Childhood dreams turn wheel
By Jesse Phelps

His garage is Mike Taggart's magic kingdom.
For the serious collector, each individual piece has something specific - a history, a design - that makes it special. Collecting takes a certain temperament, a desire to follow one's bliss, no matter how eccentric. In general, quantity can be important, but quality and rarity are the benchmarks.

Mike Taggart, a former English teacher at Ojai Valley School and Ventura College, has spent the past several years building a collection of classic race cars and rare motorcycles to boggle the mind. He's got a Lola, formerly raced by Paul Newman, and an impeccably maintained Formula 1 car, each worth about a quarter of a million dollars, not to mention a pair of rare Jaguars and an impressive array of English motorcycles.

Taggart grew up in Indiana within spitting distance of the Indianapolis Speedway. He says when he was young he couldn't pay attention to school because he could hear the cars on the track from the classroom. One day, he just left school, made his way to the raceway, and a passion was born.

The collection began when he inherited "Budweiser money" and it has been evolving ever since. At first Taggart, who donates to various causes, including a pair of annual tennis scholarships to the Weil Tennis Academy, just bought the cars to look at.

Then, he says, friends started to urge him to race. Now past 70, Taggart says he enjoys the thrill of driving the cars but he says he's too old to go very fast. So, instead, he hires drivers and works with the crew in the pits.

Taggart says the thrill of his life happened one day last year when he had a car racing at Sears Point. Looking back over his shoulder at the grandstand, he saw his family, including his grandchildren, waving at him at he stood trackside next to cars zooming by at high speeds. "I've got all kinds of pictures of it," he says.

Seeing his passion passed on to the younger generation, even if the cars were just a tad scary to them, he says, stirred the emotion in him as he remembered his own yearnings as a kid. "All those years I sat in the Indy grandstands dreaming to be out there," Taggart says.

© 2003 The Ojai Valley News

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