Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

Traditionally, we’re at the Amelia Island Concours until the very end. This year we drove up in the Miata. We had no trouble finding it in the parking lot for the drive home.

And we took the scenic route home, including a trip over the St. Johns River Ferry. It’s easily worth the $3.50 toll for the trip.

Two weeks ago we were in Amelia Island, Fla., for their concours. While some people break out the Rolls or Benz for the trip to the show, we took the Miata. We’re probably the only people who drove there on R-compound tires.

This might be one of those love it or hate it combos. Thank you Jason Stroud for the photo.

And here’s a static shot.

Our local Martin Sports Car Club hosted their “pointless” event this Sunday. Since the regular season is now over, this last event didn’t count as far as points go. The theme was “bring your daily driver.” So we did.

To get the Miata ready, we grabbed some race tires and wheels that are usually used on our ‘92 Civic—205/50R15 Nitto NT-01 tires wrapped around Rota J.SPL wheels. Yeah, so what if the wheels are green.

How’d we do? We had fun. We were running second at first but fell down to third, about a second and a half back from first.

The clean-looking filter is the new one. We damaged the old one while “inspecting” it.

We’ll cover this one a bit more in the next GRM, but recently our Miata was nearly choked to death. A stutter became a miss and then became a problem.

The culprit? An old, gross air filter. The original foam filter served us well for about six years in our Jackson Racing cold-air kit. And yes, we did clean it—but that was probably a couple of miles ago.

The old filter looked solid at first, but it easily came apart with just a little finger pressure. (We did the damage seen in the photo.)

A new filter was ordered from Moss Motors, and the car is much happier now.

Have you checked your filter lately?

We haven’t been driving the Miata a lot lately, but the other night there was good news and bad news when we got ready for a spin.

Good news: The car had a full tank of gas.

Bad news: Battery was dead.

A jump start got the car going, and it’s been fine since then.

The Miata hasn’t gotten a ton of attention lately, but it did get a bath the other night. A bunch of soft goods recently arrived from Moss Motors, so soon the car will get a little facelift.

Here’s our stock low beams. The light is kind of all over the place.

And here are our low beams with the Hella European-spec lights.

As Moss Motors is going to host a special Miata car corral at the upcoming Classic Motorsports Mitty event at Road Atlanta, we figure should give our car some attention. So we can better see where we’re going, we recently installed some Hella European-spec headlights.

These lights simply replace the stock units. They don’t look much different when off, but they have a few advantages, including better optics and a replaceable bulb. On the downside, they’re not inexpensive at about $50 per lamp. Oh, and technically they’re not DOT-compliant. (DOT regs require more light shine up to illuminate overhead lights, even though this puts more light in the eyes of oncoming drivers.)

Still, the performance is amazing. Here are some before and after pics. Notice how the Hellas put more light down and on the road? Also notice how they have a little kick-up on the right to illuminate sighs? Cool, huh?

To get these photos, by the way, we left the camera mounted on our tripod while we changed the lights in our driveway—at night. Fun stuff, especially when our flashlight broke.

For more on the Mitty, go here: Mitty

The Miata now has some retro-minded shoes: the American Racing Silverstone R. Here’s the wheel with a polished lip.

And here’s the car with the all-silver Silverstones.

Here’s a close-up of the wheel. The center caps have a retro touch to them, too. By the way, the tires are Kumho ECSTA SPT in a 205/50R15 size.

Okay, our Miata has its new shoes, as it’s now wearing a set of American Racing Silverstone R wheels. So, what do you think?

Some quickie specs: 15x7 inches, 42mm offset, all aluminum with steel inserts for the lugs, available Teflon coating. Weight of each wheel is 14 pounds, 5 ounces. Standard colors will be the two options shown here, but what says the peanut gallery? Would anyone want them in gold, dark anthracite or something else?

These wheels will go on sale to the general public very soon. (And hopefully we’ll have some pricing info soon, too.)

After being ignored for a little bit, our Miata went to BSI Racing for a little love.

A rusted-solid sliding pin on one of the rear calipers caused the inner pad to wear all the way to the backing plate. Apparently the whole mechanism was rusted solid.

Why the bike rack? Easy, as it let us carry our bike to the shop so we could ride home after dropping off the car. When the car was ready, we reversed the procedure. (Don’t worry, they removed the rack when the car was scaled.)

Sometimes real life—like magazine deadlines, business trips, other project cars and so on—get in the way and keep a favorite from getting some much-needed love. That more or less sums up our ‘92 Miata project car. We built this one back in the day and have been enjoying it since—but only to the tune of about a thousand miles per year. While the car is still in great shape, we realized that it was time to give it a little love.

This plan was kicked into high gear when a wheel company said they’d like to use the Miata for some publicity shots. We discussed this at the SEMA Show, the wheels arrived the other day, and we have been busy getting the car back into shape ever since. Since we’re also more or less on an editorial deadline (that statement is true for really any time of the year, by the way), we took a bit of a shortcut and dropped off the car at BSI Racing yesterday. They have built a few dozen Spec Miatas over the years, so they know how to quickly get a Miata back on its feet.

Our to-do list had the following things on it:

- Replace the front brakes. A while back we had installed an aftermarket big-brake kit, and to be honest we were never happy with it. It was time to rebuild the stock calipers and go back to Brembo OE rotors. We’d also install a set of Hawk street pads and some Goodridge braided lines.

- Fix the rear brakes. The right-rear caliper started emitting a sound that was awful. Sounded like a pad was hanging up. We’d go with new lines, calipers and rotors back here.

- Corner-weight and align. Even though we had recently set up the chassis ourselves, the guys at BSI felt we could safely run the car a little lower without losing any comfort. They were right, as it was sitting a little high. Not nearly as high as a stock car, but if it’s going to be used to show off some wheels, might as well make it look cool. Since we’ll be shooting the photos tomorrow and time was of the essence, we let them handle the suspension.

We got the car back this afternoon and so far, so good. (They had to wait for the brake pads to show up as they tend to stock track-only parts.) Even though it’s now a little lower than before—there’s now 5 inches between the ground and the corners of the rocker panels—it’s not hitting the bumpstops at all. The car even passed the railroad crossing test. No harshness.

We just got back from bedding-in the pads, and the whole car just feels better. Now the car gets a bath tomorrow morning, and then it’s time to mount up the new wheels and go take some photos. More details to come soon.

Even though we officially covered the build up of our 1992 Miata several years ago, the car is still with us. It’s just been too much fun to sell. However, no project car can ever really be considered totally complete, and there has been some work done on the car in recent months. Check back soon for some updates.