More drifting pics

The gallery for the March event at Mineral Wells was posted finally and there's some good shots of the miata on the track so here they are.

Caught up now

Thats gets us up to speed and to the present. The miata now sits in the shop with a dented fender waiting for some time for me to come and give it some love and get it back up to speed again. Everything from now on will be posted as it happens.

Drifting, a wheel, some vinyl, and some damage

Here's the miata after the last round of mods sporting some seriously mismatched offsets with +40 in the front and +5 in the back. It looks goofy but its temporary until I get another set of front rims.


After that event I got my hands on a sparco course wheel off craigslist and got it installed. I really like the deeper dish and smaller size. It made a lot bigger difference than I thought.


I also started a little vinyl business and decided to do some advertising on my car.


And here's some action shots of the car with the new graphics doing what it does best.




Unfortunate all good things come to an end and my miata's reputation as being the cleanest drift car at the track was one of them. I competed in the D1 underground licensing for fun. I was ranked 9th out of 16 in my initial runs which was an interesting place. The top and bottom placers were matched up to allow the best qualifying drivers to advanvce and not knock eachother out in the first competition rounds. This meant that drivers like me exactly in the middle of the pack faced very closely matched opponents. This pretty much also meant that we were both completely new to tandem and inevitably I went too deep on the last corner and couldn't make the transition and got tagged. Fortunately this is just an excuse for the new paint job I've been wanting for a while now.

Fabrication, a bench, and a seat

Next up I had to do some fabrication. While on a trip to SPL to get some parts for Ashley's RB25 240sx I spotted a nice looking carbon bucket and asked about it. It turned out to be one of the last display models of SPL's old seats. I picked it up for a steal and took it home to install. I tried to install it the same night as the roll cage however the bride seat rail that I purchased for it turned out to put it up against the cage and far too high for my 6'2" frame to fit under the cage.

With this in mind I went to Home Depot and picked up a nice Rigid cut off saw to make sure all my cuts worked nicely and then to the metal shop for the stuff to make a bench and some seat brackets. I think the end results speak for themselves. The bench works even though its a tad... industrial and the seat brackets came out extremely nice. The seat now fits in the car perfectly and sits with the bottom touching the floor. Despite this I still do not sit as low as I would like and I plan on actually modifying the seat pans in the future to allow an even lower seating position.

Roll Cage

The next thing I did was ditch my hard dog roll bar in favor of a full hard dog cage. Again this came courtesy of Chelsea Denofa who hooked me up with a great price on the cage AND a JIC racing crossflow radiator. The cage was a bit of a hassle to install but I managed to get it in and re-welded in a couple of days.

My next set of mods came quickly without a lot of pictures being taken inbetween but here's what I have from this stage:

I got a new set of BC racing coilovers to replace the old worn out stock struts. Thanks to Chelsea Denofa who helped develop these for getting me a great deal on a brand new set. Once I got them set up right the BC's really made the car come alive. Finally I was able to use all the power I had availible.

Next I installed a new front air dam courtesy of Home Depot's garden section. Despite how ghetto this seems I really like it. It looks great (imho) and it is nearly indestructable. I've run it over many cones, scraped it in and out of driveways, and tagged tires with it and it doesn't even show a mark.

Finally I pulled the old and questionably accurate boost gauge in favor of a nice greddy that I had on hand from another old project. The new gauge looks great, matches the stock gauges extremely well, and did actually reveal that my boost setting were a bit different than were being shown with the old unit.

Early miata photos

Here's the pictures from when I first got the miata. At this point it had the stock suspension, a hard dog roll bar, turbo kit, and a borla exhaust. That was IT. No other supporting mods at all. There's a long road ahead for this little machine but first the starting point:

(Please forgive the poorly resized images, I'm still getting used to this blogging thing.)