Project Trackday

Its taken a while, but I have finally found the Miata for Project Trackday!

We headed out just after lunch today to make the 4 hr journey to Columbus, Ohio in search of this hidden gem.  It pretty much rained the entire way there, but as we were pulling into I-270 the skies started to clear a bit.  Let me just say first of all that this 1990 Miata is about as good as they come, and clearly has been well pampered by its previous owners.

After a visual inspection and a test drive it was clear that this car would be a perfect candidate for the project.  The 4 hour drive back was truely a pleasure in this car, and I can’t wait to get working on the car.  For now though I’m dead tired from 8+hrs of driving today, so more updates/info to follow tomorrow!

Well having a final project and some research publications to work on last week meant that the search for a car was put on the back burner a few days.  I have just found out that a few cars that I was going to go check out this week/weekend have already been sold in the past few days.  Back to digging through the classifieds again…

On a related note, I was referred to a few websites (r3vlimited.org and e30tech.com) with some pretty interesting listings for E30s.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have written them off so quickly!

Just a quick update on the progress of the car search.  I went up to Chicago today to check out a ’90 Miata (NA) with 130k on the odometer.  All reports on Autocheck came back clean so I thought I’d go take a look at the vehicle in person and get a test drive in.

Well turns out it didn’t even get to that…  One minute of looking at the vehicle and I was already convinced that the car was not going to cut the mustard for this project.  Anyway the search continues, but I’ll be around again this week to check out a few other early 90′s MX-5s.

Edit:  See comments for a summary of the problems with the car.

So far the top two choices are as follows (in no particular order).  I’ll list my concerns with each choice and open it up for discussion.  Also, if you want to add some reasoning to your prior comments in the discussion that would be helpful too.

Mazda Miata MX-5 (1st gen)

I like the 1st gen MX-5, though a bit undecided on whether to pay more attention for the 1.6L or the latter 1.8L engine.  There are tons of these out in the used car market so finding one shouldn’t be too much of a problem.  I’d prefer a hardtop personally, but once again with the limited budget that is not very high on the to-do list for track prep.

E30 BMW 318i

I’ve always had a soft spot for the 3-series, and would love to get my hands on a E30 M3 someday.  For now though the M3 is completely out of the question in my budget range, and I’m questioning whether it’d be possible to pull off this project with a 318i.  Concerns are that the parts may be difficult to come by and/or expensive.  The other problem will be to find a 5-spd E30 318i for sale.  I’m sure they’re not that easy to come by.

What are the specific things I need to look out for on these car when I go for test drives/inspections?

At this point I’m not ruling out any of the other suggestions yet, except ‘a hemi’…

P.S. I’ve enabled the ‘reply to comments’ feature