#it's like someone unplugged a cable in my brain between middle + high school and forgot to ever put it back in

[poptartmochi]

methinks my options are to get better or die

[smoothshift]

If you question whether or not a miata is a reliable daily, let me tell you a little tale.. via /r/cars

If you question whether or not a miata is a reliable daily, let me tell you a little tale..

So here’s the story, about a year ago me and my dad were hunting for a vehicle to race in the annual shitbox ice race we had been participating in for the past few years. For about 12 months I had been keeping a very close eye on the car ads in my province searching for a shitbox we could dominate with on the frozen lake when I see a dusty red automatic miata for purchase for about $1500. It had a hard top, a big ol’ dent in the fender, and an absolutely banging stereo. It was perfect. In about a weeks time we were at the guys apartment picking up the little red turd for $1200 cad. When we drove it home that night we started to learn about the “charms” this vehicle had to offer. For starters the headlights absolutely bit, I had my head out the window guiding my dad through the construction that littered the streets back to our house. This was an easy task because there was absolutely no passenger window. No passenger window in the wintertime meant it was colder than a witches tit on the drive back. We also discovered that the previous owner had emptied an entire box of “Mr.Noodles” into the vehicle and it was getting ground to a fine snortable powder under my buttocks as I sat in the passenger seat. We somehow managed to make it home without causing any major accidents and we began the task of preparing the car for the jankiest racing event ever invented. For the next couple weeks I would spend my weekends trying to scrub all the hepatitis and layers of crust out of the miata. At some point we figured it needed googly eyes and a boso style straightpipe exhaust with supertrapp disks on the end. The exhaust was basically made up of 20 different sized pieces of piping that were laying around the shop but it seemed to do the job of making it the most obnoxiously loud car you will ever see. We slapped some studded tires on it and basically decided it was ready for 4+ hours of absolute ice racing abuse. The night before the test day at the frozen lake it snowed about a foot which eliminated any chance of us actually driving the car to the track so we ended up strapping it to a trailer and towing it there instead. When we arrived at the track we unloaded the turd and off-roaded it down to the lake track (which was still being “carved” at the time). We cranked up the Alice cooper on the stereo and we started to haul major ass. Now the car actually did something that surprised us both, it was very very very good on the ice. Not once in a million years would we ever consider a miata to be a world class vehicle on a ice track. However we couldn’t really say the same about snow banks because the whole front end of the vehicle pretty much siezed up when it got snow packed into it. After we did some spirited crashing and a handful of laps and we much called it a day and parked the miata back near our trailer. The following day we would return to see the fleet of cars brought by our competitors. The most notable ones being a rainbow ball of metal which you almost couldn’t believe was running (or was even a car at some point for that matter) and a caged dodge omni. Now that I think of it there was even a lancer participating at some point. The MX-5HIT would really have some stiff competition. The drivers gather around to discuss the rules. The rules were simple. 1. You must be able to reach the beer cooler in the back seat. 2. When someone bins it into the snow barrier outlining the track we would all come to a stop to pull him out (this ended up keeping the racing extremely close for multiple hours). 3. On the final laps it would be “prison rules” where anything goes and nobody would be rescued. 4. Pee breaks would be held periodically and we would stop to eat food somewhere in the middle of the race. Personally I think this ruleset is flawless and every form of Motorsport should adopt them. Anyways, all the road hazards line up to the start line and take off in a plume of impending mechanical disaster. Immediately the MX-5HIT squeezes its way to the front of the pack behind some caged neons. The sheer racket this straightpiped turd was making was an absolute spectacle. We roared down the straightaway at over 120kmh with no foresight to how we would eventually slow down, but it didn’t matter, this car was starting to show its true colours as an ice racing beast. At the halfway mark in the race a handful of cars had already been “eliminated”. Remember that rainbow ball of metal I referenced? I guess it turned out to be a corolla (or what was left of one). The driver hit the snow bank so hard that it send snow about 70 feet in the air. The impact caused the transmission to completely empty itself of any sort of fluids. I also believe the lancer retired early as well due to similar mechanical issues (as the car mysteriously vanished part way through the race). Honestly if I was a betting man I wouldn’t be counting on the miata making it either. At that point it had been at around 6000rpm steady for about 2 hours yet it still showed no signs of wanting to through the towel in. After a short break we resumed the antics of thrashing some junkyard rejects around the frozen lake for another mildly uneventful couple hours. A flag was waved and we returned to the start/finish line to prepare for the final prison rule laps. The race starts and once again the miata stutters its way back into the lead (I forgot to mention this entire time the car had a catastrophic misfiring issue either due to a bad AFM or coil pack so it was basically running on 3 until it reached over 4K rpm so we had to keep the revs high for the whole race). Halfway through the prison laps we almost got sandwhich between 75% of a Ford Explorer and an ice barrier but the small miata slipped through like a wet bar of soap. Coming on the last laps we had essentially secured podium somehow. The outcast miata had beaten the odds. Not only was it a compatible ice racing vehicle but it also held together at 6k rpm for the better part of a 4-5 hour endurance race with absolutely zero problems. We cross the finish line sideways blaring eurobeat as loud as it would go and then we pull into the pits where we get to assess what the racing ended up doing to the car. As we peel ourselves off the hot seats we notice that the 30 year old seat fabric is steaming. All the hepatitis I had convinced myself that was absorbed within the dirty seat fabric had now gone airborne. Other than that the car seemed absolutely flawless, the only difficulty we ended up having is cleaning up the snow in the engine bay because the bottom is completely sealed off which meant snow could just fill the engine bay completely. We also found out that the hot engine had basically turned the snow into an ice cocoon for the bottom half of the engine. Other than that the persistent MX-5HIT had saved itself from an impending future of being crushed at the local scrap yard.

After the race the MX-5HIT pretty much sat dormant in a shed rotting away for 8 months until I decided to try to “repair” the mangled soft top roof. Now I would like to say some words of advice, never never never never ever ever ever ever think you can repair a miata soft top. It’s absolute hell. From the disassembly to the re assembly it’s an absolute pain in the ass. I somehow managed to get a completely new top fitted and the old one removed in a total of about 2 days. With my new soft top fitted I try to latch the roof onto the car to make sure everything fits right when i hear a ripping sound. I glance over to the drivers side of the vehicle to see a 7.5 inch tear along the edge of my brand new soft top. Honestly if I wasn’t such a calm individual I have no doubt I would have probably thrown whatever I was holding right through the side of the car. After that the car just sat around for another month until I decided to fix the misfiring problem. A coil pack was ordered and I made it my goal to instal it in the least botch way possible. I fired the car up and it still ran like shit (I guess it’s called the MX-5HIT for a reason right?) so I do some very very brief online browsing and somehow my brain came to a conclusion that I need to “clean the MAF”. Now there are a few problems with that. The first being that my particular miata never came with a MAF, it came with a AFM. The second of the problems was that I didn’t bother taking the time to look up what a miata MAF actually looked like. So me being stupid I decide to unscrew the plug on the side of the AFM (oppose to just unplugging it) and I sprayed MAF cleaner inside. Little did I know that when you unscrew the side of the AFM instead of unplugging it and pull on the cable, it’s the equivalent to when a bee stings something and the stinger rips its guts out making it die. had killed my miata. The car wouldn’t start or anything. My brain slowly puts the puzzle pieces together and I realize that I am a fool. When my dad discovered that the eye sore of a car would be a semi permenant decoration in his shop until another AFM was ordered he said that he wanted to strangle me Homer Simpson style. We managed to saw the top of the AFM off and do some open heart surgery to all the connectors I had obliterated. The car now ran and I saved myself from getting an ass whooping of the century.

Somehow I had convinced myself that it would be a smart idea to bring the hurt car home and use it as a daily driver. Boy was I a big dummy. The first clue that something with the car was wrong was when I took it for a rip an it momentarily hesitated when I touched the throttle. I thought it was odd but thought nothing of it. A couple days later the car passes away yet again but this time in my school parking lot. Out of all the things that killed this relic it ended up being me. The open heart surgery on the AFM just didn’t hold. Andddd the miata spends yet more time sitting around. Eventually a new AFM was ordered and installed the right way (live and learn I guess right?). It was during installation I found a special pool of liquid forming within the engine bay, scratch that, two pools of liquid. The first being the master cylinder which decided that it only wanted to leak everywhere and take the paint off the car instead of Hold fluid. The second was the fluid reservoir for the windshield wipers which leaked worse than a bucket with no bottom. The car is an absolute cursed dangerous pile of shit but for some reason I couldn’t bear seeing it part with my family. I actually got curious one day and decided to do some looking into on the previous service history and accident reports on our little racecar (since the car came with absolutely zero papers saying it was ever serviced) and by golly it hadn’t been touched a Mazda employee since the day it was built in Hiroshima back in the late 80’s. It turns out it wasn’t missing service papers, it just didn’t have any. And this was the same vehicle that spent 4-5 hours in the red with all 90hp screaming at 6000rpm. I’ve convinced myself that this car deserves a second life that isn’t the junk yard. Sure it may be the rustiest slowest miata in the continent but it’s one tough bastard. And I’m not sure if I’m the only one but I had zero interest in owning a miata until I actually got the chance to drive one. Even the shittiest miata of them all still ended up being a good ass car.