Songfacts®:

• The Mach 5 is Speed Racer's car, and it's very fast. In this song, Presidents Of The United States Of America frontman Chris Ballew recalls his childhood when he used his imagination to drive his own Mach 5.
  
  "That was about the joy of when I was a little kid," he told Songfacts. "I loved building model airplanes or buying Matchbox cars and playing with them for a while, but then devising maniacal ways to destroy them. That was part of the fun. You know, loading up a B-52 model bomber with gunpowder from a brick of fireworks and lighting it on fire. So it was just about the joy of smashing."
• The Speed Racer franchise started in Japan and became an anime that was dubbed into English and shown in America. In 2008 it was made into a live-action film directed by The Wachowskis, known for their work on The Matrix movies.
• "Mach 5" was the lead single from the second Presidents Of The United States Of America album, appropriately titled II. They were one of the many Seattle bands to land a record deal in the '90s, even though they didn't do grunge. Their debut album was a smashing success, selling over 3 million copies thanks to the hits "Peaches" and "Lump." II didn't do nearly as well, and they split in 1998, re-forming from time to time to record and perform.
• Musically, this song is influenced by Kiss, specifically the song "Shout It Out Loud." It was written by band members Chris Ballew and Dave Dederer, who each played guitar, but Ballew's had two strings and Dederer's had three.