I bought this car late 2010 after my old '95 M edition was totaled by mother nature's furious hailstorm. I bought the car back from the insurance company and continued to drive it, as the new golfball-like aerodynamics on the bodywork seemed to make the car faster.
A few months later during a sunday morning drive, a comically blind old lady in a Buick LeSabre, a russian tank in comparison to the miata, drove out in front of me making a left turn and destroying my quarter panel. After this the search for a new car started.
For the first time in ages, facebook.com wasn't my most visited website in my browsing history. Craigslist had taken the honors. I was looking through every NB Miata, MR2 Spyder, E30 325is, S2000, C4 Corvette, and Civic (for comical reasons) ad. My only criteria was somewhat lightweight, rear wheel drive, limited slip out back, manual transmission in the middle.
After many test drives I landed on a '99 pretty base (light as possible) NB miata somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin. Other than lots of Gouda and Fermunda wrappers in the trunk the car was pretty mint for its age. I happily drove it home and begun to mod it. At first, I didn't really have a goal for the car other than I wanted to go fast in it, a sure way to go bankrupt. On went Koni Yellows with adjustable sleeves and 550FR/375RR springs. My old M-edition got robbed of its very light and very narrow BBS wheels and on went some Hoosier R6s. The car handled wonderfully and the steering response was magical, but the slicks proved to be an expensive route and the car was nowhere close to being competitive in CSP.
Over the winter I had started to build a knowledge base for myself of what it would take to get the car set up for STR and be competitive, at least on a local level. And so the garage slowly became a storage ground for all the parts I was gathering.
Once it warmed up I got it all put together and the car was transformed into a competent racer, now I just slowly tinker with it to get every last tenth of a second out of it I can.
