Mazda2 on $100 a week

time for a full underbody mud guard er.... skidplate, yeah skidplate.

In reply to slopecarver:

Yea, I have thoughts about that. I've watched two "skidplates" get ripped off so far this season. Having a properly designed one would be nice.
In other news, I was given permission to photograph the 4wd cars as they did their runs on Saturday. I'm still figuring out what lens I want to use to and how exactly to shoot moving cars so I didn't get as many functional pictures as I wanted, but I got a few. I'll post them up over the next couple of days just for fun. Clearly, since I was shooting, non of the pictures are of my car. Such is life.

Time to replace the mudflaps. I thought I'd show my extremely simple method of mudflap instillation on the 2 just in case anyone else wanted to wander down the same path.
Step 1. Remove the three lower push lock fasteners and the upper screw on the fender liner behind the wheel. Then cut a piece of cardboard the same shape as your mudflaps and mash the fasteners through it to make a pattern. It's crude, but it works.

Step 2. Use the carboard pattern to mark and drill holes in the new mudflaps. Here I'm using RallyArmor's cheapo universal set. It comes with 4 mudflaps for $15. For $26 shipped to my door I have a set of mudflaps and a set of spares. Bargain of the century.

I have to admit, part of the reason for using RallyArmor flaps is the rally bling. I think they look cool. I'm not installing anything in the rear because there's not really any car after the rear wheels to protect.
I had my first autocross of the year last weekend and am happy to report that I took home my first every autocross trophy with the car. First in STF by 0.05 seconds. Two of the three people I beat routinely beat me by 1-3 seconds so I was pretty stoked. I'm waiting for the full results to be posted to see how I paxed in the 80 or so car field to see if I had a good day or if my competitors just had a bad one. I'm happy no matter what.
My budget coming into the new year was $378. Add another $100 for last week and $100 in money that my wife's grandparents gave me for Christmas.
Take away $26 for the mudflaps, $30 for autocross, another $30 for the practice the day before which nearly involved swimming it was so wet, and $30 for the upcoming rallycross in New Orleans this weekend and we're at $462.
I need to cool things off a bit because I pre-ordered a set of the Z2 Star Specs and those are supposed to be here within the next month. That's going to take $550 plus mounting from my budget.
I still love this little car.

Picture from this weekend's adventure. More story to come.

Somehow this is becoming a thread about things I do with my car instead of things I do to it, but whatever, it's fun.
Last weekend my oldest daughter and I headed 6.5 hours to New Orleans to rallycross with the Delta region SCCA. Before going over we checked the rules and checked and got the ok for her to ride along with me which is the first time any of my kids has been able to do this. We decided to go all out and got a hotel close the the track for Saturday night so we didn't have to start the day at 3:00 am. We had a good drive and were able to talk and hang out one on one which is hard to do in a house with four kids.
That evening there was a meeting at the cafe at the track and I'm now all educated about being an SCCA rallycross safety steward. I just have to send in my paperwork and see if they think I can handle it. The next morning we headed over to NOLA Motorsports Park and got set up. I taught my daughter how to jack up the car and change tires and all about tightening things in a star pattern and how to use the torque wrench and all that good stuff.

Later on she told me that changing the tires was her favorite part of the weekend. After a drivers meeting we were underway. I'm not sure if any of you watched the weather around New Orleans last week but it rained. A lot. So much that the event was nearly cancelled. I survey of those that had signed up indicated that we all wanted to run anyway, mud be damned, so we did. To put it mildly, the driving sucked. The course was set up perfectly for the mud with not too much turning and trying very hard to take advantage of any dry-ish spots there were. After about one run by each of us it was just a mud bog. Second gear, 5000rpm and just hope you didn't get stuck. There was no driver skill involved at all in the day. Those with more traction took less time than those with less traction.

The mud, oh the mud. It was pretty spectacular stuff. It smelled of thousands of years of rich river deposits and the lives of thousands of crayfish who had lived in died in it. It was the consistency of play dough and the cars mixed it with the grass it was on to make a substance that properly shaped and dried would have made fine mud bricks for building. It packed every single nook and cranny in the wheel wells from the top of the strut towers to the bottom of the mud flaps leaving only space for the tires.

It was heavy enough that it was literally ripping the fender liners out of the Subaru's, or at least that was the theory. We were going slow, and it was pretty smooth but if your car had AWD then pieces were just falling off. It was nutty. One intrepid pair of Subaru drivers ended up completely taking the front plastic off the car between heats. After the fender liners and a few other plastic bits were yanked off it was clear the the front was next. If it fell off during a run it was going to be expensive, so they elected to pop it off and set it on the grass and keep running. This was a very new STI with 600 miles on a factory new replaced under warranty engine. Press on regardless indeed.

There was a photographer at the event by the name of Luke Guillory that took the picture of me running above. It's the first picture I have of me running and I love it. Nobody ever takes pictures of the slow cars. Slow cars need love too.

The whole key to not getting stuck seemed to be to keep the wheels spinning. For me that meant second gear and about 5K rpm's no matter what the actual speed of the car. In the picture below you can see the difference between a front wheel that was spinning fast enough to clear the mud and a rear that was just along for the ride.

It got so bad that I watched one of the 2wd guys drive 50 yards of the course with one of his back wheels jammed stuck with mud. It was just stopped in the wheel well and dragging along behind with no apparent effect on speed.
When cleaning the car over the last few days I found this.

That oil filter did not have that dent before the event. The Mazda2 doesn't have any sort of splash guard under the engine and the oil filter is sitting right out front so it's not totally surprising that something can get up there and hit it. I'm going to have to think long and hard about some sort of protection for the front of the motor. Along with the oil filter, the clutch slave cylinder and a few sensors are in very vulnerable spots. After watching a few skid plates get ripped off and cause havoc this year, the key will be to figure out how to protect things without making it worse.

Your daughter looks really happy to be there, and it's great that she got to ride along with you. The picture with her little helmet poking up behind the dash is great.

I like the mudflaps!!! Got me thinking about replacing my factory ones with those.

Swank Force One wrote: I like the mudflaps!!! Got me thinking about replacing my factory ones with those.

I'm happy to report that they made it through the weekend. Lots of lesser flaps got ripped off, but these survived. I can heartily recommend the Rallyarmor economy mudflaps to all my super cheap friends.

Great read. As a fellow M2 owner with NO budget, I'm loving this thread. So far all I've done was fit second hand RE-11s that are too big (205/50R15 on stock alloys), too worn (2 of them are 2/32s) and too slippery (too many heat cycles I think). But my god has it made the car fun. Getting some nice lift off oversteer on onramps. This car really feels like a FWD Miata.

BTW, I like the slight pin-hole effect on some of the shots. Makes the thread feel like a story.

you drove home all muddy like that? how far did you drive? (Great pics too)

In reply to Datsun310Guy:

Funny story about that. At NOLA Michelin was setting up for some sort of corporate event and they weren't particularly happy that we had to drive across their parking lot to get from the course to the bathrooms. A few calls were made and the next thing you know the track has hooked up a fire hose for us. A genuine your house is on fire hose hooked to a hydrant. I was able to get the majority of the mud off the sides of the car and out of the wheel wells. On the 7 hour drive home we were lucky enough to drive through an hour of good old fashioned Louisiana downpour. Between the hose and the downpour about 90% of the mud was washed off. It still took me 3 hours with the pressure washer and the car on ramps to get it clean, but it was way easier than it could have been.
A word of caution. A fire hose will blast the magnets right off your car. Looking for magnets in several inches of muddy water sucks. Magnets off, then fire hose.

dculberson wrote: Your daughter looks really happy to be there, and it's great that she got to ride along with you. The picture with her little helmet poking up behind the dash is great.

I'm seriously considering getting a large print of that. I've already got it set as my background on my computer and it makes me smile.

Just a quick update to get my budget back up to current so I don't get lost in a sea of money. $100 for last week and $100 for this week and all I really spent was $30 for BMW autocross. That leaves me with $632 which is really good because Tirerack should theoretically be shipping and charging me for the new Star specs in the next three weeks or so. My current star specs are also on their last legs and since the new tires are supposed to be race tires, I'm going to need a new set of street tires too.

Before Christmas it was decided that we needed an iPad charging solution for our primary road trip vehicle, my wife's FJ Cruiser. The only 12V outlet is occupied by the XM radio and I wasn't thrilled about plugging in dual outlet 12V plug and then plugging everything into that. Not elegant. I searched the forums over at Expedition Portal to see what the latest cool toys were because those guys love gadgets. I found that Sierrra Expeditions was selling a hard mountable two socket USB socket that was putting out 2.1 amps. The amperage is important because the recent generations of iPhone and iPad won't charge on low amperage sources. It was $25 shipped. The FJ has a bunch of open live spots in the fuse box so I bought an add-a-fuse and wired it up and we had ourselves a great vacation. After we got back it occurred to me that I didn't have any way to charge high amperage toys in the 2, so I stole it. At first I was planning to do the add a fuse thing but the 2 doesn't have any extra live fuses that I could find. Not a one. After thinking about it, I figured that I might as well just try to replace the 'cell phone charger' (which is what the kid at the dealership called the cigarette lighter when he was showing me the car. Kids.) The 2 has the charger in the front of the console right next to the aux plug in for the radio, like so.

You'll notice that each plug has a very nice little door on it and that the lighter socket is already popped out. It's kind of a bear to push out and I didn't feel like doing it again for illustrative purposes. Flipping everything over we get this.

Socket, hole, plugs, the usual stuff. Just unplug the wires and push with the palm of your hand and it all pops apart.

This is our new plug.

It's made by BlueSea and I think its supposed to be for boats or something. It comes with a mounting plate on it but removing the retaining ring from the back allows it to be pulled off leaving just the socket and the ring. It also has a very nice cap. In the picture you can see that I had to use a file to lightly trim the ring around the plug to get it to fit flush in the stock opening. It fit without the filing, but I wanted it to fit better. Wiring it up was a simple matter of making a pair of jumpers and plugging things into the original socket. I suppose I could have cut the socket off and put new spade connectors on the factory wiring but I like things to be easily reversible when possible.

And here it is all snapped back together. Easy peasy. Looks good and works great. Charges everything.

BlueSea also makes the same basic thing that just plugs into the socket, which I could have bought and not had to wire anything up, but I dislike adaptors in sockets and because I had this laying around in my wife's truck, its was free! The only cost is having to pull it out and re-install it on my wife's truck when we go on family trips.

I didn't update the budget last week because I was in the hospital monitoring my five year old getting IV antibiotics because he stepped on a nail. That sucked. I also missed the first rallycross of the year. That sucked too. My new tires came yesterday though so that's awesome and there is an autocross on Sunday so that's also awesome. It all works out. I've got get the tires mounted to the 6UL's that I've had for a couple of months. I'll take some pictures when it's all together. It's just wheels and tires, but they're all shiny and stuff.
$200 for the past two weeks. $550 for tires. $30 for autocross entry. I had $632 two weeks ago so add some stuff and carry the three and I'm at $252.
My daughter likes the new tires.

New tires are mounted for $40. I'll add that to the budget next week. This is a comparison of the old Star Spec on the stock wheel next to the new Direzza 2 (since they dropped the Star Spec from it's name) on a 7.5 inch wheel.

From the back of the car I think you can see that I gain a bit in track width by adding three inches of wheel width, which makes sense. I need to get out my measuring tape and measure.


I have a set of longer front studs coming and when they get in I'll swap them out and talk about the aluminum lug nuts that I have but haven't put on yet. As far as weights go. The stock wheels measured at 15.5 lbs each on my scale and the 6UL's measured at 11.75. The old Star Specs weighed 18.5 each and the new Direzza 2's weighed 19. The old combo wieghed 34 lbs per corner and the new setup weighed 31 on my scale. I'll take 3 lbs lighter per corner, but honestly I was hoping it would be lighter when it was all said and done. The stock tires on the stock wheels weighed 29.5 each and I've always thought the extra weight was noticeable. I was hoping to get back to that 29-30 lbs per corner but I don't think it's going to happen without a lighter tire.
Edit: I just checked and the old tire/wheel combo is down to 32.25 lbs per corner. That's 1.75 lbs of rubber gone off the tire at the wear bars. Wow. Looks like I might hit that target weight right at the end of the tire's life.

Well, I won my class at the local autocross for the first time ever. Maybe the tires are better? I didn't feel that I drove terribly well but still PAX'd 17 out of 106 drivers. Not great, but less than half a second from top 10 which would make me ecstatic. $40 to have the tires mounted. $100 extra for the new week. Add and subtract and I'm at $312.
Longer front studs, a light weight battery, a review of my first full year with the car and hopefully a picture or two from the autocross should be coming up.

Congrats, Seth!

Thanks. David and Jan have kindly bowed out of STF and gone over to X class to play with the fast kids. That leaves three of us full timers to battle it out. We ride with each other and take tire temperatures for each other and have a good time.

My friend and fellow STF competitor Ray Tuquero is a photographer and he managed to snap a few shots of me running in the last Houston autocross. Ray is awesome. The first picture is the super glamor shot lifting the rear wheel. The second shot is after the transition. Notice the difference of the position of the tire in the wheel well. Body roll. So much body roll.

Ok, no updates in the last three weeks and I need to get caught up. First the budget. Add $300 to the $312. Take away $75 for registration to the two day rallycross in March, $30 for autocross this weekend, $72 for ARP wheel studs for the front and a sub 2 lb lithium battery for $60. That gets my budget back to $375.
I have a bunch of pictures for the stud install and I was planning on getting to connectors for the battery today but the stupid gravel delivery guy is late. Stupid gravel delivery guy.

Wow good thread. I'm jealous of the budget though. I haven't mustered the courage to propose my $50/week budget, INCLUDING car, to SWMBO.