My car itself is a 2001 model which I picked up in New years day 2007. It was immaculate at the time with barely ever a stone chip. It's only modification was heavy BSA 17" wheels with some Sumitomo HTR-Z tyres. Car felt awesomely tight and it only had 35,000km's on it and had been garaged it's whole life. It came with a hard-top as well. Initially it was only to be a trackday car but I drove it everywhere just because it felt sooo good compared to my tired old Camira. I think I did my first trackday by March after less than 3 months owning it for the Mx5 clubday triple treat. This was back in the days when we used to use the short-track, longtrack and hill climb which hasn't been done since Wakefield Park was resurfaced.
I signed up to the trackday in stock class and planning to stay there so I could be a better driver with all the modification variables removed. However... fate decided, or atleast the scrutineers deemed that my wheels put me in modified class. So understandably I wasn't as competitive as I liked. We all like to think we're going to go out and surprise people with a wicked fast time. Well I didn't surprise them with that...I did however spin off the track about 17 times, melt my tyres, boil my brake fluid and rip apart some brake pads
. I spent the next 2 months trying to find some stock 15" wheels to use and oddly not 1 set came up on the forum or anywhere else at the time. First things changed were lessons learnt from the first trackday and advice from CT. So I got DS2500 brake pads, had the brake fluid professionally flushed and replaced with RBF600. I never saw 1" of broth in my master cylinder again past this point 
.At this point I started doing every trackday I could which included Circuit club trackdays at Eastern Creek. My first day there it was really wet and I was pitted with an EVO 9 which I was proudly keeping up with. Towards the end of the day it dried up though and I got more confident. Too confident actually and I lost it on the big hairpin at corner 9 and slid on the grass and was running parallel to the wall backwards at high speed. Managed to slow the car down but it just clipped the tyres and ripped the exhaust up into the back bumper and destroyed the tail-light. So I replaced the tail-light and resprayed the rear quarter of the car.
Rodd Clarke stopped racing by this point and he started parting out his NB8B and he was the current record holder for the road registered non-turbo modified class so I bit the bullet as I'd already ruined an exhaust. I contacted Rod and I got his old SMB exhaust and Racing beat headers. Plus his original Mania ECU which plug-in harness. This was a rare unit and one of the only things at the time that could handle the SVT and work around the alternator issues. There was however one problem and that was the mixtures were horrifically off with my car even though they were the same models. I figured it was simply due to the lack of CAI and contacted Mx5 Mania to see if I could get it retuned. Luckily or Unluckily I dropped my MAF while I was doing some preliminary design for a CAI and this actually broke the hot wire element. Daniel at Mania said he could upgrade the ECU board and firmware and convert it to a MAP sensor for me. So I borrowed a mates MAF and got the car up there and it was tuned and the car got a simple PVC elbow to a Pod filter as a CAI for the time. From memory the car made 87kw atw on the very old mania dyno. This was the last power mod for a very long time. I also picked up some cheap Advanti racing wheels for $100 for some eventual race rubber. They were just 15*6.5 ET38 but were surprisingly light. Next was coil-overs, I did my research and got myself some Tein Monoflex with an EDFC unit and self-installed them. Then I had 2 more changes before the start of the 2007-2008 mx 5 club season which were to change the diff and ratio from my open diff on 3.606 to Babalouies 4.1 centre on a Tomei Traxx 2-way competition clutch-pack LSD. It was at this point my car finally felt like a real race-car and my times came right down. In 6 months I'd gone from a standard car doing 1:23's to a 1:16's. A very expensive 6 months I might add!
Now I learnt one of the more important lessons and this one was from Phil Ashton(Charlie Brown). I got myself some Bridgestone RE55S 205/50/15's for the Advanti's and found I was now going slower (1:18'ish). The car just felt like it was bogging down on corner exit and they didn't seem to be much grippier. He took me for a drive during lunch and absolutely stood on the brakes and really push the car hard. This did 2 things which he probaly regrets now
. Firstly he showed me you can brake REALLY hard on semi-slicks, he practically slammed the pedal and the car just stopped. I'd been made paranoid by a few people that if I flat spot the tyres ($1200 worth at the time) they were ruined. So I'd actually been braking less than on the street tyres and the second bit was he got heat in the tyres because of this...which made them come alive. This immediately pulled 4 seconds off my PB and got me competitive with Irwin8er, Lithium and all the other front running modified guys. Over the next 6 months during the competition year me and Irwin were always within a few tenths of a second of each other and we both slowly developed our cars to stay competitive. So we'd both try out different mods and basically apply what worked to both our cars. So from here the car got by the start of 2008.
- Front 24mm Swaybar
Rear 16mm Swaybar
Polyeurethan bushes
Brown Davis Rollbar
Sparco Tec raceseat
6 point autotechnica Harness
Flared guards
Rear swaybar endlinks
From my old spreadsheets I can tell you that including only mods, race gear and servicing I had spent $39269.90 in my first 12 months of mx5 ownership
By this point forward most of the improvements came form me learning to drive but a great many refinements have been made.
- DBA4000 front rotors
Slotted RDA rear rotors
Rear race brakes to match the front
Carbing Front Strut tower brace
Carbing fender braces
Carbing front sub-frame brace
RS-Aizawa rear Strut tower brace
Beatrush differential Brace
Mazdaspeed engine mounts
Plus the car now got a re-tune. It was pointed out to me by Phil Mayo if I remember right that my car was blowing a lot of flames/black smoke all over the hill section of wakefield. Me and Irwin8er drove together in convoy to Winton a month earlier and I'd actually used more fuel than him and he was towing a 400kg trailor on his car. So I contacted Daniel and he said he hadn't had much time to do a thorough tune first time round so he'd be happy to clean up the tune for me. This cut my fuel use about %20 everywhere including on the track and the car felt significantly smoother and had more torque at 4000rpm. Where it was tuned it had made 105kw BUT that must've been an awesomely ego inflating dyno because it still was just a little slower than a few other cars on the straights which dyno'd much less. Also on the trip down to winton the car had lost it's pod filter twice on the elbow which was getting tiresome so it was retuned with a modified K&N typhoon intake and home made cold air box.
Since then the only mods in the last 2 years have been
- Air-con removal
Power steering removal
Radio Removal
949 racing 15*8's
52mm cooling pro radiator
Sparco Sprint V
APR Carbon mirrors
Lightyear Carbon hard-top
Mazdaspeed pedals
Times the car has done :-
Wakefield Park - 1:09:68
Eastern Creek - 1:52:91
Oran Park GP - 1:23:01
Oran Park South - 53:36
Winton Long - 1:44:92
Winton Short - 1:12:12
. And I suspect you might not be an early starter either! 
. So I think in future I will be doing one very important thing between trackdays. Driving it to work atleast once without headphones in so I can hear the car properly. So I spent most of yesterday night and this morning replacing that bearing. The rear wheel bearing are a significantly bigger PITA than the fronts. After spending a good 3-4 hours analysing, using a big hammer and then re-thinking the approach when nothing could budge the original bearing... I went to bed. This morning I made up a mount so it could fitted to the press. This was made out of a 15mm steel roundbar and an 8mm steel plate. Using a 40 tonne press the round bar was bent about 25mm before the bearing released 
. Very very minor scraping really with a slight dint in the front quarter panel and some paint removed around the rear wheel arch so overall I was stoked that so little had been done. Though Andrew got to go visit the officials for making that contact overtaking mid turn-9 at wakefield. Was already incredibly weird hearing the announcers who thought that I was driving. Hearing "Hellmun goes for a massive desperate .....blah" over and over while half asleep in the ute and unable to see anything is quite fear inducing!
