Well my brother and a few of my best friends have decided to build a LeMon/Chump Car racekor! lol I just purchased this beauty right here!

1979 Mazda RX7 from Rene over at RMS here in SoCal. I know this is probably not the type of builds you guys are use to seeing around here But it's something we have always wanted to do. And I never really wanted to do it unless we did it with an RX7. Light plus well balance and more then enough power from a 12A/13B, plus a little LSD in the rear and I couldn't ask for a better car!















The plan is to completely gut, and strip the car of everything except the essentials. So that means everything including old wire harness is going...a SCCA/Chump Car spec cage will get built for it. I plan on giving it a rattle can silver paint job and swapping in a healthy 12A or 13B whatever I can find down the line.

I am also leaning towards the Toyota rear end. My brother and I are avid Rock Crawlers so I am confortable with fabbing and I am almost an expert with toy rear ends! I have a few laying around with different gear sets.



I still need to find a 1st Gen 5 speed for tranny duties and address the front struts/brakes...should be a fun project!!

 

Looks fun. One of my buddies and I are building a 1993 BMW 325i ($300 runner!) for LeMons. It was a really sharp car when we got it (black over black leather), it just needs a head gasket (we'll do the swap, and sell off the interior to offset the cost of parts). Have fun!

 

This'll be good, im subbed.

 

Nice!! I notice a lot of those BMWs in these series!! But this should provide us with a lot of entertainment value as well.

 

Got the powerplant for the car... Just need to find a 1st gen tranny, GSL-SE rear end, and a GSL-SE Flywheel

 

got some updates!!

Got the car stripped today...it was a pain in the *** getting in there and removing all the **** but looking at it now and knowing we are actually doing this is pretty cool!!! Can't wait to have the cage done...

 

And the idea is to get it to look something along the lines of this!

 

I have the GSL-SE tranny and flywheel, I live in AZ, let me know if you stil need them.

 

Hmmmm...wonder what the shipping will set me back. Any idea?

 

shipping < 5 hour driving and meeting cool peeps

 

bump

 

If I had time to make the drives to pick up parts this car would have been running by now Heavy work schedule and working Saturday's doesn't really leave me much time for anything...

I need to win the lotto!

 

You ain't the only one bo!



Car's looking gutted. Break/remake

 

Picking up the car today after work and taking it to RMS here in LA so he can build the cage for it. Pretty excited as this is a big step!!

 

Car is officially at Rene's shop getting the cage built...this is the cage that is going to be built for the car!

 

Do you mind me asking how much that cage is gonna cost you?
I was recently thinking about turning my rx-7 into a cheap an nasty little track car but decided it would be better to part it out and make some money rather than spend it but i'd still love to know what the expenses are with these chump cars because i saw on the chump car website the cars aren't meant to be worth more than $500 otherwise they get position penalties.

 

The car's value besides safety cannot be more then $500. The RX7 is on there list as a $500 car but you have to show up with a Stock RX7 as far as performance is concerned. There is no budget for Safety, so all the safety stuff like the cage, nets, gauges brakes, tires, wheels there is no budget.

as for the tires they can't be slicks or professional racing tires...they have to be DOT approved street tires. Any performance mods you will get penalized with additional laps to your race. Which you can buy back with $ which all goes to charity

 

That would be awesome! good luck with it all

 

Thanks dude! cage should be done by the end of the week!! And I think I found all the parts I needed for the car already! I am thinking some white Diamond Racing wheels...

14" x 9" 4x110 with some sticky Falken Azenis...

 

Cage is done...

 

Did some work on the car... We sprayed everything down with some simple green in the morning and we let it sit for a while after that we headed off to the carwash to power wash the interior and get all cleaned out for some paint.









We then air dryed the sucker! LOL!! We drove around on the freeway, headed to Pasadena for some breakfast burritos @ Lucky Boys and then drove home. By the time we got home the car was dry







I then busted out the cans of primer and we got the whole interior primered out...

 

I then busted out the white paint and painted just the cage portion...











Gonna finish the rest of the interior tomorrow...then it's on the engine bay for the same. Engine bay and interior will be white...rest of the car will be silver!

 

damn, thats a nice looking cage! this is turning out pretty badass pretty fast.

 

Thanks Dude! Yeah the goal is to get the car done by late August or early September! But def by SevenStock/Mazdafest gonna hit up the track that day and do some shakedown runs on the car to see how it does.

 

Cool project. We have been running an 83 RX-7 with a 5.0 and autopower bolt in cage. We are swapping all that over into a 79 with a real cage.

The rotary will run out but I will tell you that there are some seriously fast cars running in Chump. At Daytona last month we were running 143 mph on the banking and there were a couple hitting about 150. I included a couple pics of our car from Daytona. One at the Start Finish and another before the race next to my old truck and our neighboring paddock with a V8 Volvo.

Good luck with the project!