Fast, cheap, and out of control: My ES Miata

This is great content!

Good luck!!

Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) said:

I have the original Bilsteins from my 99 sport. Never occurred to me that they could be worth $100 to someone.

Well, if you get tired of looking at them, ship them to me. I've already spent my $100 though, so my budget for Bilstein is completely shot. From what I'm hearing, though,  a dollar a shock should be more than reasonable. 😆

Uhhh.

!!!

I think the pilot bearing was red hot at some point in this cars horribly neglected existence. All it's precious bodily fluids have run out and all over the flywheel. Impressive. 

So this is what I've been racing on, nice. 

Ando said:

This is great content!

Good luck!!

By the way, thank you! Little things like this make the difference when I'm lying on my back, an atmospheric river drenching my legs, with rust flakes falling into my eyes, questioning my life decisions as the blood drains out of my arms and my hands slowly stop working.

Does anyone else have a hankering for some soft serve now? 

Will this work? I don't know. Seems like it might. Signed up for an event on sunday at Bremerton, hopefully I can get the car back together before then.

This place was really cool. They really mostly work on trucks, so they were a bit worried my flywheel would be too small. But it ended up being easy, they said. Lots of giant truck flywheels and brake drums sitting around the shop. 

Excellent service, super friendly, great price. 

I've decided to try and only build my cars using shops in the 253 area code. I love Tacoma and I feel like we still have everything you need to build anything. 

I really love this place.

And this season more than any other, it has been wet here. Wet, and when it's wet, the surface starts turning green and growing, and getting even more slippery. I've come to really like it when it rains, which is such a change for me. I never had a good rain tire, though. I do now.

But first, let's go back a week.

I installed my crappy suspension, and cleaned up the stock springs.

I had to remove the top isolator donut to fit the NA shocks to the NB tophat, but for race use it's probably fine. Still has the bottom donut and metal cup. Nothing too difficult.

I feel like it was a group effort. Jay did come over and help me bolt the exhaust in, which I really appreciate.

To do the fronts I decided to drop the insides of the control arms because I have the adjusters turned all the way out, and I was in a hurry. Of course, the previous owner put the car in the ditch at some point and crushed the channel section where the control arms attach to the subframe. So it was really difficult to get one of them out. I still think it saved a bunch of time after I realized I could lift the control arm out instead of dropping it straight down. I couldn't find my balljoint separator to crack the top of the upright, so that tactic wasn't on the table.

The driveshaft was really disgusting.

So I did some very minor treatment:

I did manage to get everything together in time for an autocross at Bremerton with BSCC, and it wasn't great. I don't have index times to compare, so it's hard to know, but we were significantly off pace. There seems to be way more effective rate in the suspension and the front would not grip. Turning the car around on the runway was excruciating, and I'm sure it cost me several seconds. The fronts would just skate across the surface.

So, right after getting back from that, I changed the front sway back to full soft, and rotated the tires front to rear. I don't think my tires are doing ok. 

This is how the fronts looked before this weekend. I think I might not actually be suited to driving on this compound, I can't get it to stay cool enough to actually stay on the tire. Hmm. Or my pressures are way off? Or both. I'm not sure what is going on.

One way or another, I had to keep trying. And maybe Packwood would be good to me.

I got in on Friday and set up camp in the main building. It was still dry, but that wouldn't last. At about 3 am I was woken up by rain just hammering on the metal roof above. It would be wet to start out the day, at least.

Sure enough.

But will it last long enough for me to win at least one event?

Kinda?

I feel like the universe really doesn't want me to win sometimes. Like, to the extent that fate would conspire to send an entire team of Canadian autocrossers with a dual driven HS Civic and an ES Miata and some ungodly number of spare wheels and dedicated wet/dry tires in order to take first place from me on index, plus a total of 8?! drivers to make it happen.

I mean. That's literally what happened on Saturday.

Fastest raw time wasn't enough, and they were on a dedicated rain tire. Definitely a Continental but I didn't pay enough attention to know for sure which one. 

My last run was made under drying conditions and once again the tires started sliding. I think they got warm and had too much pressure. I'm still not entirely sure why they simply don't work with me as soon as the rain stops dumping.

I will say I'm stoked with the way the car works when it's not sliding on greasy nonsense. My progression was almost perfect, 2 seconds per run, I love it. Ended up in 9th index overall, including the dry runs from the morning.

I think maybe my best index result from an NWR event, I'm not sure. Definitely good.

If only Sunday had also been pouring, I might have had a chance. But, when the sun came up it was clear and dry, although very cold.

You can see fresh snow in the mountains, so it's good to know we are adding to our snowpack in June (?!). 

Oh well. I managed to lay down a great first run, but then after picking up a second or so I just hit a wall and was unable to improve. There either simply isn't more grip, or I don't know how to find it. 

Yeah, that's a lot of runs with very little difference between them. Absolutely frustrating. 

I will say the car is incredibly predictable and handles amazingly. Brakes are so perfect and the Exedy clutch is fantastic, although it's still breaking in. Launches are now actually exciting, rather than slightly scary. 

I... I still haven't changed my timing belt.

However! There's almost a two month break before the next event, and I have all the parts I need. So I can finally attend to that. 

I also realized that everyone else was on a 205/50 and I was on a 195/50, I just didn't pay enough attention when ordering. Pretty expensive mistake, lol. I think I'll flip these tires on the rims, and get a set of RE71RS in the proper size, and see how I like a tire that can actually use heat. Right? Something like that.

All things considered, a pretty decent weekend even with the rollercoaster of emotion on Sunday. On Saturday, after the competition runs, some of my competitors came over to look for 'illegal parts' on my car. It was done very jokingly but they also looked over my car really thoroughly with a flashlight for a good ten minutes, so... Nope it really is a completely stock, heavy, leather interior 1999 with stock wheels, the wrong tires, a $100 set of shocks from facebook marketplace and an alignment I did myself. Nothing to see here, I swear.

If anyone has any thoughts as to why I'm so competitive in the wet and simply can't get a competitive time in the dry, I'd love to hear it. I have set very fast times in the dry before, but I've always been on tires that love heat. Is that all there is to it? Compound? The only thing that touches the ground the entire time I'm on the course and is responsible not only for putting down every bit of power, but also dealing with every bit of braking, cornering and steering input force? THAT stuff? Hmm.

Help me not spend another $800 on the wrong compound please :crying_eyes_emoji: