Our long national nightmare has finally come to an end. We found our car.
As you may have read in this post back in August, we bought a Mazda RX7 back in May to race in the LeMons and ChumpCar series. At the time, the car was located in Orlando and our team members were spread out between Atlanta and Nashville. We knew a guy near Orlando who owns a race shop, so we asked him to pick up the car and look it over for us. We knew that the car needed a new exhaust system, so we asked him to do that as well. Thus began our long and tortured journey to reclaim our car.
The next six months were filled with unanswered emails, unreturned phone calls, and unfulfilled promises. We were rarely able to contact the shop owner and when we did, we were made promises that were never kept. We had owned the car for a full six months and never once laid eyes on it.
The good news is that earlier this month, we finally took possession of the car. The shop owner was coming up to Georgia to pick up an engine, so he brought the car with him.
Randy took the car out to Road Atlanta last weekend and did a few laps. The carb was not working correctly, so it had a habit of flooding. This past week, Randy and Andrew figured out the carb problem and took it to Road Atlanta again yesterday for a test. Unfortunately, some mechanical gremlins are still plaguing the car. Randy can drive the car hard into a corner or two, but then the engine loses power. The exhaust also kicks out a lot of black smoke on deceleration. We’re not sure what the problem is at this point.
Randy reported that the car felt slow and the the gearing is unusually tall. He said he doesn’t think we’ll ever use fifth gear. That’s not good.
I hate that we’re having the mechanical issues, but at least we have the car in our possession. That’s a step in the right direction.
Tags: Andrew Tucker, Mazda RX7, Randy Pobst