Month: January 2020

We’ve seen them on professional drift cars, they’ve been recommended by friends and their distributor is located right next door to where the Craigslist Miata received both a heart transplant and a rear-end rejuvenation. After spending a few minutes with my new friend Rob, he recommended the WinMax W3 brake pad. The W3 is made from a compound suited for highly spirited driving and even some track application. The W3 is not a super aggressive race pad, so there is no need to build up heat before the brakes start working. They also provide more modulation than the stock so that you can feel the difference based on how hard your right foot is depressing the pedal. These are metallic brakes, so there will be plenty more noise and dust than before, but after one afternoon spent bedding the brakes in the Crest it would be an understatement to say that the difference is like night and day.

Things are starting to look pretty shiny under there with those fancy blue anodized aluminum bars. While the Craigslist Miata wasn’t suffering from thermal inefficiencies just yet, there was a major issue keeping the car from meeting its full potential on the racetrack. The culprit being a leaky heater core tucked down below the dashboard that was already showing early signs of incontinence. My main motto being “any track day you can drive home from is a successful one.”

This means that until the job could be done the right way, the best option in order to keep hot coolant from pissing all over the driver compartment, and more importantly maintain the cooling system’s structural integrity, would be to simply bypass the tiny heat exchanger all together. While this modification makes it impossible to defog the windshield on a cold morning, it does give me the added peace of mind to start pushing the radiator’s fluid to a highly pressurized limit. So as long as we’re in there, might as well upgrade the radiator too.

I promise this is the last time, for now. Really. Somehow I ended up on TireRack and somehow came across a pair of these Sparco who knows whats but they do look kind of funky. Like they would be cool on the back of a Miata drift car right, maybe, we’ll see.

Continue reading “Stop It Already with the Rims or Rejoining Team Gold Wheels with Sparco”

Blame it on a trip to SEMA, but after meeting a guy who worked at Vivid Racing showed me the Stack tach in his Integra I started to peruse their online inventory of aftermarket automotive knick-knacks. As usual, the search began in the Bargain Bin or Closeout section, where I first came across the lower tie bar on sale for a mere $45 USD. Now not one to leave things half-assed it was decided to pair the beautiful blue anodized piece with the one you’d actually be able to see once the hood is popped. After all what good are the shiny bits bolted to your engine bay unless you can show them off and impress people?

Continue reading “Unnecessary Spending on Some JDM Underhood Bling”