Emy Kissick wasn’t who I expected to find in the paddock at SCCA®’s initial Targa event of the 2025 season, Targa Texasland. A road racer who won a $50,000 Mazda Motorsports scholarship to race a full season of Spec MX-5 in the SCCA’s U.S. Majors Tour® and Hoosier Racing Tire SCCA Super Tour in 2025, I figured 17-year-old Emy would be laser focused on those endeavors. Instead, she was touring Texas during the April 30-May 4, 2025, Targa Texasland as part of the three-woman Mazda Team ZoomZoomHER in an all-wheel-drive 2025 Mazda 3 turbo – and she was loving it.
You can read all about how Targa Texasland unfolded by clicking here, but being that Emy was a road racer participating in the four day, four racetrack Time Attack-style Targa competition (with TrackSprint elements), I couldn’t wait to get her take on the event.
“As a road racer who started out doing lap days and track driving like this, this is definitely nostalgic for me – it takes me back to when I started driving street cars on the track,” Emy explained in the paddock of Harris Hill Raceway during the second day of Targa Texasland competition.
Emy’s road racing career began not long ago, but her trajectory has been largely vertical. “This is only my third season [road racing],” she admitted, adding that by Targa Texasland, she was already seven race weekends into her season. “I started racing Spec Miata in 2023 after taking a racing school at ProFormance Racing School in Seattle, Washington. I always loved cars since I was 10 or 11 years old, and my first car was actually a Datsun 280Z which I bought when I was 14. I didn't really know about the racetrack, and I just loved the mechanics side of it. When I was 15, my mom bought me a high-performance driving day as a Christmas present, and that’s what started the very slippery slope.”
Emy’s Targa Texasland adventure wasn’t something she saw coming. Now deeply integrated into the Mazda Motorsports family via her scholarship, her Targa adventure began by answering the phone. “I didn’t know I was going to be here until about a month before the event,” she laughed.
SCCA Targa, she explained, is very different from a road racing weekend – but for her, it was also a welcome change of pace.
“Targa is very similar to a high-performance driving day or a lapping event; or, as a road racer, it’s like a qualifying session every time I go out,” she said. “It’s been super fun to be in a more relaxed atmosphere, taking a shift from the super-competitive atmosphere that is the racetrack during a Spec MX-5 weekend. It’s also been very fun to hang out with my Targa teammates Abby and Kelly .”
Hitting multiple racetracks in one week alongside a group of likeminded enthusiasts is fun in and of itself, but Emy added that there’s another reason road racers should be drawn to the event.
“I would recommend [SCCA Targa events] for any racer who wants to learn new tracks,” she said. “The ‘tour’ style of Targa, you get to visit more than one track in a week. It’s a great experience if you want to maximize your time at various racetracks, and I think any road racer would appreciate that.”
Want to join the Targa action? There are two more Targas on the calendar for 2025, the first being Targa Southland, taking place June 11-15 and hitting Atlanta Motorsports Park, Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, NCCAR, and Carolina Motorsports Park. Targa Chicagoland concludes the Targa season with a July 30-Aug. 3 adventure that puts drivers at Autobahn Country Club, Putnam Park, Tire Rack’s test track, and Gingerman Raceway.
Learn more about these upcoming Targa events (and enter one…or both!) by clicking here.
Photo by Philip Royle
