Three engines later, our V6 Miata finally finished an endurance race

“FINISH A F*@%ING LUCKY DOG RACE”

That’s been the missive scrawled at the top of our V6 Miata’s whiteboard for years, but we’d been astonishingly bad at doing it.

Every race repeated the same cycle: a round of last-minute upgrades followed by broken parts and retiring our LFX V6-swapped endurance race car long before the race took the checker.

Sure, our Miata had 289 horsepower. But we were losing to stock 1.6-liter cars every single time.

[Haste makes waste: What happens when you rush to race]

On that long, disappointing tow home from Atlanta Motorsports Park last year, we vowed to stop adding features and actually spend some time refining our race car.

Photograph by Tom Suddard

It obviously needed a new transmission, plus some major ergonomic improvements to make our drivers less miserable. And we needed to put in the time to refine its PDM, tidy its wiring, fix some hose routing and improve overall serviceability. We should probably replace those trashed suspension bushings, too.

So we went to work, prioritizing the biggest job: that bad transmission. We went to a junkyard and spent $500 on a Camaro six-speed. Then we bought another one, giving us a spare for the trailer.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

Transmissions are expensive and hard to transport. But as we learned the hard way, they’re tough to find on short notice during a race.

We fired the money gun at some other hard-to-find spares, too, including an extra fire bottle, already charged and ready to install after we discharge ours.

Why? Because we learned the hard way that finding a fresh SPA Technique Novec 1230 bottle is impossible when you’re at a race track, even if that track is AMP and has an open race shop that sells SPA Technique systems.

[A new season means an updated fire-suppression system]

Photograph by Tom Suddard

Our Cadillac differential has also become quite rare in junkyards, so we scooped up a spare for the trailer, too.

Parts acquired, we put the car up on the lift and left it there for a solid month. We swapped the transmission. We replaced the trashed suspension bushings that everyone complained about at AMP.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

We better secured the clutch hydraulic hose to keep it away from the exhaust and prevent it from boiling during pit stops. We replaced the leaky steering rack with a good used unit fitted with fresh boots and tie-rod ends from Treasure Coast Miata.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

We coated the downpipes with a high-temp spray from ZyCoat. We spent a few hours finally finishing our AiM PDM install so it would have all the gauges and predictive timing we desired.

Photograph by Tom Suddard

We rerouted our fire system’s activation cable to prevent future accidents. We replaced our pull-up belts with a pull-down set from Lifeline to speed driver changes.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

We replaced the steering wheel with a sturdy one from Momo. We installed a windshield defroster from BimmerWorld. We pressed straws from cans of CRC products into our CV boots to vent excess pressure and thus prolong their lives.

Photograph by Tom Suddard

We replaced every single alignment bolt with fresh OEM parts to prevent them from slipping or stripping when we overtorqued them. We corner-weighted and aligned the car.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

We bought dedicated bins and labeled them for tools, spares and consumables. And we loaded the trailer days ahead of time, keeping track of what we brought and where we packed it to make unpacking and repacking at the track less of a panic.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

Then, we tested the car at our official test track, the Florida International Rally & Motorsport Park, to confirm it worked. Finally, maybe, we’d achieve our goal of finishing a race.

Photograph by Tom Suddard

But there was only one way to find out, so we signed up for Lucky Dog Racing League’s Southern Dawg Delight later that season at Carolina Motorsports Park. Then we also signed up for the track’s own test day immediately preceding it. Remember, we’ve changed.

You’re never going to believe what we did at that test day: We tested the car. And no, we don’t mean we chased teething issues, or tried to get it running, or did any of the things we normally do when we’re behind.

Photopragh by Chris Tropea

Instead, we started with a reliable car and focused solely on making it faster. Would more wing help? Less? What about toe? Camber? Tire pressures? Does short-shifting use less fuel? How much less?

[How to master chassis setup, from tire pressures to alignment]

Scrolling through photos of that test, the most common shot is one of us writing things down, creating a notebook with lessons learned that will become our car’s recipe book, full of ideas to make it faster in whatever situation we’re presented with.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

Then, it was finally time to race. Lucky Dog split the weekend into two races, one on Saturday and another on Sunday, giving us two chances to succeed–or twice as many opportunities to fail.

We’ll spare you the full blow-by-blow–picture a little red-and-gray car driving in circles all day long–and we’ll instead hit the high points from day one. First: Our Miata is seriously fast. We were three-tenths of a second off the fastest lap of the day, and the in-car video looks less like racing and more like you’re riding along with a dummy that forgot there’s no passing on the cooldown lap. This was insanely, insanely fun. On narrow 225-width Hankook RS-4s, our Miata managed a 1:47.968 around CMP.

[Why did we switch our V6-powered Miata to smaller wheels and tires?]

Photograph by Chris Tropea

But now comes the bad news: Our Miata is seriously thirsty. Like, “pit after 45 minutes” thirsty.

Lucky Dog mandates 7-minute-minimum pit stops at CMP and allows stints up to 2 hours long, so while we passed everyone on the track, we then spent far too long staring at the pit stop timer when our car immediately ran out of gas.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

We didn’t always hit that 7-minute mark, either, as we hadn’t practiced pit stops and again had new drivers joining the effort. We might have finally made the car reliable, but we’d yet to make it competitive.

Oh, and did we mention we could barely get those few measly gallons into the car, too? A clogged rollover valve/tank vent reared its head toward the end of the first day, slowing our pit stops even further as fuel trickled into the tank and the escaping air had nowhere to go. Despite these challenges, though, we ran the entire race and finished with a respectable result: 11th in our 18-car class.

As we took the checkered flag, we realized we didn’t really know what to do next–we’d literally never gotten this far before with the V6 swap. Now it’s time to start calling junkyards hoping one is still open, right? Or run to the parts store? Walk the paddock asking competitors if they have any less-broken parts? We were honestly lost.

Then we heard the unmistakable sound of a party. We’ve joined Lucky Dog at CMP for years, but we’ve always been suffering under our ill-prepared car when they host their giant paddock party, complete with a barbecue dinner, cake, free beer and free casino games to earn raffle tickets for the thousands of dollars in prizes the series lays out.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

So, still bewildered by our still-running car, we swapped brake pads, made an alignment and wing angle tweak in hopes of making the car faster, then spent the night partying. This “prep your car before the event” thing wasn’t so bad after all! And, as always, Lucky Dog’s vibes were incredible.

Sunday was a new day and a new race, and as it turns out, we had made our car faster the night before–setting the day’s fastest lap by a full 1.5 seconds, banking a 1:46.868 lap. We might not be great endurance racers yet, but we do know how to build a fast car occasionally. (Try to remember that as we stopped for painful 7-minute-long refueling twice as often as the competitive teams.)

Despite this, though, we finished Sunday’s race–and we finished it WELL. How well? Fourth in class. Still plenty of laps down from the leader, but we’ve never seen the team so happy, spirits so high, and loading so light, fun and energetic.

Photograph by Chris Tropea

As the car drove onto the trailer, we were high-fiving, cheering and plotting. As 2024 drew to a close, we’d finally finished a race.

But we were so, so close to a podium. Close enough to plot our course for 2025: If we put a big fuel cell in, we might finally have a truly competitive race car–we’ll cover that process in the next installment.

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