Hello all.
I joined the site a long time ago (Nov. 2007) and have been soaking up knowledge, without really posting. So this is my fourth post here. Back in 2007 I lived in the Kansas City area. I bought a 2002 Miata SE after I graduated (Mechanical Engineering) and found this site as I was getting into autocross. Fast forward some years (~2014 or so) and I started doing HPDE and Time Trials with NASA's Central region. I moved out to the Northern Virginia area in 2018. Somewhere in there I thought it would be fun and smart to change classes and prep my car to the limit of NASA's ST4/TT4 class. Somewhat because I was getting really tired of being so damn slow down the non-interesting bits of track. A lot because engineering and fabricating are just as enjoyable to me as driving the car (usually...), and moving to a higher class also meant more things to tinker with. Blah, blah, blah... life happens, buy house, get married (second time, massive upgrade over original model), have kid (these are better than racecars, and when they start getting older they help racecar!), have smaller percentage of time to dedicate to the car. After procrastinating and telling myself for a couple years that I will finish the project, I finally admitted that I've completely lost the motivation to see it through and I just want a car to drive. I know that I will undoubtedly go down the rabbit hole again on whatever I end up with, but where's the fun if not?

Here's a pic from back in 2007 or 2008 of mediocre driving, lots of body roll, and a damn good time as near as I can remember...


Also, I own a cat.
-Justin

 

Managed to dig up two pics from when my car was functional and doing time trial. Except one of them it wasn't functional because I'm replacing a broken wheel stud. PSA - ALWAYS use good quality lug nuts. Nothing from an auto parts store. I must be a slow learner because this had to happen twice before I switched to ARP wheel studs and good quality lug nuts.

Pretty sure this photo was taken with a potato...

 

I'll probably make a build thread for this that will never be finished. Then I can look back in perpetuity and question my decisions. My old dead phone won't let go of all the fun fabrication photos, but this was from Oct. 2021. Literally an annual moment of me rolling the car out of the garage to dust it off and push it back into the garage.

 

Hey! Thanks for posting.. what state is the car in now?

 

Welcome back! It looks like a decent bit of progress was made between the first and third posts. Interested to see what state the car's currently in, just as Fire said.

 

It's even more disassembled now. Working on parting it out...

 

I see a trans adapter plate in that photo but it looks pretty new. Were you planning on putting a ZF/Getrag 260 in it at some point?

 

Yep. Have a ZF 6-speed that was going to go in...