0 to 60 V8 Tire Shredder meets the Klutz!

First up you should know I am a convertible guy.  I have owned a half dozen convertibles with at least one made in each decade going back the 70s.  Suffice to say I have a great deal of experience with convertible tops.

So I’m rolling along to work yesterday when the sky opened up with a TREMENDOUS BANG!  

3 things happened in the same nanosecond. 1, the top went down with such force the back window exploded, 2, I woke up, and 3, I found out the brakes are very good in the car!

On close examination I decided I must not have had the pin in the hole on the driver’s side latch.  Really Mazda you designed a system that would allow the latch to latch without the alignment pin being in the hole properly?  After numerous tries I found it is quite easy to do just that, but still I felt pretty stupid (and Klutzy) for missing it.

As tempting as it was to box up all the glass and mail it with a hate letter to the Mazda top latch engineer, I decided it would be better to install the Aero latches that had been sitting on my bench for a month so we don’t have a repeat performance from the hood.

The pin under the hood Can't miss getting the pin into the hole on these guys! That will hold her!

In other news over the weekend I put a cow catcher on her.  (front chin spoiler :-)

I’m not sure I like it.  Maybe with side skirts and a wing…

After cleaning up the glass last night we put her in a car show rust, dents and all!

Wait, is that a NASCAR shirt with shorts, black socks and loafers? 

 
Oh no problem he has a camo hat!  Yeah we know what cool is in small town Minnesota! :-)

I still have a few bugs to work out but with the autocross race coming up I thought I better give her a little gas and see if anything breaks. 

So I made several attempts to record a 0 to 60 time. I could get the clutch out and ease the pedal to the floor just fine but no matter what I did when she hit the power band around 3500 rpm the back end gets loose. Backing off or short shifting to 2nd helps but it’s still impossible to maintain traction at full power.

So the best I could manage was around 4 1/2 seconds but I know with some sticky drag tires she would easily be in the 3s.  For a video of some of my later efforts: CLICK ME  (the early ones were all tire smoke...)

The LORD will open the heavens, the storehouse of His bounty! Deut 28:12. Yeah he did that this week!  I hope to have track video for ya in the next post...