Hello from Washington
 

Hello, all. Newb from the Olympia area checking in. My miata is a red '90, all stock. I figured now was a good enough time to join, considering my need to tap into the community's collective wisdom (which I'll do in another thread).
I'm looking forward to being ruthlessly hazed by everyone and turbo-ing my car.

Welcome! Good to see some fellow NW people im up in Seattle. We don't really haze people here as long as they search for the info first, we just don't spoon feed the same question a million times every day. What are your plans for the car? Do you plan on taking it to the track or windy mountain runs?

I might track it occasionally, but our LuckyDog car serves my track needs for the most part. It'll probably mostly be a fun commuter. I may take it rallycrossing later, if I let my boy talk me into it.
I do have a standing bet with my brother that I'll be within two seconds/lap at the Ridge in his (yet to be completed) LS3 NA miata.

Welcome to the forum, glad to have you join, any fun performance mods planned for the '90? I'm sure you'll find lots of good ideas and advice here.

Yeah, I plan to DIY turbo it with one of the spare Subaru turbos I have. I'd also like to do a good street/decent track suspension.
This forum has been great, so far.

Little update. I've been very busy with work (and racing). But one of my side jobs netted me a VF38 from an import Subaru engine. Seems like the perfect turbo for the 1.6. I've seen some talk of it but not of anyone actually using one. I was planning on building my own manifold anyway, now it'll just need to be a twin-scroll.
Should I start a build thread?

Start a thread with lots of pictures. Sounds like a fun plan. Also jump over to the "Washington miata turbo folk" thread and say hi. There's a good handful of us in the area that talk and can help each other out.

Will do.
A forewarning though: I'm horrible at documentation. When I start working, I rarely slow down enough to take pics.

Good to see more NW people, welcome!

I'm on the large and in charge Lexus LS400 team, #414.
You guys are fast. Do you have any documentation on the motor swap in the race car?

Thanks.
I'm helping my brother swap a LS3 into his NA. Motor and trans are in and we're working on the rad mounting and plumbing. I'll be following your thread with much interest.

Hey thanks, a lot of development has gone into that chassis/engine. Are you Group Therapy now or is there another #414? I believe I recall the LS400 being a very courteous car to race with, so if that was you, thank you. There's a lot of riff raff who don't know what they're doing down in C class.

There are a few pictures here and on club roadster. Either we suck at updating the build threads or no one seems to care, so we stopped updating them. There are some other pictures of the engine bay on our Facebook page, Race Invaders.

But basically it's a $600 60k 2.4 EcoTec out of a 2006 Pontiac G6, installed with MT motorsports swap kit. We went the extra mile by installing V8R's tubular subframe and re made one of the motor mounts all to get more room to route the down pipe. Swap kit adapts to the Miata 5/6-speed, we're currently running a rebuilt 5-speed, waiting for it to blow up. Dyno'd at 186hp/tq, and is absolutely awesome to drive. Like a Miata x1.5

Looks like qualifying spec miata record at The Ridge is 1:59.2, we ran a few 1:57.3 during the race, then did quite a few 1:55 during a track day a few weeks later (much less traffic). All running 225 RS-4s.

https://www.ecotecmiata.ca/

Yeah, Group Therapy. We figure that if we're going to be a rolling chicane, we might as well be a courteous rolling chicane. Even we know how frustrating it can be trying to get around a slower car that is mostly clueless.

Your car seems so much faster on track than the numbers would suggest. Must be proper torque on the nuts behind the wheel.

Thanks for that link, too. I had no idea that the ecotec swap was so popular. I had plans to swap one into a early Celica GT-S years ago, but that project got round-filed.

Feel free to reach out if you ever have questions on anything! And good to know more LD people as well. My lemons team did a lucky dog race last year, the weekend before or after I was at MRLS and I think we're planning on running only LD next year. We took this year off as most of the team was finishing school/getting houses and our shit together.

We haven't run a LeMons race since we started with LD. Have I seen you/your team at any of the NW races?

Possibly, we/my team would have been in a white 1990 audi 90 that we sold this year. We were probably a bit of a moving roadblock if you ever saw us

Were you the team that had to run a cage tube through the roof to pass tech?

Hahahahahahaha, yeah. Our tallest teammate didn't come to work days when we were mounting the seat and we had a driver who was shorter than me on the team that year so the seat got mounted a bit too high.