The car gets sold
Right after I finished packing the car up at Nationals, I made a single farewell post to Lincoln on Facebook, and in it, I offhandedly mentioned that it was perhaps time for me to move on from STR, and that the asking price for the car would be $9k.
Why so cheap? Not only did the Miata have the aforementioned handling issues that still needed to be resolved, there were some maintenance items on the to-do list that were impending for the next owner to take care of. I still had the mysterious check engine light and the light stumbling at idle, so that was one thing that needed immediate attention. Not quite as urgent was the fact that the top was tearing and needed to be replaced — though it was still water tight — and the transmission needed a rebuild or replacement sometime soon to address the fact that the synchros on 6th gear were going out, necessitating an annoying double clutch into top gear to avoid grinding.
But after that initial Facebook post, I never advertised the car as for sale ever again afterwards.
When I got back home, I unhitched the trailer, put the Miata in the garage, and promptly forgot about its existence as my autocross competition car for a while. It would come out of the garage every now and then as a nice sunny day driver, but I didn’t autocross it. At the next local autocross event, I competed in STR not with the Miata, but with a borrowed Porsche 911 (nicknamed affectionately by the Detroit regulars as “The Super Beetle”) instead. (Thanks, Matt Luckow!)
While I was avoiding autocrossing the Miata, I was slowly working the numbers for different options to run for next year’s season of autocross. The smart money said that my best option was to hang on to the Miata, as all it needed was some more fine-tuning and some mechanical work and it’d be all ready to go. Going to a different class would likely mean driving a slower car, as Street Prepared and above was pretty much out of the picture, and there wasn’t a Street class car that would be able to keep up with an over-tired, over-caffeinated little roadster.
Despite the Miata being the financially “sound” choice (or as sound as putting money into motorsports can be), I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stick around in a class that would require me to continue fiddling with bits all over the car. Never mind that I had a decent idea of exactly what the car needed, it was still work that needed to be done. And what if I am still wrong? Then I’d be back in the same rut that I had been for the entire season. Was I really willing to give this setup-critical class another shot?
Still, I’m a cheapskate, so it looking more and more like keeping the Miata as an STR car was going to be my ultimate pick. I started shopping for a tow vehicle and trailer, and began budgeting out what I’d spend on the car in the new year.
Then I got a Facebook message from Danny Kao.
Danny Kao had just sold his NC1, and was looking for another Miata. Was my Miata still for sale? Well, I guess it is. My first question to him was, why would you buy my Miata when you just had a perfectly serviceable Miata?
He was looking for a fun daily driver that would work well as an already-prepped backup autocross car. Well, I suppose my car could fit the bill. Initially, I wasn’t sure if selling the car was the right idea, so I told Danny that I’d sleep on it for an evening and get back to him tomorrow.
The next day, I messaged him back and told him that I was game for selling my car. I had convinced myself that if I could move the car along, then I should do so; this would be a good opportunity to spring to another class and shake things up a little bit. Who else in their right mind would attempt to acquire my needy little piece of junk?
I finally wrote up a detailed description of the car and added some photos of the troublesome spots to a website post that I then forwarded on Danny. We finally agreed on a simple $9,500 price tag for the car, its three sets of wheels, and all of its spares with the exception of the roll bar. Danny sent me $5,000 via PayPal as the initial deposit, with the rest due when the Miata was delivered to him. We decided that the vehicle exchange would take place at an autocross in Pennsylvania, chosen because Mike Snyder had a party that same weekend.
I wrote up a bill of sale and had it notarized at my local bank. I stuffed the bill of sale into the Miata’s maintenance and modifications history binder (a three ring binder than contained records of literally everything ever done to the Miata, from tires, to oil changes, to receipts for all of the modifications and maintenance), and packed it into my Focus ST with as many of the Miata’s spares as I could. One free weekend, I trucked all the stuff over to Danny’s house and dumped it in the garage. On the way over, I stopped by Carlislie to browse a very wet car swap and meet, stopped by State College to wander the Penn State campus for all of 10 minutes before jetting off to take a look at a potential nearby Subaru XT parts car. While I was in the DC area, I proceeded to go swing dancing and visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, all while crashing on Danny’s couch while he and his family were away for the weekend.
I left the bill of sale, the title, and the maintenance records on Danny’s kitchen counter. I considered the whole thing more or less done, and drove back to Michigan wondering exactly what was going to be next in store for me.
The car gets sold, again, sort of
I was working on my Mustang over at Steve Schweitzer’s place when the phone rang, just as we finished swapping the old and busted transmission mount for a new one. Much to my surprise, it was Shane, asking about the particulars of my Miata. Wait, what?
Apparently, Shane and Danny were talking, with Shane expressing disappointment that he didn’t get a chance to buy the blue NC1 that Danny had just sold. Danny then mentioned that he was in the process of buying my car, and that perhaps the red NC2 would be a better option for Shane. So Danny suggested that Shane buy the car off of me instead of him.
Well, that was unexpected. One would expect that once the title and a bill of sale is out of your hands, things are a done deal. But not so. I know that, technically, Shane is merely taking over the transaction from Danny, but in my mind, this was the equivalent action of selling a car that you hadn’t taken delivery of yet.
So while I spent the next 30 minutes in Steve’s garage blabbing about the Miata to Shane, Steve got bored and decided that while I was busy conducting business, he’d go ahead and change the rear shocks on the Mustang, because how hard could that be? Not very hard, as it turned out, as he pretty much completed the job while I was chatting away on my cell phone.
After my long phone conversation with Shane, I also sent him the same link to the written for sale description and images that I had sent to Danny just two weeks prior. I was sent $4,500 to complete the final sale of the car, and I sent away another bill of sale, also notarized, via FedEx to the East Coast.
The delivery of the vehicle was to remain the same. I would drive the Miata to the autocross in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and I would autocross the car one last time with Shane. Afterwards, it would be party time at Mike Snyder’s graphics and tint shop, where booze, barbecue, and bad karaoke would the be focus of the evening.
The ultimate irony is that I have been bugging Shane for the past two years to buy my damn car. Last year when I met him at Nationals, when he and James were in attendance — and the year that James’ car had the exhaust cam slip that took them both out of the running for a podium finish — I offered my car to Shane for $9k. This year, same deal — after engine issues took Shane out of the running for a podium finish again this year, I told him that he could have my car for $9k.
Eventually, he was the one to take ownership of the car. All it took was one Danny Kao to smooth talk me into letting the Miata go into his hands, and one smooth talking Danny Kao to convince Shane into taking a car that Danny hadn’t taken delivery yet.