I'm going to reply to all the comments in one post.
As far as Dean taking his MGB to "the next level" goes, expensive
experience has taught me that there is negligible price difference
between building a new car, and bringing your car to the next
performance level. By the time that you're done bringing everything
back in line, you've just thrown away a lot of gofast parts you spent
a lot of money on, just a few years ago. Remember, the expensive part
of "hotrodding" a car isn't all the expensive parts you put on it,
it's all the expensive parts that you take off because they didn't
work for your application. From a cold hard cash perspective, you're
better off finding someone that would appreciate your MGB for what it
is, and start over on a new car.
Unless you have a much larger racing budget than I do, you can't
afford to be sentimental about what you race, if you want to be
competitive. You need to pick a class that you can afford to be
competitive in. Otherwise, you are just making a quixotic gesture. You
may be having lots of fun, but you won't be competitive. I,
personally, am sick and tired of "doing well considering what I was
driving", and hearing things like "You drove the wheels off that POS,
you're an awesome driver, when are you going to get a real car?".
John, I'd strongly advise going Spec Miata rather than Spec Rx7. Not
only are 1st gen Rx7 evil, nasty unpredictable beasts, but they are
only a few years behind MGBs on the price and availability
curve. They've already bottomed out in price and are starting to get
more expensive as street cars. Also after 10 years of it being the
cheapest class, all the "low hanging fruit" performance parts in
junkyards has been picked clean, and they aren't making any more first
gen Rx7s.
A few years ago, I was teaching at a Miata club track school and for
the first time really looked at the cars. I had been trying to install
a 1st gen Rx7 rear end in my MG to get limited slip and disc
brakes. When I looked at the Miatas I realized that they had all the
things that I wished I could do to my MG, more power, coil overs all
the way around, four wheel disk brakes, overhead cam, fuel
injection... I also mistakenly thought that they were heavier than my
car. I realized that it would be a lot easier to take the weight out
of a Miata, than to put 30 years of technology into an MGB.
One of the guys on a miata mailing list commented that once I drive my
Miata on the track, I'll never bother putting the MGB back
together. There is a major difference between the two that I didn't
mention in my first post. I've effectively designed and built Jasmine
myself. When I'm done with it, there will be very little that is still
stock. With a Miata, all it takes to go fast is money. There are a lot
of people out there who have figured out how to best use todays
technology on them and you can just buy the stuff and bolt it on.
When the two cars are done, I will have built the MGB, but I will have
just assembled the spec miata.
If your goal is a practical, reliable sports car that is inexpensive
to buy, has good power, and handles well and predictably, 20 or 30
years ago, I would have reccomended that you buy an MGB. Today, it's
the Miata. If however, you enjoy driving a car that you won't see 7
others just like it on the drive to work, one that causes complete
strangers to come up to you to talk about it. If you like taking
something, redesigning it and spending lots of time and money making
it better than it was when it left the factory, the an MGB (or almost
any other 30 year old sports car) is a better project.
--
Girling is not a verb.
lrc@red4est.com http://www.red4est.com/lrc
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