V6 powered Mazda 323

Hey guys/gals, Welcome to my build thread. Lots of work and fun has gone on over the last couple of years. My friend started building the car to compete in SMF class in autocross. I have kept up with the build and continued to develop the car.I will try and keep things short for now so that everyone can get caught up.

The car was about 90% finished when I picked it up. It was in driving condition when I bought it, but didn't run right. It miss fired while cruising and had a really hard time starting once warmed up. The speedo didn't work and I had to sort out some funny things my friend did with the wiring.

I picked up the car on a friday night after work. The next morning I went threw the car and managed to fix the miss fire/hard start, even got the speedo working and fixed a couple other little wiring issues. Sunday morning broke the car in the only way I know how. I took the car autocross racing.

Some pictures of the car after I brought it home from my shop saterday night before going autocross racing.

A couple of pictures breaking the new car in.. :) My girl friend had just as much fun as I did..

She was even nice enough to leave me with a dead battery during my run group.. Thanks hun.. :)

Took my mom for a ride along.

Stay tuned its getting late.. I have done a lot more with the car over the past couple years..

Everywhere i go, you come in here and make me look bad.

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: Everywhere i go, you come in here and make me look bad.

Haha. No hard feelings bud. Hows your SMF escort coming along? I haven't seen many updates on it lately?

crazycanadian wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: Everywhere i go, you come in here and make me look bad.

Haha. No hard feelings bud. Hows your SMF escort coming along? I haven't seen many updates on it lately?

Eh it's coming along... slowly. In the stage of nickel and diming again as i put everything together and realize what i missed previously or turned out to be broken.

Well, and i took a pretty large pay cut at work, so finances are a problem.

I need to update some threads for sure, though!

Do Canadians come down to Lincoln?

Cool car! Keep the updates coming!

I think you need to lower it a little more.

What engine did you use in that?

It's a KLDE now... i'll let him clarify what was in it earlier. (It's on its second V6 now.)

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote:

crazycanadian wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: Everywhere i go, you come in here and make me look bad.

Haha. No hard feelings bud. Hows your SMF escort coming along? I haven't seen many updates on it lately?

Eh it's coming along... slowly. In the stage of nickel and diming again as i put everything together and realize what i missed previously or turned out to be broken. Well, and i took a pretty large pay cut at work, so finances are a problem. I need to update some threads for sure, though! Do Canadians come down to Lincoln?

Yep we do... Usually there are about 30 or 40 of us that make the trek down.. I am hoping to have the car ready with in the next 2 years and make the trek down my self..

crazycanadian wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote:

crazycanadian wrote:

92CelicaHalfTrac wrote: Everywhere i go, you come in here and make me look bad.

Haha. No hard feelings bud. Hows your SMF escort coming along? I haven't seen many updates on it lately?

Eh it's coming along... slowly. In the stage of nickel and diming again as i put everything together and realize what i missed previously or turned out to be broken. Well, and i took a pretty large pay cut at work, so finances are a problem. I need to update some threads for sure, though! Do Canadians come down to Lincoln?

Yep we do... Usually there are about 30 or 40 of us that make the trek down.. I am hoping to have the car ready with in the next 2 years and make the trek down my self..

Excellent! I look forward to meeting you.

Just to clarify a little bit for everyone.. The pictures of the car are from 2 years ago when I first got it...

Back then the car was running a 2.5L KLDE swap, stock mx3 transmission, ebay headers, hacked together exhaust system, intake. It was lowered on HKS springs and Tokico blue shocks. Whiteline 19mm rear sway bar, stock mx3 V6 front sway bar.. I picked the car up with a set of 5 year old toyo RA1's on nissan 14" rims. The car had a 323 manual steering rack in it. It was running a 91 - 94 cavalier 2.2L radiator and some junk yard hyundai cooling fan. The battery was relocated to the truck. The interior had mx3 front and rear seats. used an mx3 gauge cluster. The grant steering wheel I installed using the old stock steering wheel to make an adapter piece.

In the last 2 years I have changed almost everything... I'll keep the updates coming as I have time to write them.

how hard is this swap?

good results? mpg? 1/4 mile?

After the success of my first autocross with the car it was now time to debug and get the car set up for use as a daily driver...

I installed some 17" rims that came off my old 323GTX.. Since I have a son the car needed a back seat.. I installed a complete set up from an mx3 including seat belts..

The biggest thing I had to debug was the steering set up.. The manual rack had a horrible lock to lock ratio.. At first I installed a depowered 4 cylinder mx3 rack all though the turning ratio was better the effort it took to turn the wheel was horrible. My girl friend almost couldn't drive the car during one of the autocross events. I quickly got what I needed and installed power steering on the car, and fixed the 4 cylinder rack to make it work properly again. This worked out great. All though it still left me wanting a little quick lock to lock ratio.

Like anyone with the racing itch, I had to take the car at some point to the drag strip..

My first run out I was less then impressed..My mph was far to slow...

My best run of the night.. The car weighed in at 2305 lbs that night with a full tank of gas at full street trim.

60'..... 2.307

1/4......15.690

MPH.....85.47

For the rest of the summer I had fun with the car though rather then figuring out why the trap was so low..

One of the event I attended was the UBCSCC team enduro event. This is a unique and very fun autocross event. You make a team with 4 drivers, you all drive your own cars. In the morning the event is run as normal, you get a chance to practice the course a couple times. In the afternoon every person gets 1 shot at the course. You do 2 - 3 laps (depends on how many cars and how long the course it). Your pax times are calculated and added with your team mates. The team with the lowest time wins the event.

This was my run from that event.

Adam's Team enduro Run

My team had 2 novice drivers on it and we took top honors being the fastest team with more then 1 novice.

more to come, we have only gotten threw the summer of 2010 :)

Sweet! Definitely will be watching this one!

crazycanadian, 92CelicaHalfTrac, ST_ZX2...The Bee Gees.

Thanks for the support guys :) I am at home again with a little more time to add to things.

I guess we move along into the winter of 2010. This was a fun winter.

I had some left over stock suspension kicking around from another 323 project.. I decided to put it all to good use and installed it into the car. While I was at it, I put my GTX up on blocks and stole the winter tires off it. Thankfully I work at shop that has a tire machine so it cost me nothing to switch over the RA1's in favor of some hankook I-pikes. My shop also has an alignment rack as well. You will notice how much this helps me keep costs down as this thread progresses.

With the car winterized there was nothing better to do then enter the Totem tsd rally. This was my first rally as a driver ( had navigated for a friend of mine earlier that year at the Thunderbird tsd rally). There was one stipulation I had to follow. My girl friend requested that she be my navigator and was going to put up a fuss if she didn't get to come. Thankfully we get a long really well, and when I shut my yap and leave her alone, she does really well with all the math and calculations.

Note, to anyone considering running a winter tsd rally. Make sure the glycol tester you use to test your coolant before you leave still works properly. On the way to breakfast the first morning of the rally my car started to over heat. When I checked it out, I found all my rad hoses were about 90% frozen.I guess my car wasn't as prepped for the -45 deg C weather :( ....I got lucky though, once the car thawed out and I started getting some warm coolant to circulate the car was fine. My first order of business when I got home was to throw out my old glycol tester and go buy a new one.

Some pictures.. :)

Waiting to start one of the stages

My girl friend busy doing calculations

Unfortunately for us the rally ended early though when I went off the road. This accident made me realize the importance for studded snow tires. The place we went off was a very looooooong slow right hand turn. I came into the corner slowly and must have found the ice under all the snow. I had enough time to turn the wheel, realize we were still going straight, peddle the throttle, still go straight, play with the ebrake and peddle the throttle, still went straight. at this point I gave up looked over at my girl friend and said "hold on we are going off the road."

It was a very minor off road experience and could have been a lot worse. Had it not been for the tree and a couple shrubs we would have slid off down into a creak bed. Both my girl friend and I were ok. It took sweep over an hour to get to us. They then spent an hour helping tug us out thankfully. In the process of tugging us out though we managed to rip the winch right off the front of the truck. With a little bit of muscle though we were pulled free thankfully. My girl friend and I forfeited the last 2 stages and headed straight back to the meeting spot for a late night dinner. Once sweep finished off their night I slipped them a $100 bill for sticking it out and helping get me back on the road. The next morning my girl friend and I felt there had been enough bad karma hanging over this trip to call it quits. We didn't run the second day, instead we packed up and headed home.

This is a video one of my friend put together. He used all of our in car footage. Stuff from my car is first up in the video. Totem TSD rally video

A couple weeks after the rally I put the car up on my hoist and work. I was shocked to see all the damage and just how lucky we were.

In this area the body is pushed up almost an inch and torn right threw to the inside.

The gas tank took a good knocking. In one spot it was almost torn threw.

Dented the oil pan

This part of the body took a hit and saved my gas and brake lines.

awesome thread...not just a build, but a USE thread...we need more of those! (but I still really like build threads too! keep the updates coming!)

Well since I can't sleep tonight I might as well add another section. With the winter rally over and no more plans for racing it was time to start focusing on how to make the car faster come summer time. The HKS springs and Tokico shocks were a great set up for daily driving and a little bit of spirited driving around the mountains, but they weren't any good for autocross. I needed something with a higher spring rate.

As luck would have it a friend of mine picked up a set of used coil overs for next to nothing. He wanted the helper springs and pillow ball mounts for the coil over kit he was building. I bought what was left of the coil overs for $60. I had a set of stock upper shock mounts kicking around. With some scrap steal some drilling and cutting we managed to make everything work. This is what I ended up with. Fronts

Rear next to a stock rear

The interesting part about the coil overs. They literally came straight from japan. My friends cousin owned a RHD 323 GTR that was imported over. These coil overs came off that GTR

The coil overs were better then the HKS springs, but the car still had more potential in it. Turn in had improved, but I was dieing due to a lack of caster. At this point the most I could muster up was a lousy 2 deg. Even with -3 deg camber turn still wasn't as good as it needed to be.. getting on the power early made the car push. Throttle off over steer was unpredictable. So I continued the hunt.

The middle of summer saw me getting more serious about my suspension set up..I had been saving my tax return. Doing lots of calculating and pondering on what to spend it on. Well $450 later I a potion of that return went to these babies. Custom made spherical front control arm bearings. The rear sleeve was offset helping to add the caster that I was so desperately needing.

It took a bit to get them installed. There are a few variations in rear control arm bushing bracket. I wont go into all the detail here but if you are in need of front suspension information for a 323/protege/mx3/ford escort let me know. I have lots of pictures and stuff I can post up.

Money shot!

Once installed the offest rear bushing help me gain another deg of caster. I was now up to 3 deg. YES! All of this was with out camber/caster plates or camber bolts. :)

July of 2011 saw my fasted 1/4 mile time. I had decided to ditch the 17's for my RA1's I was using for autocross. I aired the RA1's down to 12 psi and went for broke.

60' .... 2.170

1/4 .... 15.250

MPH .... 88.73

Still such a poor mph for a light weight V6 323. Something was definitely going on. The motor should have been making more power. I had a few idea, but being a typical mechanic my car was always the last thing I wanted to diagnose. Besides it still drove good on the street and I got fairly good fuel milage.

With the new control arm bearings installed I managed to get a couple more autocross events in before winter hit. Here are some pictures and some of my videos from my 2011 autocross season.

My morning pitcrew. Happy to be paid in fruit snacks. :) He was 4 in these pictures. I have slowly been working on getting him more involved.

This is my favorite video. If you pause the video at 44 sec, I don't think you can get any closer to a cone mid drift and not end up with a penalty.

Autocross April 3rd 2011

First event after installing the new control arm bearings. The new alignment, added caster and the new bearings help the cars responsiveness. Much better steering feed back.

Last autocross run of the day Oct 2 2011

Fun in the rain getting a little sideways. Slush series 1 Oct 30 2011

The fall of 2011 saw me spend the last of my tax return on some new goodies for the car.

A new upper hatch wing. I owned it less then a week before I got the bug and installed it.. :)

Jim at Pierce motorsports became my new best friend. He fabbed up a set of tubular rear control arms for me. He also helped me get my hands on a KAAZ LSD. The diff came straight out of japan, shipped directly to my door. :) At this point in the build had finally gone over bored. I had officially spent more on custom parts for the car, then what I paid for it. These parts would have to sit and wait before being installed though.

iadr wrote: was that car originally built in Edmonton? I was working in a speed parts shop around fall 2003, and someone came browsing on a slow day and we looked over his white v6 swapped 323. I don't remember his name. I want to say he was a redhead, IIRC? I was driving a '63 Volvo 544 at the time.

No this car and I are from the lower mainland BC. Plus it was only built back in 2010/2009.