Has anyone been to any of these?

http://www.starmazda.com/results/2007-season.htm


There's one on June 9th at the Portland International Raceway.

The engine used is

"Engine: 240 HP Mazda “Renesis” rotary engine with encrypted ECU including rev limiter, pit speed limiter, traction control, fuel trim.
Transaxle: Six-speed sequential with no lift shift"


which seems to me like the same engine in our RX-8's.


If someone plans a meet for this event, I'd drive down from Seattle for it.

 

I haven't been to one, but the guy that owns the body shop that fixed my hood owns one of the teams that races in that series, and his son is the driver for his team. He told me it was the same exact engine as was in my car when I had it in for work done. His team is Northwest something or other. His son drives the J&M Body Shop car.

 

get free tickets then bunny!

 

actually I need a ding repair, it's tiny though so I wonder if going to a body shop is overkill. Anyone got any suggestions? It's about a 1/4'' dia and hasn't broke the paint, you can only really see it from an angle.

Oh and since I shamelessly hijacked the thread, I'll be going to this event, sounds interesting.

 

Background:
Star Mazda uses the stock renesis except for the ECU as mentioned and a Dry Sump for the oil (necessary to keep any engine lubricated when turning at 2.0+ lateral G's). I think the rev limiter is slightly higher (maybe 10k?)

The car body's are also all 100% identical. They look like Formula 1 but are smaller (similar to Formula 3?) The idea behind the series is that Mazda (after aquiring rights to Laguna Seca Raceway) decided (correctly) that America is way overkill on Nascar and has almost no "real" racing. Even Formula 1 events held in the states are populated by almost entirely foreign drivers, probably only contributing to people's waning interest in racing. Mazda is trying to combat this with the Star Mazda series. The cars are cheap and even and fair. Anyone can race. Winners of series get to go on to bigger Formula series (and GT). The idea is a grassroots series to build up world class American racecar drivers.

Also. the cars are maybe 1500lbs(??) so they perform a world apart from an RX-8. And they have no mufflers or anything so the Renesis sounds scary/badass. I didn't know they were coming to PIR and would be interested myself.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RTPPe9Znig
to get an idea......
check out about 2/3 through when the driver weaves through a multicar collision unscathed! Also shows shots of the racecar spittin fire out the pipe in true rotary fashion.

 

Someone down there organize something soon or I'll go overkill planning an outing.

 

I went in 2005 @PIR. Definitely worth coming down for.