Last night I hit the track for the first time and it was fantastic.

These are not your run-of-the-mill go-carts, but rather performance-oriented machines hitting upwards of 25 mph. They take a little getting use to, but after a couple of laps I was powersliding around every corner. It was a blast. At only $15 for 10 minutes, I’ll certainly be back — a lot.

The flange between the exhaust manifold and the tailpipe on my street car rusted apart several months ago. I put a temporary fix on until I could get parts. Turns out the “front pipe” (see photo and notes) can only be bought from Mazda at a cost of $300. That’s $300 for a 12″ piece of cast iron.

My temporary fix was looking pretty good.

About a month ago, that fix finally gave up for good. A little internet research lead me to ProtegeGarage and OBX stainless steel headers for only $250. It didn’t take me long to decide what to do.

The swap proved remarkable easy to do. The old manifold dropped off sans prolems, and the OBX header slid right into place &8211; an exact fit with not modification. If you compare the stock manifold to the header, you will notice the restrictions in flow in the stock set up. The free-flowing header has really perked up the Mazda’s motor. It has gained a small bit of horsepower, but what I really noticed is that the power comes on sooner, is delivered more smoothly, and pulls all the way to the 6,500 RPM redline.

On the other car front, my racing partner Terry and I finally pulled apart the Omni’s dead motor. Yet another trashed rod bearing. You can see the autopsy on Flickr.

After getting the motor back in, the car went off for a little welding. G.T. Fab & Welding did a fantastic job installing a couple of extra door bars for me. Now not only do I meet the updated rules, I feel safer.

All that’s left to do for the weekend is to finish installing the new race harness and gather up supplies. We’re heading out Friday to run the open test-and-tune session at Gingerman in order to break in the new motor without breaking it. It will also give me some much needed extra seat time.

Let’s hope everything goes well.

It is now off to a welding for a little bit of work. Next, the Fury.

We made it to the track in record time on Friday. We had a quick and easy technical inspection and things were looking good. Saturday we were Group 1 — 8:00 am start time. The track was damp and slick and we didn’t get the car set up completed, but it didn’t matter as I was just out to turn a bunch of easy laps to break in the brand new motor.

Everything was looking pretty good until one of the rod bearings failed. 10 min. Half-a-dozen laps. All told, the new motor had less than an hour of run time on it. It’s just one of those things.

So, out comes the motor again and back to the engine builder. Luckily, I wasn’t at race speed, so no major damage should have occured.

[Updated Sept 10, 2006]

To that end, my long-time racing friend Terry came over and helped yank the motor out of the Woodstock, my 198x Omni. It’s on its way to the engine builder to get a much needed freshening. On tap: new rings, bearings and honing.

While the engine is away, I’m going to try to clean up the engine bay a bit — getting rid of grime, dressing up the plumbing, etc. Also on the to-do list:

• new radiator mounts
• required tow hooks
• fix front fascia

The engine should be back in a couple of weeks, and we should be hitting the track July 1, 2.

Sarah and I spent the 4th of July racing at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. My good friend Terry came along as crew chief, providing his invaluable mechanical help (he also owns the tow van and trailer).

The car didn’t handle very well Saturday morning. We got it handling a bit better for the race, but it still didn’t turn very well. But the bigger problem for the race was a wicked vibration. There weren’t any broken-mechanical sounds so I chocked it up to an unbalanced wheel or possible flat-spotted tire.

Turns out I had broken the left drive shaft. Of course, I had just put new drive shafts in the car so neither Terry nor I brought spares. Fortunately, a fellow Dodge racer lives not too far from the track and he had spares for us. It only takes about a half hour to change, so we had no problem getting everything ready for Sunday morning.

Sunday went a lot better. We dialed out more and more of the handling problems so that during the race the car was much better. There is still a ways to go, but we’re pointed in the right direction. I was still towards the back half of the field, but I had a great race with another car the entire time. We were literally nose-to-tail and door-to-door for the entire race – without touching once. I was in front of him for most of the race (we traded places several times), but he pushed me hard enough to get me to overheat my front tires. With grip going away, he finally got around me with only a couple of laps left. The really cool thing – he’s got a digital video system in the car. Hopefully I’ll get a copy before too long and I’ll share it with you all.

Both photos in this post are from this past weekend. (Patrick, you asked, I deliver.) The track at Mid-Ohio is a 2.5 mile circuit, and these photos were taken near the spot labeled 16 on the map.

Finally, I thought I’d share this article that was written about me a couple of years ago and published in the Big Idea magazine.