Been highly considering a "beater" autocrosser

General Off-Topic
1

So I do autocross on the side quite a bit, just landed a new job so I have a little bit of extra money to do a few different things:

A. Modify the ZX2 (it’s my daily driver… so I’m leery)
B. Do a /few/ mods to both my bike AND my ZX2 (nothing major, just here and there)
C. Go buy a “beater” autocrosser and slowly fix it up and make it a dedicated autox car.

I’ve been seeing a lot of 2nd and 1st gen RX7s around here for about $200 that are pretty much beat to hell, which is fine with me… I’m looking for a car with great weight distribution (go figure, 2nd gens are DAMN close to 50/50) and rear wheel drive (wha? rx7 is rearwheel drive yay!) and something that redlines high and can stay there with very little engine mass (wha? rotary?) so i’ve been very seriously considering finding one of these little buggers and modifying them as I drove one a long time ago and got a kick out of them. Not to mention I’ve driven a total of around 6-7 RX8s when I worked at a Ford/Mazda dealerships and I love the way the rotaries drive. I think I’d really enjoy modifying my ZX2 and I think i will coninue to do so but not to the extent of making it dedicated to autox simply because if i screw something up at autox my livelihood is affected, whereas with a dedicated autox car i can f*ck it up and it’s fine, I just gotta get it fixed. It would probably be soemthing to be fixed and modifed over a series of several months because the season is now closed and I have a few sources to get parts for the ZX2 and the RX7 if I wanted and by next season i could have the suspension finished and an engine in it.

Any thoughts?

(edit) and for reasons of confusion, this choice will not affect the other poll i made on the mods to my bike, I will still be doing them…

2

well i can tell you the v6 swap your thinking of will make the car less auto x friendly ( im planning on using it more of a road race car )

3

Get the first gen 7, and look into all of the Spec7 or Pro7 race classes in the SCCA, or NASA…

4

Get the RX7 running and then go after the Zx2

5

Seems quite unanymous, i suppose I’ll go save up a few hundred bucks and go find a beater and do all the body work and such :slight_smile: This will be fun.

6

ohh and rx7’s are a little closer to 60-40 weight balance hence why they drift them ( 50/50 like miatas and mr2’s cause snap over steer when whipped sideways)

7

2nd gens are close to something like 52/48 from what i was told, i heard that the 3rd and 1st gens were different… where can i find the info? been googling, guess i could go to rx7club…

8

Whatever you decide to do, make sure to keep us in the loop so we know what’s going on. I know this is ZX2 Motorsports, but that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in other cars too! I want an RX-7… :cry:

  • Darron
9

I hope you get the RX-7. It wil be interesting to see all the fun things you do to it.

-Miranda