Claff's autocrossing Miata

[Claff]

I had a nice '90 Miata for autocrossing and did fairly well with it. But when we decided to get more serious I figured we'd start over with a newer car with fewer miles, a true base model that didn't have the rollbar weight that my '90 had. In the summer of '09 we picked up a $1800 '93. Can't get more stock, more base-modelly than this thing.



That's the white '90 in the background and the wife's '05 Mazdaspeed as well. You can see the paint is not so great on the '93 (trunk lid and gas door). We'll address that down the road.

The only thing the car needed immediately was brakes all around. Later we changed the timing belt and clutch.


The wife used the '93 as a commuter and autocrossed it in STS class despite it being soooo stock. The first time she autocrossed it, it still had the steel wheels and all-season tires on it! I put on whatever wheels & tires I had hanging around on it as she learned the ropes, and I ran my '90. People looked at us funny when we showed up with his & hers cars.



Love that body roll



We didn't get too serious about this car's prep till late 2010. We decided that, going forward, we were going to concentrate on running the '93. We ordered coilovers and a big front sway bar in September. The shocks were custom-valved Bilsteins from FatCat Motorsports and took forEVER to get done. I wanted them on for the last event of the season, a test & tune at a small lot, but they didn't. I put the sway bar on and hoped for the best. The wife said she could tell the difference, so we were making progress.



These finally arrived on Christmas Eve


On New Years Day, we had an install party at a friend's house. With three of us working we had the job done in two hours.





Biggest problem now is that we still had three months till we could test the setup out. In the meantime, the paint got worse and worse


We swapped out the exhaust. We could have gone lighter, but this was one compromise towards making sure we liked driving the car around town while perhaps improving performance a little. It's a Flyin' Miata system with their high-flow cat. We have FM exhaust on the three other Miatas and love the sound, so we went back to the well for this car rather than chance it with an unknown system.





We got our first chance to run the car in March and it was encouraging, though the 40 degree temperatures were a little low for our RE11s to get ultimate grip. Luckily it was a test & tune day and not a points-paying event.


Second event went better, but the biggest thing on the horizon was that we were getting ready for paint. It needed it! The dark splotch on the rear fender was where the wife found a can of green paint and shot it on to see what it would look like. Thanks for the help, dear.

[sdemo45]

this one ends up green, right? haha. love the suspension setup.

[Claff]

Now it's off to the body shop, also known as dad's garage. He volunteered to paint it provided I did all the prep. The car didn't need much bodywork at all, just a couple of door dings. I took a week off of work and stayed at Mom & Dad's pretty much working on the car all day every day. I had it ready for primer two days ahead of what I thought it would take, and we shot it with color after another day of wet-sanding.









The color is 1991 Miata British Racing Green. We had two hardtops for Miatas and they were both BRG. My '90 was white with BRG stripes so we decided that the '93 would be the flip-flop of that.

The biggest lesson I learned about painting a car is to NOT DO IT YOURSELF. I sanded my fingerprints off and got it to where I thought the surface was nice and smooth, but you never know if you've done that good a job until the job is all over and there's nothing you can do about it. Turns out I didn't have it glass-smooth and it showed in the final product. The other gaffe was that, when I grabbed a rag to do the final wipe-down before shooting color, I didn't know that the rag had some wax residue on it so the paint on the hood has lots of little dit-dots where the paint didn't agree with it. It's a decent looking car from 10 feet away, which was my goal, but it still burns me that a couple little goofs in prep is keeping it from being a really presentable car.

The only other real problem spots are around the mirrors where we didn't get enough coverage on them. I'll blame this on my inability to get the mirrors off the car during prep, and a lack of decent light in Dad's garage. It's not a big deal and I can fix it down the road if it bugs me enough. My only goal for the paint was to make the car one color again, and we did that. It's fairly shiny, so that's a bonus. Besides, I figured we were going to beat the paint up knocking over traffic cones soon enough anyway.

The car came out of paint decent, though it was far from a looker with the silly green-painted Daisy wheels I had on at the time. Its first public appearance was at the OCC show, which just happened to be on my way home from Mom & Dad's.



The next weekend was its first autocross as a green car. I got new numbers (my old numbers were technically not big enough to meet SCCA specs, and our ultimate goal was go to to the SCCA Solo National Championships, where I didn't want to run into any troubles in tech). Naturally, that first event with new paint was run in a downpour.





Next step was to finish the look of the car. We called on a friend to lay down the white stripes so it would really be the opposite of my '90




It came out pretty well

[Claff]

The Duckling's first road trip took it to Bristol, Tennessee where a big Miata meetup is held every year. In addition to a lot of driving on fun roads there's an autocross and we get to drive on the NASCAR track there. We brought both old cars, which doubles my workload (and the chances that something will break). While I was getting the cars ready our new autocross tires showed up



We took a sidetrip to Deals Gap with a couple friends and their Miatas, and made Killboy's highlights of the week


This one was titled "Striped Trio"


This one was titled "James May?"


On Bristol Motor Speedway




Best part of the weekend, I jumped into the green car and won the autocross. Some of the competition included newer MX-5s on wide RS3s and a caged '99 Miata with a LS1 motor. I was liking how this car was coming together.

One thing I was noticing was that the braking wasn't quite where I wanted it. To combat front-wheel lockup, many Miata autocrossers use more aggressive pads in back. I had regular old Napa pads up front with Hawk HP+ in back. The HP+ were a little too grippy and the car would dance a little if I was dumb enough to brake and turn at the same time, and I was dumb enough a LOT. Luckily, I had a set of Hawk HPS in the back of the '90 so it was an easy swap.



We got our new tires (195/50/15 Toyo R1R) mounted up to my old set of RPF1 and I figured we were loaded for bear.

[Claff]

We had run a half-dozen or so local events but our first serious test came when we entered the SCCA National Tour event at the Toledo Express Airport. We geared up for this by buying a trailer and something to tow it with earlier in the spring.



A couple of years ago I would have scoffed at someone towing an autocross car to events, especially an autocross car that ran on street tires. But the wagon and trailer sure made these trips easier, otherwise we'd have to drive two vehicles out since we don't pack light. The 4Runner handled towing the Miata just fine, even through the western Maryland mountains.

At Toledo we got SPANKED. I mean beat and beat bad. There were 21 drivers in STS and I wound up 19th with the wife 21st. We left with our tail between our legs but with some lessons learned.



Heading home defeated but not about to quit


First lesson we learned is that full-tread tires are not the way to go. The hot setup is to take your $500 tires and have someone grind two-thirds of the tread off. This gets rid of tread squirm with the bonus of lightening the wheel/tire combo as well. Since we had already run our R1Rs it was hard finding someone willing to shave them, but a Spec Miata operation agreed to do the job. The tire on the left is unshaved while the one on the right has been.



The next lesson is that we needed to do some work under the hood. At this point, all the hardware was stock 1993 Miata. I had adjusted the timing to 14* but the car needed at least a cold air intake to get a little more power. At Toledo I had snapped a picture of the winning car's engine compartment, and I figured I couldn't go too far wrong trying to duplicate that setup.



I'm surprised to see in this picture that the car was running the stock exhaust manifold.

After doing some homework I got the make and model of this intake, which was SPX2. I ordered one up and put that one in. I hadn't figured out what the insulation was made out of, so I faked my own heat shielding with HVAC insulation from Home Depot.

$250 for this? I suppose that's the price of speed.




Making a template for heat shielding




With an infrared thermometer, we found that even after a short drive the temperature in the filter cone area was about 30 degrees cooler than it was around the brake master cylinder. Whether that translates into actual horsepower or speed is debateable, but at least we have roughly the same setup as winning cars in our class did.

[Claff]

Late August brought us to the event that we had been shooting for since this build process began. The Tire Rack SCCA Solo National Championships brought over 1,200 entrants to Lincoln, Nebraska for four days of competition.

And off we went


We got there on Saturday but we weren't going to make our competition runs until Thursday and Friday. But that gave us plenty of time to get the lay of the land. We took care of registration and inspection quickly.

On Monday and Tuesday we signed up to run the Evolution School test & tune. Kate ran it on Monday and I did Tuesday. We figured we needed more opinions about the car so we had two of our DC-area drivers take the car out on the practice course and give us some feedback. Ian Baker liked how the car handled, but said we were down on power. He asked if we had a header, and I said no. He figured it would help quite a bit.

Monday night was the welcome party at the Speedway Motors museum. There were five or six of us spending dinner on our phones looking for a company that would get a header to us, quickly. We ran into roadblocks because some couldn't assure us that they'd get it to Lincoln in time for it to be installed, and some wouldn't ship to an address that wasn't on a credit card. I took that as a sign that the header plan was not meant to be, and I'd make it one an off-season project.

But our friends kept checking, and one found that Emilio at 949Racing was willing to do it (I bought the Tein Flex coilovers in my '90 from him a couple years before). We placed the order at 6:00 PM Lincoln time and he said he'd rush to get it to FedEx before their cutoff time.

Tuesday I made my Test & Tune runs and was pretty happy with the car. Of course gridded right next to me was Andy Canak, who won STS in 2010 and was going to repeat this year. Don't know why I didn't ask him to drive our car as well.

The header showed up at the hotel at 3PM and we tore into the install. One friend did the lion's share of the work and we were very appreciative.





The header really woke the car up. It really got off the line strongly and on the East course we ran on Thursday we did pretty decent. Out of 39 entries in STS I was 27th after day one while the wife (she does not run "Ladies" classes) was 35th. On Friday's West course I didn't do as well, falling to 31st while the wife picked up a spot to finish 34th. I wasn't too thrilled at losing all those spots but it wasn't last. We proved our license plate (which we ordered after our terrible Toledo performance) wrong:



After Nationals we came home and finished out the year running some local stuff as well as a trip to Charlotte for the North Carolina Autocross Championships, where I finished second. In the last two events of the year I won my class, so we headed into the off-season on a bit of a winning streak.

[Claff]

Now it's the off-season and we're mulling over what to do with the car next. We'll definitely stay in STS, that's for sure. We did have a set of second-hand R-comp tires and dabbled a little in CSP but not well enough to consider pursuing that further. STS limits us in what else we can do but I don't think we will prep to the limits, especially when it comes to engine management. Those rules are changing to allow more but I'm clueless about that stuff, and don't want to risk losing this car's streetability as it still does commuter and around-town duty, even still stickered up from Nationals.

We have a new set of wheels, taking advantage of the rules allowance to run wheels up to 7.5 inches wide. They're 949's 6ULs, 15x7.5, 11.4 pounds each.





I'm skeptical of the claims that 7.5-wide tires are that much better than 7s, but those with experience say they're quite a biut better, so we upgraded.

We'll have to get new tires as we've pretty much used up the R1Rs between having them shaved and running a bunch of events on them. Compare that to my Bridgestone RE11, which I got at the start of the start of the 2010 season and run a ton of events and street driving on. They're still good, lots of tread left, while the R1Rs are good for the last half of last season and I'll be lucky if I can sneak the first few of 2012 on before they're totally shot. But that's the price of speed, so we pay it. It's still cheaper than Hoosiers.

On the car itself, we may take a couple small steps to reduce weight. It's not much work to fit a tiny Braille battery in place of the stock unit in the trunk, though I wonder if it'll be worth the effort to swap batteries for race days and back, or just save it for 'big' events. We're also mulling over a race seat but I have to figure out how much the stock seats weigh in comparison before spending that money.

That's the story of our Duckling for now. We tried to do it on the (relative) cheap but sometimes you have to pay the freight for the good stuff. We're very happy to have a car that can win on the local level (I've been consistently in the top 25-30% of PAX in DC region events) and not embarrass ourselves at the National level, our Toledo experience excepted. It's provided us a fun hobby we can do together without spending ourselves silly.

It even provided the basis for last year's Christmas card


Hope to have more good news to report in 2012.

PS we ran video cameras for pretty much every event we ran. If you want to check them out here's the Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/user/aclaffie

[acedeuce802]

Awesome! Nice Miatas!

[Claff]

The march towards the 2012 autocross season continues. We had the new wheels that showed up for Christmas and figured it was a good time to put some rubber on them. Called up Radial Tire in Silver Spring and cleaned out their inventory of 195/50/15 Toyo R1R, all 8 tires. Four were shaved to 4/32nd tread (about halfway) and mounted on the 6UL wheels, while I took the other four at full tread for later use. They'll go on the RPF1 after I completely use up last year's tires on them now, and use those for daily driving, rainy autocrosses, and low-key events like the local BMW club stuff.

Test-fitting the new combo


The inventory waiting for warmer weather, making the dining room smell like a tire shop


Tonight I ordered a pair of adjustable sway bar end links so I can get rid of the stock ones up front and eliminate preload since we have lowered suspension and the big meaty Racing Beat bar. This should be the last piece of the puzzle car-wise for 2012.

[Claff]

Adjustable end links are in.





If you see the black marks on the top of the red sway bar, those are where the sway bar rubbed against the upper control arm at full suspension compression. These end links let me shorten them so the sway bar is further away from anything that might affect its ability to do its job, and that can't be a bad thing.

We briefly kicked around doing some sort of aftermarket ECU stuff after learning that out of all the 1.6L Miatas that ran in STS at the national championships last year, only two of them had stock electronics and ours was one of them. So it's gone from something that would be nice to have to almost something we have to have, but I know nothing about them. The Megasquirt system costs $500 to start and then there's a lot of DIY trial and error/dyno time to get it working 'right'. I think the car runs great now, doesn't throw CELs, passes state smog inspection, and is a great driving car both on course and on the street. I'm not going to spend money to jeopardize any of that at this time. Maybe next winter?

First local event is in three weeks.