Yo always get to the finish line after you start.
If you can travel faster than your light signature, it might be that an observer at your destination was watching you take off, but only seeing it in the time light took to cover the distance (in your past). That would mean you could not only arrive before you took off, but you could debark your ship, and take a turn at the telescope to watch yourself take off.
What you would likely see is two identical ships. One at the launch pad and one closer to you, flying backwards back towards the launch pad. At the moment of launch, you would observe your distant self board the ship, start the engines and, just as your distant self hit the launch button, that second ship would land, right on top of you and both of you would disappear, while the third you watched through the telescope. That is, of course, if you could achieve FTL on the launch pad. Otherwise, you would merge and disappear as soon as you got above NAFAL somewhere away from your origin planet.
From the active pilot's view, time would appear to travel much faster ahead of you. Your telescope vision of your destination would start in the past and as you approached at light speed or above, actually any speed, the images in your telescope would move faster to catch up to your present upon your arrival. Looking behind you, at your destination, you would see life moving backwards. Upon passing FTL, the image of your ship would return to the launch pad, the second you would shut the ship down and you would debark backwards to go have breakfast and get back in bed.
Your own ship would leave a streak of light behind it as each new position would reflect or emit an image to travel out at light speed. You, as the pilot wouldn't see it, though, because you're moving too fast for any of those images to catch you until you arrived at your destination and slowed down. An outside observer would see that steak like the con trail of a jet. You would start to lengthen, to an outside observer. The faster you went, the longer the con trail image would be. At FTL, the lengthened image would also appear behind your actual position, farther and farther back, depending on the distance the outside observer was from your path. It would be like the wake of a speedboat. The father from the speedboat's path, the faster away the boat is before the wake rocks the observer's boat. The outside observer only being capable of observing the wake, not the speedboat, wouldn't have a good idea of actual speedboat position.
-Will
