“You need a hobby,” said Nathanial Sparks’ mother to him and his father.
Thus, a career, racing championships, and eventually a business, were launched.
“We were homeschooled all the way up until high school, which meant I was playing every sport every month of the year all over the place,” explains Sparks, now the owner of Whelen Mazda MX-5 Cup Presented by Michelin prep shop Spark Performance. “I was always in a sports environment where you’re on a team and you have to work with your teammates to try to win the game.
“So then when Mom wanted Dad and I to have more of a hobby to do together, she said, ‘Well, [Sparks’ father] Jerry was always interested in cars. He always built his cars throughout the years, tinkering and all that kind of stuff back in the day when he was a kid. So, let’s do car stuff.’
“It started off with a couple of autocrosses, and then that’s kind of when you start getting involved in motorsports, and being competitive in motorsports gives you a lot of avenues to go down.”
The avenue that father and son Sparks chose led to Spec Miata and eventually the Teen Mazda Challenge. A win at the NASA Championships in 2011, and the scholarship money that came with it, steered them to MX-5 Cup. Back then, for the first-generation race car based on the NC MX-5, the cars weren’t built by a single company, but rather by the teams using the spec parts, so it was a perfect project for the father-son duo to tackle.
The first 2012 race weekend at Sebring International Raceway may not have gone to plan, with Sparks trying to straighten frame rails in between two palm trees after crashing the car in testing. He got it fixed, and while it wasn’t the most attractive car on the grid with its mis-matched body panels, he still drove it to top-10 finishes that weekend.
It’s been a long journey from that beginning to where Sparks (below) is now. The path was laid out before him by being in the right place at the right time.
“One of the races we went to, a fellow competitor crashed, so his car needed to be re-tubbed, and it was a really close, quick turnaround to the next event,” Sparks recounts. “I was standing next to the team owner, John Dean II of Sick Sideways Racing in Florida, and we’re looking at the car, and I said, ‘Hey, I can come down and help you build the next car and get your guy back out there.’ He said OK, so two or three days later, I’m talking to Mom and Dad telling them I’m going to go down to Florida to help this team build a car.”
Sick Sideways was growing in Sebring, and Sparks stayed with the team for several years. He won the first championship with the new ND-based Global MX-5 Cup car in 2016. He also won the multi-national Global MX-5 Cup Invitational. He followed that up with another Invitational win in 2018. That’s when things began to go in a different direction for Sparks and his wife Courtney, who got her degree in finance and was working in banking in Sebring.
“When I won the [Invitational] in 2016, they give you a decent amount of money to race the next year,” says Sparks. “But since I mostly took care of everything myself, I could race for as cheap as anyone could possibly do it. So, I took the money and bought a property and had a building built on it in Alabama. I knew I wanted to do this for myself one day, and I wanted to move home to Alabama.
“So then when ’18 happened and we won a little bit more money, it’s like, ‘All right, I’ve got a little bit of a cushion.’ So ’19 came around, and I was like, ‘Honey, I’m moving back to Alabama,’ because I had to make a decision to do it then or later; I didn’t want to leave mid-season.”
It was one of those let’s-just-do-it-and-figure-out-the-rest-later deals that ended up working out, because his first customer was Gresham Wagner, who would go on to take the 2021 MX-5 Cup championship.
“Then I was fortunate to say I won the championship in the car and out of the car, which was pretty cool, because in the end, I didn’t necessarily want to be a race driver, but I wanted to be in racing,” Sparks explains. “I really liked the trucks, the logistics of everything, and working on the cars. I think that’s something that I’m probably better at than the driving part. I was decent at the driving part, but I knew that I wasn’t good enough to do anything more than, if I could come up with the money, just keep driving. But the team part was really where I was excited.”
And indeed, he’s proved extremely good at it. Spark Performance ran three cars in the 2024 Mazda MX-5 Cup (above) for Alex Bachoura (No. 33), Grant West (50) and series rookie Sally Mott (15), while also expanding the operation to include running in other series. He hopes it’s just the beginning.
“If you were to ask me to dream big and tell you, ‘What’s the one thing that you wanted to come away from this?’ I would think it would be so cool that 30 years from now, people might still know the Spark Performance name in racing,” Sparks says. “We’ve got all these big guys now whose names are just part of motorsports. I’d like to be able to do that one day, have my name be a part of motorsports. Sure, it’d be great to win Daytona or run a car at Le Mans, but even if I don’t succeed in that, I still think that that would be the cool thing — if I could just still be around and make it into something.”
Follow Mazda MX-5 Cup to learn more about the upcoming 2024 Shootout including the 2025 schedule, until then check out the 2024 season championship at Road Atlanta and more on The RACER Channel.
