Southern Motoring Society is a community built for those who value driving great roads, and the culture surrounding auto enthusiasm across Alabama and the Southeast.
We aim to connect and share our love of cars and car culture through local meets, driving experiences with great scenery and destinations that highlight what makes Southern roads and car culture unique.
This site is about bringing together people who simply enjoy cars, whether daily drivers, performance builds, exotics or classics.
Southern Motoring Society is just getting started. If you have the passion for all cars, you’re on the right site.
About the Founder
Every memorable drive has a story. Sometimes it’s the car, but more often it’s the road, the destination, and the experiences found along the way. I’m Brent McClendon, the founder of Southern Motoring Society and my love of cars isn’t something I can trace back to a single moment. I have been fascinated with them as long as I can remember. Maybe I got it from my parents, my Mom had GTOs and Chevelles. My Dad when I was growing up had Mustangs, I was 9 when my dad took me along to buy his 83 Mustang GT, right off the showroom floor! That memory stuck with me and so did riding in it not long after, T-tops off, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album was in my Dad’s tape deck most of the time. A simple memory, but one I’ve held onto ever since.
I’ve owned lots of cars over the years, mostly Mustangs. I still have a soft spot for them, but after learning and driving them for years I wanted something different. I have always been drawn to European brands. I had a Volvo before this, and just two months ago picked up a Mercedes-Benz E450 Coupe and recently joined the Mercedes-Benz Club of America (MBCA). I’m sure the Mercedes won’t be my last as there’s far too many cars still on my list, like every car guy has. Beyond the cars themselves, it’s always been about the driving and exploring. I grew up in a small Southern town, and getting my driver’s license opened up the world. There’s nothing like a drive to nowhere in particular, no destination, just the countryside rolling by. One of my favorite local roads is Highway 231 north of Fayetteville, Tennessee, where the hills and curves make the drive itself the whole point. I recently was able to take a bucket list drive up the Pacific Coast Highway from L.A. to San Francisco, that was incredible! That love of the open road is really what Southern Motoring Society is built on and to actually share these drives with others, I needed two things, a way to capture them, and a way to tell them.
The capturing part came naturally. My interest in photography came from that same place cars did. As a kid, I’d pick up car magazines just for the images, and I got my first 35mm camera at 10 years old. I’ve been taking pictures ever since of everything! To me, a photo is a small piece of time, a place, a moment, a thing worth remembering. It’s a big part of how I document the roads, cars, and places you’ll see featured here.
The telling part is where I’m still learning. Writing is newer territory for me, and honestly not something I ever expected to be doing. My background is technical, 30 years in manufacturing, starting as a machinist and working up to Quality Engineer. I’ve written plenty of technical procedures over the years, but never anything like this. (I nearly flunked English 101, so bear with me.) What I lack in formal writing skill, I’m hoping to make up for with genuine enthusiasm for the subject.
Putting cars, driving, photography, and now writing together is what led me to start this site. I wanted a place to share great roads, great museums, great food and the events that bring car people together. My hope is to keep growing it with more destinations, more in-depth guides, maybe even organized drives and meetups down the road. That’s the goal, and I’m working toward it one story at a time.
Thanks for being here! I hope these stories send you out to find a few of your own.
