The absurdity of the experience made me laugh. Lap times were steadily tumbling but rather than fixate on a specific time, I just wanted to do better — refine my technique — and extract everything I could out of the car. This was fun, and that’s how it should be.

When cars are set up to turn the fastest lap possible they are edgy, hard to drive and that fatigue, along with the mental battle of trying to achieve the best possible lap time or cross some arbitrary but specific threshold is taxing. “If it isn’t fun, then what’s the point?” This hobby is so expensive, so all-encompassing that driving a car where there are no stakes is so refreshing. Tenth by tenth — with no self-inflicted pressure — lap times continued to fall and the Prius soldiered on taking the hard driving in stride. I even passed an S2000 along the way.

Twelve seconds. An eternity in motorsport time, and how much my final lap time in the Track Taxi dropped from when I first brought the car to the track bone stock and ragged. Covering the 1.55 mile track in 1:38 means the Track Taxi had an average speed of a whopping 57 mph, and peak speeds cresting a lofty 80 mph.

With the massive improvement in both my disposition and the car’s lap times, the day — and this build — came to a wrap. The Prius was a phenomenal palette cleanser. Operating with very little money, and even less expectations, the Prius did everything I had hoped it would. Cheap thrills, and a good laugh when I needed it most.