All my Cars (92 Miata, 03 MSP, 97 Impreza, 94 Miata, 88 RX-7, 06 E-350, 90 Miata, 03 P5, 97 Miata)

I would have to get a Porsche first before I could get a Porsche parts car and be classy

I think the car being on jackstands and the missing/dented fenders might have tipped them off that it was not a nice car.

July
Black RallyX Miata
Took the black rallyx car to east coast national challenge.

Since Maxxis tires was offering contingency for rallyx this year I bought some Maxxis tires. Tried the DMACK tires vs Maxxis tires. Both were close on the Test & Tune course so went with the Maxxis since they were paying contingency.

We did pretty well.

Ended up 1st and 4th in class but more importantly 1st and 2nd Mazda in class so we both won a bit of money from mazda motorsports.

Dirty Snow
Since the steel wheels had some issues at the last event it was at another local rallyxer offered some stock subaru alloy wheels cheap. The finish on the wheels was toast so they needed a little bit of refinishing. Stripping the stock finish.

This color will look nice.

August
CSP Car
In August the 949 clutch I installed at the start of the year started having some issues. Pulled it apart to find this.

One of the discs looked like this.

So I had to order and install new ones.

Found a deal on a small fortune racing front bar so I bought it for the CSP car. Had to drill out the sway bar mounts on the car. Installed the new bar. While I was under there I found that I was missing some minor nuts. Just the ones that hold the motor mounts.... I am sure they dont make much difference.

Blue RallyX car
The blue rallyx car had a bit of clutch shudder when I bought it but it had gotten worse over the last few weeks so with the parts from the parts car I figured I should just replace the clutch. While I have it on the lift I went ahead and replaced the suspension. Out with the old. In with the new

The blue rallyx car came with the larger NB sport brakes so I needed to downsize the brakes to run the 14" rally tires that I wanted to run. Good thing I had some other miata laying around that I can borrow parts from. Not the parts car just my 1997 dailyish miata. The fronts swapped no problem but I held off on the rear while I took the car to a susq scca event. It ended up being a bit of a mud fest. https://www.youtube.com/embed/KJbrrGuRolk

The last time I did brakes on the 97 I had some issues with getting the rear rotor off so I just left the old one on but this time I need to get it off to swap the rear brakes. That is not going so well. This should work. Yeah not so much. I ended up pulling the rear axles and uprights from the parts car to get the 97 brakes working again.

Since I had the big front bar from the CSP car I figured I should go ahead and install it in the blue rallyx car.

Free Miata.
My wife got offered a free 1994 miata with a hard top because the owner did not want to deal with craigslist crazies. I of course said why are we not already in the car picking it up?
Not that bad looking for free... Ok I can see more of the reason why it was free.

Looking a little better inside.

Hey look another torn miata shift boot.

I skipped that 8/6 Susq event because I needed a day off in the middle of a busy autocross season, and boy am i glad I did. That was brutal. I will remember to stay away from that site when wet. Even with running water through the site, Kempton is stickier than that.

RedGT wrote: I skipped that 8/6 Susq event because I needed a day off in the middle of a busy autocross season, and boy am i glad I did. That was brutal. I will remember to stay away from that site when wet. Even with running water through the site, Kempton is stickier than that.

I think the one run I took at the canceled Kempton event to test out the course was almost as slow.

Sept
Now that the blue car was ready we needed to test it against the black car before choosing what one to take to nationals. Since the next DC rallyx was at the local rally farm site we decided to bring both cars out. This would also be the weekend of the second annual Dirty Industries DoubleCross
with one rallyx event at VIR on Saturday (215 miles from home) before coming back to Catlett, VA for the sunday event (212 miles from VIR). This was not nearly as bad as DIDX in 2015 where it was home to VIR to Frontburg to Home but still a good drive. The VIR rallyX events are always interesting. Being a non SCCA club the courses tend to be a lot faster and they use less cones so we spent more time looking at the butterfly's on the red flag than we do resetting cones. Thanks toDirty Industries for some pictures. Vir Course

Thanks to Brian Battocchi we have some pictures of the cars on Sunday.
Rally Farm - Black Car Rally Farm - Blue Car

As my wife was headed out for her next to last run in the blue car the starter noticed a bit of an oil drip and asked if we had checked the oil recently.

We had checked it before the event but not at any time during the event and had been running the whole event without an oil cap. I quickly ran over to the van and grabbed the extra oil we always carry and brought it over and started pouring it in. After about a quart or so I thought to check the oil level and it was about full again so I think we dodged a bit of a bullet there thanks to the starter.

Even after some cleaning the underside of the hood still looked dirty.

During the DC event it looked like my wife was faster in the blue car and I was close in both with a little edge to the blue car. After looking at the results it turned out my times were a little under a second faster in the blue car and my wife was about 1.5 seconds faster with that car on those tires on that course. With that in mind we decided to take the blue car to nationals for the 3rd event it had been to.

So we added the needed stickers and headed to nationals.

Oct
Blue RallyX Car
I was hoping to do well at nationals but we ran into the wet grass that I don't do very well running in again and I lost so much time in the wet that even having the fastest class times on all the dryish runs was not enough to win. I took 3rd so time to get better tires and figure out how to drive in the crappy wet grass since I lost the last 2 years on wet runs. Some old wet tires that a friend gave me but did not help enough.

First run on Sunday morning. Sorry about the water on the camera but that is about how it looked on the ground also. https://www.youtube.com/embed/TxQsNupedRI Last Run Sunday morning. Camera is much cleaner and so is the course. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Jfd2RZvHMjs

Free miata
Needed some maint. The upper ball joint was a little floppy and I was feeling it in the steering. Once I got the new one in it tightened up quite a bit.

Also did plugs and wires since I had no clue when they were last done on that car.

CSP Car(s)
After talking with some other CSP competitors we had decided that swapping to an NB chassis for CSP to get the better ABS brakes might be a good idea to stop killing hoosiers from brake lockups if we could find the chassis cheap enough. You can't just swap the NB ABS into the NA chassis because the holes are not there to install it. So on my daily checks of craigslist I find another crystal blue miata with close to the same mileage as my rallyx car for only $1900. I send him a message asking if it has ABS or if he does not know can he send me an underhood picture so I can tell. I get back a picture like this.
Yes that is an ABS car so after talking with my wife about getting a sort of twin to our rallyx car I arrange to meet the owner and end up buying the car for $1900. 2001 Miata 6 speed, VVT motor so I pretty much need to take the whole driveline/suspension from the CSP car as well as the dash and put it into the 2001 chassis.

Old car on Bottom. New car on top. Quite a lot of work in between.

Now both the RallyX car and the CSP will be going from black NA chassis to Crystal Blue Metallic NB chassis. Good thing I actually like the color.

Nov
Before I can work on that this winter I need to finish stripping down the parts car and for that I need a little more space in the basement for parts. We managed to rearrange and move enough stuff in the basement to clear out this hole.

And built another set of shelfs for parts storage.

Protege 5 I had been telling my wife that the front motor mount on her car needed to be looked at and possibly replaced... She finally got around to looking at it and decided that it did.

My wife decided that we had a few to many cars for the keys to just be sitting on the table and that we needed a key holder.

Well that took care of her keys.... I still need to find one for my keys before my wife decides to get me some rack I don't like.

December
Got the RallyX miata back from the vinyl guy in time for the last RallyX of the season.

Finished pulling parts from the parts car.

Moved the old car into the other garage bay so we can start working on them both. Compression tested the "old" CSP car and the new one to see if I could leave the new engine in place and just swap everything else over. "old" engine (From 92 CSP car) "New" Engine (came with 01 Miata)

Yeah I need to pull the motor from the 92 and swap everything over.

January

Got some of the external engine parts pulled in Dec but we got going good on it in Jan since it was so warm around here.

Getting them both ready.

One engine.

Two engine

Old wheels/tires and a HF furniture dolly should hold the engine fine.

Yummy fluids drained.

Lots of room to work now.

Lots of engine bay cleaning to do before we put the engine back in.

Dirty shocks waiting for the new car.

Pulled seats and ECU from old car.

Because the CSP car was a 1992 body some changes had been made to the 01 engine that was in it to get everything working correctly. Now that it is going back into an 01+ body I had to swap back over all the 01+ stuff so it would work correctly.

Dremeled the 00 IM so I can fit the 01 fuel rail.

More cleaning type stuff. Cleaned up some surface rust and painted over it. The silver paint had been laying around in the basement for a while so my wife decided that would work fine.

Also painted over the drilled out spot welds for the sway bar before installing the small fortune racing bar.

Now you A/C.

Now you don't.

Pulled the 3.9 diff from the blue car to put in my 4.10. Old one out. New one mostly in.

I had a lot of trouble getting that last inch in on the drivers side. Once I pulled the suspension from that corner I was able to get a better angle for pushing and it went in.

Driveshaft bolts back in.

Had to pull the front bumper to get the hoist close enough to get the new engine back in.

Fans are overrated. I only need this one.

Now it looks almost like it did when I started.

All of that trouble just to get a car with the washer bottle over here.

I see there will be two Shawn and Katie miatas at RX#1, eh? Dirty Snow getting sidelined as the rental?

Feburary

More new CSP car action.

Got the DIYBOB wired up for the 01 CSP car.

Found a nice square hole to run my round wires thru for the megasquirt.

The grommet makes my square hole look round.

Exhaust from old CSP car installed.

Megasquirt "Installed"

It was enough to try starting it up and get fuel spewing out of the fuel line that I did not reconnect well enough. got the fully connected and we see that it is trying to idle at 4k. Take it back out double check all my connections make sure they are correct then start checking the engine for vacuum leaks. This part is always fun. Found a loose bolt on the IM and double checked the fuel rail was all the way in.

Added frankenbolts for the hardtop.

Started out being careful pulling the soft top then looked closer at it and just pulled and ripped it. It was the original top from 01 and has seen lots of sun and miles as well as having been patched a few times.

All ripped out.

We don't need no stinking stereo.

More unneeded stuff.

A better picture of the small fortune racing bar.

Maybe I can mount the megasquirt here?

I wanted the stock hard S suspension for my 97 that is currently running around on completely blown shocks so time to reinstall the good stuff so I can steal the stock stuff. rear shock and remote reservoir.

The other side.

Front remote reservoirs zip tied into the engine bay.

Pulled fender liners so I can trim the fenders to fit the 15x11 wheels with 275 hoosiers.

It moves again. (Sorry my wife was suffering from vertical video syndrome that day) https://www.youtube.com/embed/-6r6N-FVJCY

Parked outside.

Both the blue cars. CSP car with fenders taped for cutting.

List is shrinking.

Working on the cutting fenders.

That should help.

While I was nice out I also replaced the frankenbolts on the free miata. The prior owner had a hard top on but no side latches and had not adjusted the top well so the frankenbolts looked like this when I pulled them off.

A rare sight to see around my house.

That did not last long. Pulled the 97 on the lift to install the suspension from the 01.

The suspension from the 97 looked like this when I pulled it. Yep shock oil mixed with dirt looks great.

Had to replace the rear bump stops in the suspension from the CSP car before we could put it in the 97 since it was quickly turning into the dreaded red dust.

The 97 has mostly been sitting the last year and a half for one reason or another but we needed to get the 97 working again because we decided to go "someplace warm" for a vacation in Feb and decided that it would be a good idea to go to a RallyX@ The Firm. After talking with the Firm we were told we needed to have a rollbar in a miata if we wanted to run with them. The only miata we have with a rollbar installed is the 97 and I am not going to swap that into one of the other cars and we decided to travel light and actually drive the race car there instead of trailering since my wife was going to do some diving at crystal river and we wanted to go to busch gardens and seaworld while we were in the area and it can be a pain trying to park a trailer at hotels.

Scheduled a 1 day rally school for Friday before the rallyx event and got to work prepping the 97 for a trip.

Since the 97 has the brakes from the 02 RallyX car the smallest wheels I can fit on it are 15" wheels so we have to find the 15" snow tires and make sure we take one of the 15" spares we have laying around.

Took it to the local inspection station and it passed first try..... It only had a few issues that he said I should take care of. 1. 3rd brake light out - Easy fix just wiggle connection. 2. rear bar "broken" end link - Ummm I disconnected it that is how I want it. 3. play in RF wheel

The play in the RF wheel is the only one that I needed to figure out before we left. We think it is the inner tie rod and once I disconnected the outer tie rod end it just drooped down. Ran around like crazy trying to find anybody that had a manual rack inner tie rod end in stock (Nobody does). Since I can't seem to get one I am looking at it from under the car and notice it is not just the tie rod that is moving it seems like something in the rack itself is also going bump in the night.

Since I am having trouble getting the tie rod end in time anyway I decide the day before we are leaving that it would be best to swap the steering rack from my 1990 miata (The only other manual rack) into the 97 so we can take the 97 with a good rack. In a bit of a rush so did not take many pictures but here is a picture of both racks. Alignment (Toe and go)

1800 miles plus a rallyx in a miata that has been mostly sitting for over a year and I just swapped the steering rack on? No problem.

How do you pack a miata for a week long trip for two people with helmets, clothing, and everything else?

Very carefully?

I can still see out the back window.

If the cops are at the BBQ place it must be good right?

That looks something like the cars we ran at the school.

We did not really take many pictures at the school since we were a little busy driving.

The school was a lot of fun throwing around the fiesta's but for some reason I kept thinking that is not how it works in the miata as we are working on handbrake turns.

irish44j wrote: I see there will be two Shawn and Katie miatas at RX#1, eh? Dirty Snow getting sidelined as the rental?

Not sure. We have at least one nibble on it right now will have to see if that pans out.

The Firm RallyX #2

The main reason to go to Florida was to run a RallyX with the FIRM.

Got there bright and early Saturday and unloaded everything into trash bags since it was raining a bit.

Got the car teched and waited around for a while since the other group was running first. It was strange not working the course or something while the other group was running.

Thanks GRM for the photo on course.

At the FIRM rallyx events you get 6 runs (3 morning, 3 afternoon) on the same course and they try to grade the course between groups. My Wifes first morning run https://www.youtube.com/embed/weVckKcAnKc

My second morning run where I had a little off course issue. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5awpQ06PAUw

My first afternoon run. https://www.youtube.com/embed/K99v71jTIqQ

My last afternoon run. https://www.youtube.com/embed/-NFt7sJWywI

You can see how bad the course was getting by then. They told us that first section would be good practice for sandblast and they did have a few people there testing out things before sandblast.

I ended up doing ok at the event.

The Firm said: From https://www.facebook.com/events/251750205246086/permalink/267014620386311/ Thanks to everyone who came out to our RallyX this past weekend! Below are the results. RWD Mod: 1) Nile Nesbitt #18 --------------- 20.49 2) Shawn Roberts #74 ---------- 21.17 3) Tommy Ransom #17 -------- 22.23 (Time is in minutes.hundredths of a minute)

I think they need to get better at running 2 driver cars since we ended up taking our later runs pretty much back to back to back because all the single driver car were done their runs but I still had fun.

BMR RallyX Doubleheader - Saturday

We got back from Florida on Wednesday then debated up until the last minute if we wanted to drive the 3.5 hours each way that weekend for the BMR Doubleheader.

Decided better racing in the cold than working on the cars in the cold so we went with the blue rallyx car.

BMR RallyX #4 (Sat)

With the cold weather forcast and my expectations of Kempton I decided to leave the rally tires at home. I brought the old mud tires that Josh gave me and a set of snow tires.

With it being a day/night event Saturday we were able to get a late start Saturday morning and still get there by noonish in time for registration.

After walking the mudpit of a course I decided we should run the mud tires.

This was not the muddy section.

This was not the muddy section either.

Wide but still not the muddy section.

The muddy section I don't have any pictures of but it was lots of mud with just 2 tire tracks thru it.

Our competitors figured out what their car was missing that would allow them to keep up.

During the dinner break I kept having people come over and check out my tires since I was slinging the mud so far on course and I think I was fastest time in our group at the time.

Since the mud tires were doing pretty well out there and it was cold out so I did not feel like changing tires I decided to leave them on for the night part of the event.

As we went out to start running we made the mistake of looking at the temp on the phone. It said 28 degrees but feels like 18 degrees.

Leaving the mud tires on seemed like a mistake because it got cold enough to start freezing the mud areas and the other group had cleaned up the course a bit also so I was just skating around on the mud tires during the night runs. I was losing about 2-3 second per run to my competitors that I had been beating by 2-3 seconds per run during the first half of the event.

Night course. You can hear a few places where the tires are rubbing the fender liner under braking. I might need to just pull the fender liners or raise the car a little more if I want to run those tires often. Or just ignore it like I did for the weekend. https://www.youtube.com/embed/RmXn-soC_-M

No mud to throw :(

Still no mud.

I was far enough ahead from the morning runs that I still had a comfortable lead but with as few cars as we had and two drivers I did not have time to change tires to see if the snow tires would have been better like I thought they would be.

As we left to head to the hotel for the night we checked the outside temp gauge in the van.

I assume you checked on the state of the wheel wells and are indeed rubbing the fender liners - but for what it's worth we discovered that the horrific noises during the evening session on my car were not actually fender liner contact but contact with the supplementary 1-2" of frozen mud coating them. It didn't come off until halfway through Sunday.

RedGT wrote: I assume you checked on the state of the wheel wells and are indeed rubbing the fender liners - but for what it's worth we discovered that the horrific noises during the evening session on my car were not actually fender liner contact but contact with the supplementary 1-2" of frozen mud coating them. It didn't come off until halfway through Sunday.

Yes I checked and I have some nice shiny spots on the fender liners from contact. I am pretty sure it is from those tires since they are the tallest tires I remember running on that car.

Yeah, those tires are more e30 size ;)

Happy to see them slinging some mud. Gotta say, at WMWR last month I was kind of regretting giving them to you lol (though probably not legal for stage due to the build date). Glad to see they're holding up well though.

BMR RallyX Doubleheader - Sunday

Sunday was much warmer that Saturday night. The Sunday event was at a new site for BMR. Sleepy Hollow Motocross Park. They had posted a video on facebook of the new site with a Preview of the course and it looked so good I think they set record attendance figures for their program on Sunday with 54 drivers attending.

After walking the course and looking at how much of the course was on gravel/packed dirt roads instead of dirt/grass we decided to swap back to the snow tires for the day.
Went out for my first run and it was a little slippery in the grass sections but not to bad and the dirt road sections seemed good with the tire choice.

My wife went out for her first run and spun in the grass section. https://www.youtube.com/embed/9EZpv2B81Ys

The second run was much slower than my first (10 seconds slower for me). https://www.youtube.com/embed/zb4AG6Hs4QU

After getting the news that we would be doing 4 runs that morning and with the grass sections quickly turning to mud that you had to creep thru we made the decision to swap back to the mud tires. While we were working on swapping tires they decided to make a change to the course because everybody else was just crawling thru the one big mud section also.

Before After

They made it so you did not have to get back in nearly as much for the cone in the muddy section. With the mud tires and the new course my times got much better and the course was more fun.

I could feel a lack of grip when braking on the dirt road sections of the course but being able to actually drive thru the slow/muddy sections instead of just doing damage limitation made them seem like the better choice.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vzyb3MJaERM

After the other group got all 7 of their runs we were back out there for our last 3 runs. Because of some timing issues in the morning and the use of their backup timing system (Stop Watches) we did not know any times from the morning so I just had to trust that my times were good enough. The course was pretty much the same as the morning other than to fix a few places where it had rutted up. We stayed on the mud tires even with the other heat drying out the course a good bit and they did ok. If I had brought the gravel tires I think they might have been the best option that day on the afternoon course.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/4uOUHEbJvcU

Ended up winning my class for the day and had fastest time in our group (Stock, PR, PF)

As always at the BMR Events Mike Vanino got some good pictures

This was a much better site than their last test event at the site that shall no longer be named and I hope they are able to get more events at this site in the future. It helps that it is about 1/2 hour closer to me than the kempton site is also.

Katie spun? Such a surprise, lol. Well, at least she spun THROUGH the gate, for extra style points :)

How far is the new place? Kimmett said something about it being about 2 hours from Loudoun County....if so, I may have to hit some events there too...

There was some discussion of giving her those extra style points.

I think it is about 2.5 hours for you? Map link

It was just over 2.5 for me but much better than Kempton that is just over 3 hours. If you were out by Leesburg I could see closer to 2 hours since you could take 15.

Your posting of results made me realize my car hit 29 cones on Sunday. I need to do something about that. My codriver got close to your raw times but hit 3+ cones every run. Geez.

Did you guys go to 1st gear in the vicinity of the finish or stay in 2nd the whole run?

Lou and I are looking at coming down to VA for the event on the 9th with you guys. Not sure yet.

Dude! That vinyl is hilarious!

RedGT wrote: Your posting of results made me realize my car hit 29 cones on Sunday. I need to do something about that. My codriver got close to your raw times but hit 3+ cones every run. Geez. Did you guys go to 1st gear in the vicinity of the finish or stay in 2nd the whole run? Lou and I are looking at coming down to VA for the event on the 9th with you guys. Not sure yet.

If it makes you feel any better Katie and I once had a 75 cone weekend in the RX-7 between the two of us. They did not make the gates wide enough for me to fit the car thru sideways so I had to switch to a shorter car like the miata.

I tried both but mostly went back to first.

You should come out.

Crackers wrote: Dude! That vinyl is hilarious!

Thanks we were looking for something on the slightly ridiculous side and I think that worked out well.