1983 RX7 on $100 a week

How much did those wire markers count against your budget? ;-)

info on the labelmaker please

The label maker is a Dymo LetraTag. My wife got it for me for Christmas ($0 to the budget ) though I saw them at the store for $18. They take a small cartridge of paper or plastic that is printed on. Thermal? I'm not sure to be honest. Very easy to use. Type the words in, push print and there's your tag. I think the replacement cartridges are going to feel expensive when I need to start buying them. A single 13 foot cartridge was $6 at the store. I can get them in a 3 pack for $11 on Amazon so that should hurt less. I like being organized. It's quite nice for that.

If you get clear heat shrink tubing you can wrap the label underneath and shrink it to the wire. Little cleaner looking without the labels acting like flags.

That's a damn good idea Dave.

The last time I did a budget was the beginning of December and I had -$26. Since then 8 weeks have passed giving me and additional $800 for the budget. I spent $12.50 on the flasher relay and I think $35 on that last autcross. Rallycross yesterday was $50 and it was cold. The cold has been really challenging for the seven year old battery in the car. When it's warm it will start right up. When cold the voltage drops to something like 8 volts when cranking and I think the spark is suffering or something. I could hook the car up to a charger and get it nice and charged and it still wouldn't start well. If I hooked it up to the truck it would start right up. It was supposed to be 28 degrees for the rallycross yesterday (it was 29) and I had offered the car up to a co driver so I felt the need to run out to Autozone at 7:30 at night and get a new battery. Another $129 off the budget. If you've seen my garage thread you might understand why there hasn't been much actual work being done on the car. I'll type up a race report from yesterday when I get a chance today or tomorrow. I think another seat is in order soon. I need to be able to take passengers.
Old -$26
Add $800
Take away $226.50
New budget $547.50

Dish may not be a desirable characteristic of rallycross wheels.

Hmmm... extend those spokes out to the edge of the rim and they could be a traction device in the deep mud! How deep was it out there?

PAM does not work well to keep mud off.

Or did I try tire shine? I forget. Probably tire shine because the inside of my car still smells like sweat, mud, oil, and rubber, with no hints of freshly baked muffins.

We were running in Sealy Texas which is gulf coast plain. When it's wet the mud goes down about 200 feet. I was doing course design and safety and we had to do running changes with the course. We had 18 drivers and probably 6 of them got stuck at some point (not me ) so we were very rapidly switching things around. You HAD to look ahead because the course might be different than the last time you came through. You also had to evaluate the course based on your car. There were times when you had to decide if following the path of the car before you made sense or if going way off line and picking up a cone but not getting stuck was better.
It was an interesting day. We knew it was going to be sub optimal going in, but decided that having a slightly less than perfect event was better than canceling. I'll do an actual race report tomorrow. I'm still hoping some photos of the silliness surface.

Mud in the tires. That's what causes that sound.

I'm jealous. It's supposed to be 9 degrees here later today and there's still a frosty coating of snow on the ground. The closest thing I got to rallycross was driving the wife's Jimmy back into the forest with a trailer to drag out more deadwood for the stove. I did manage a cool snow roostertail- trailer attached.

What's a Yoot?

Saturday was the first rallycross of the new season. This is the first full year that SCCA is running the events in this part of Texas and we have two venues. Half of our events will be at Brianne Corn Raceway in Maxwell Texas and the other half will be at our new site, Lone Star Raceway, otherwise known as Hennessey Performance. The new site is exciting if for no other reason than it's only 1.5 hours away instead of 3. A six hour round trip makes for long days.
We knew from out recon mission two weeks before that any rain on the days leading up to the event would give us a surface somewhere between bad and impossible. It rained on Thursday. We debated cancelling the event but decided that a bad surface was better than cancelling.
It was 28 degrees and clear when we got to the site. A total of 18 drivers showed up to run. MR consisted of my RX7 driven by me and my friend Seth on his maiden rallyxross event, another first gen RX7 from Oklahoma with two drivers, and my friend Dustin in his first gen MR2. It was 80's goodness all around.

The day started slippery, and got worse. The sod held up to us 2wd drivers for about 5 cars. Once it started to break apart, we were hosed. I got in one nice exceptionally slippery run. Just one. After that you were following tracks or not following tracks if they looked too deep. My co-driver was the first to get stuck. Rapid course changes were the rule of the day. Ruts would sometimes go from started to car eating within 3 or 4 cars. It was kind of nuts.

My co driver did a great job considering all we were really doing was surviving the conditions, not really driving in them. Some people might think the day was a waste, but I disagree. First off, we had a great time. Second, we've done 4 or 5 muddy events now. The drivers that have done them all are getting fast in the mud. Driving in the mud is one of those things you need to know how to do if it rains at nationals, which it did this year.

We managed four runs in the morning for both the 2wd and 4wd guys. Everyone scattered to eat lunch and we reset the course and were able to get four more in for everyone before it was all over. In the afternoon run group things got interesting. My friend in the MR2 came in after his second run with what sounded like a rod knock. Whatever it ends up being, it's not a sound that a motor should make. He decided to shut down his car and I insisted that he finish his runs in mine. We ended up hot lapping the RX7 for the final four runs of the session. He held the car at about 7500rpm for a 60 second run, 10 seconds through grid and another 60 seconds at 7500. When he got in to had the car over to me the sound deadening on the floor was smoking. He drives hard. It was awesome. I just asked him to check that nothing was on fire under the car and away I went for my runs. What a good time.

We finished the event at about 4:00 and this is where my day should have ended with my wife happy that I was home in time for dinner. Remember that rod knock? Well, the only thing that really made sense to me was to load the MR2 on the trailer and take it, the owner, and his wife home. The hitch being that is was exactly the wrong way. Three hours the wrong way. So that's what we did. That's what rallycrossers do.
We got the MR2 home and unloaded a bit after 7:00 and I turned around. I was back at Hennessey at 10:30 and loaded the car in the dark hoping that nobody would think I was there stealing something. I pulled in at 12:15, just over 18 hours after I left home for the day.
The pictures for this post were provided by Kenzie, the media.... something for Hennessey. He was a cool dude. He came out there on his own time to take the pictures and some video and hang out. He's putting together a Mitsubishi Starion that was supposed to be together for this event but didn't quite make it. We're looking forward to him driving with us next time.

Edit: Where did I finish? Third out of five in MR. the MR2 driver took the win in MR and the other RX7 beat me. I'm normally pretty competitive when I rallycross, but on this day, it really was about sharing the car, keeping the course as passable as we could, and having a good time.

You're a good man for helping the Mr2 get back home. And I'm glad the mud and cold didn't stop you guys from holding the event!

This is the video that Kenzie the media guy from Hennessey made. He did a fantastic job.
Rallycross Video

That looks pretty fun. I want to do some Rally-x events in my Camaro just for fun.

Quick budget update. Three weeks adds $300. Take away $35 for autocross and that's $812.50. This is good because I have rally tires coming. They're fairly inexpensive at about $85 each, but apparently it costs a LOT of money to put them on a boat and float them over an ocean. Who knew? I'll update the cost of them when they arrive. I still don't have wheels to put them on, so that's a bit of an issue to be sorted out. I also ordered a seat from Ultrashield but they were out of stock for 12 weeks. I need to figure something out about that. Rallycross practice today. I'm hoping to get in a lot of laps.

What kind of tires did you get? Maxsport?

Round ones.........
I have some internal debate on whether I want to keep the surprise in my pocket until fall. There's about a 80% chance the tires will be on a car other than mine that I'll be sharing at nationals. Let me think about it when the tires show up. If I'm too excited I'll almost certainly let the cat out of the bag.

Great, now I have to go on a hunt to find all the tires available for $85 overseas.

Practice day today. The RX7 did 100 runs without a hiccup. 75 of them were driven by me and 25 were by my co-driver before he decided to hop in his AE86 and run somewhere between 30 and 40 more. I'll write more tomorrow. Over an hour of rallycross seat time is exhausting.

Practice day. The good people at Brianne Corn Raceway held a practice day yesterday. The course was impeccably groomed. Pay your money and get in line and run over and over until you or your car get sick of it. I invited MR2 guy who's car I hauled back after the last event (spun rod bearing probably due to all of the oil going somewhere) to take some laps in the RX7. He agreed and said he'd pay my entry fee for the day. Sweet. I got there at 10:30 and we were taking laps by 11:00. Usually there were 2-4 people at a time on track. The timing lights were working and we had a starter/time keeper letting us know what the times were. Every 10-30 minutes there would be enough cones down that someone would walk around the course and set them back up. My co-driver and I kept the car running constantly and by 1:30 he had 25 runs in and I had 30. Pretty much every one took a break for lunch and I kept running. Only guy on course. Runs were in the mid 50 second range. I'd run, drive through grid, get my time, run again. Over and over for half an hour. It was great and I'm become so much more comfortable with the car. At the end of lunch my co-driver decided to pull out his Corolla to see how different it felt from the RX7. He rallycrossed the car for two years but recently retired it in favor of the MR2 because he loves it and he didn't want to completely wear it out. He did somewhere between 30 and 40 runs in the Corolla and is in love again. He's usually 1-2 seconds a lap faster than me in the RX7 and is at least that much faster in the Corolla. I pulled in with 63 laps done and took a breather. I was tired. The cold that has been coming on had taken about 80% of my voice away. I debated putting the car on the trailer, but I was only 12 runs from the car taking 100 rallycross runs for the day. I hopped back in and finished them putting in some of my fastest runs of the day.
The car never missed a beat. Temp stayed right in range, noting leaked, I even got pretty good mileage, sort of. The car feels like a tank. Like it can take the punishment time after time and never fail. I'm starting to really like this car.

Last budget was $812.50 and add two weeks for $1212.50. I spent $631 on rally tires, $9.50 on hardware to mount a passenger seat, $50 to rallycross and $30 to autocross. Carry the 6, add 2, comes out to $492.

Rallycross this past weekend. We had another new venue. We're trying to get 3-4 venues going that we hold 2-3 events at a year. This gives us a supply of back ups if the weather goes bad or we lose a site, and gives all of the sites more time to heal between events. The course was 80% gravel and 20% paved. Courses were short, 50ish seconds in the morning and 40ish in the afternoon. My car had three drivers in it and we had a blast. I placed 3 out of 5 in MR, beating one co-driver and losing to another. Having a passenger seat was fun.
That was Saturday. On Sunday I hooked up the rear sway bar and headed off to autocross and had another co-driver. Again, had a ball. The course was the same as the one I ran two weeks ago in the 911 and I was about two seconds slower, which wasn't bad. My co-driver had a bad day and I beat him. I also got to ride in a new C7 and do my first ever instructor ride in a GT-R. It was a good day.
The car is flooding in hard right handers, espicially bumpy ones. Talking to a few people leads me to believe that I need to muck about with the floats and lower the fuel level in the bowls. Rallycross National Challenge is in a month and that's really the only thing I need to get done. The car just keeps on going.

isn't $812.00 + two weeks = $1012? This is 100$ a week, right?

Either way, I am enjoying this thread!

Rob R.