The PBOC Motorsports Club had their big, annual bash a couple of weekends ago. They call it Winterfest, which is something that has to annoy those in America's chilly northern areas. It was a wonderful 80 degrees and breezy throughout the weekend, which was a great way to see and appreciate fast Porsches, BMWs and more taking fast laps around this historic airport track.
We took our humble little yellow Miata there, with a freshly installed six-point Schroth Racing harness got from HMS Motorsport. This car may be a low-buck racing effort, but our bodies aren't low-buck. We want to come home in once piece, whether the car does or not.
Things went really well, right up until they didn't. It wasn't a big off-course excursion, but rather the car's untold mysteries catching up to us. After about half an hour on track, the car would start having strange shutdown issues. For seconds at a time, it felt as though someone shut the ignition off, then turned it back on. Not a misfire, but a full-scale power loss. We changed as many parts as we could borrow from No Mo' Money Race Engineering with a little lighting and moral support from our paddock neighbors, the guys at IPG Parts.
Alas, we had no success in tracking down the problem, so we packed the car up early on Sunday and headed home a bit saddened that our Miata didn't run so well. Now we have a mystery to solve before the next event. These are the woes to expect when you awaken a sleeping toy car from a neglectful, six-year slumber underneath someone's tree.
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