As always new paint brought bad luck and at the next practice day I put the car in to the tyre wall at Barkston Heath. Front indicators gone for ever and brand new radiator scared for life, but no damage to any of the bits that really matter. The front end of the car needed some tidying up so I refitted the bumper with cable ties, mucked about with various lights until I had tiny Nissan Micra indicators at the front and huge air intakes where the old lights once were. The missing lights provided an excellent place to put a nice sturdy tow hook straight on to the chassis rail, much needed as the car had no tow-eye at all when I bought it.
Race mirrors replaced the standard ones which randomly fell off all by themselves.
Next on the list were more spare wheels and tyres – for free I got some old JDM CRX wheels with missing centres fitted with magic 15 year old perished tyres. 40 quid also got me a seat and a harness (both a bastard job to fit in an MX5). This was the spec of the car for my assault on the 2006 SVA Challenge Cup. Sadly after a three hour drive down to Lydd the clutch went on my first lap of practice on Friday. I skipped the rest of practice to save what friction material I had left for the judged rounds on Saturday (and the trip home) and was concentrating so hard on being gentle on the clutch I forgot to use the handbrake. I was very happy to come 24th out of 29 competitors. I’d actually said when I booked it that while I didn’t care about winning not being in the bottom 5 would make me happy. Job done.
Buoyed up by my lack of success I decided to have a go at Eurodrift in 2007 - so I bolted my half cage in properly, upgraded to a new quick release harness and slapped in a fire extinguisher. I also mucked about with some different tyres – Yokohama A048 on 16" wheels on the front for 6 quid a wheel. This totally buggered the already marginal tyre clearance so off came the front wings and I made some pikey-spec carbon fibre ones, with 200 gsm carbon - thin enough and feeble enough that the tyres would chew their own clearance. Also thin enough for light to shine through from my side indicators (laziness lead to them being left behind the wings as I couldn’t be bothered to cut the holes for them).
I also got free stickers and some cash for spending all my holidays working in schools thanks to the lovely people at Camouflaged-Learning. School kids will be impressed with anything, from a BMW so shabby they are allowed to fire rockets at it to poorly painted MX5's covered in stickers. Most of them think it’s an RX7 of some kind (must be the hard top), some of them quite fairly point out that it's gay, but as none of
them have cars I still win.
