After my success in karting, I knew I had the talent and ambition to pursue racing more seriously. However it took me some time to narrow down how I wanted to pursue this desire. As much as loved karting, when looking at the series I was already much older than the top level drivers, and on top of that the fees were much higher than I expected (welcome to motorsport!).
Because of this, I started to look into all aspects of motorsport. After a few months of research I initially looked into the Formula Jedi series, however after finding the cost over entry to be just too high, I settled on the BRSCC MX5 MK1 Championship. I found that the cost of entry of this series actually ended up being surprisingly less than to compete in a competitive nature in karting.
My MX5 on the day of purchase
I chose this series because it was filled with close, wheel to wheel racing. with up to 40 car grids it seemed like whatever level car you have, you will always find yourself on track with somebody. On top of this these cars were cheap, reliable and lightweight rear wheel drive sports cars. What’s not to love! With an abundance of online MX5 forums and how to videos, I elected to buy a road worthy MX5 and build it into one fit for competing, as I wanted to learn more about the mechanics of these machines. I felt this would all be necessary knowledge when it comes to the setup of the car and diagnosing faults in the future.
From here I had saved up enough and spent the next month combing through the markets online for one. And after some luck I found one on Facebook marketplace about 15 minutes from my home. There’s a few things we needed to watch out for when looking at these cars. Namely rust. Along with just making sure everything in the engine bay was neat and not heavily modified. However after seeing this one we knew we had a contender so we speedily bartered the price and drove it home that day.
On our First track day - 2018
Before doing any work to it we took it on a track day soon after. Where we realised just how much we had to do to this car. Not helped by the fact that we had a set of tyres on their last legs in heavy rain. Still the handling and power deficit was immediately apparent and I realised how big a job lay ahead of us. On a lighter note however, the car ran beautifully the whole day, and it was fantastic to drive on its own. Handled precisely and intimately through the corners and you really felt the power delivery which surprised me given that this model was likely barely reaching 100bhp. Although I knew it was a long way off. I was already ecstatic to be working on this car and racing it in a real championship. Have a look at my next blog for more info on this track day and what we learnt.
Some slides and saves from our first track day