Nein Shiza Autosport - Miata #529

[snowman]

Team Name - Nein Shiza Autosport #529

 

Team 

Owner/Driver - Jay Dee Callahan (me) - Connecticut

Driver - Travis Callahan - Virginia

Drive - Danny Callahan - Virginia

Driver- Lincoln Young - Connecticut

Crew - James Emery - Connecticut

 

About the team

Lincoln and I met at a the Lemons race at Thompson last year.  We both rented a seat in the same jalopy that blew up about 5 hours into the race.  James is a buddy that helps with the car and serves as the crew chief if you will.  He's hyper competitive and organized so we put him in charge of pit stops.  The rest of the team is family as you can probably guess.  I thought it would be cool get the family racing together, and what better place to do it than with a bunch of other chumps. My dad (Danny) raced late models in Virginia back in the 80's, so the racing bug has always been there.  Lincoln and I have done a bunch of HPDE's and the Lemons race.  My brother had never been in a race car, on a race track, to an autocross....you get the idea.  So Chump has been an eye opening experience to say the least.

 

The Car

The car is 1993 Miata.  Found a gem with 70k on it that was in great shape mechanically, but a few issues on the interior.  I didn't care, but I used that to get the price down and away I went.  I bought it to do autocross, but found autocross to be too boring.  Lots of waiting, not enough driving.  So I started doing track days with it, and slowly started adding parts.  After the Lemons race last year, I literally went home and started tearing the car down to do a full race prep.  Even though I'd never done anything close to this, I was sure I could build a better car than I could buy, for cheap.  Yeah, wish I had that to do over again....haha.  That was Aug of 2016.  Lots of money and mistakes later, I finally got the car out for a shake down in July of this year to get ready for the Thompson race.  We didn't go crazy with the build.  I left on the suspension stuff I added for track days and just focused on reliability and cooling.  We'll start going crazy after a couple races.

 

First Race - Thompson

We made it out to Thompson for our first race.  Man, what an experience.  Just pure excitement from the time we pulled in on Friday till we left Saturday night.  Car passed tech on the first try, so we were very happy with that.  We were very happy to get everyone on track for a little practice, but we got cut short with some slight overheating issues.  In my haste putting everything back together after changing the timing belt and water pump, I left a hose rubbing on a pulley and had a nice little hole.  With that replaced, we started the race on Saturday towards the back to make sure to avoid any issues.  Lap 3 the water temp shoots to 230....great, here we go again.  Turns out while fixing the hose the night before, we pressed the main coolant hose into a sharp edge of a clamp, and poked a hole in that hose.  Rookie mistakes by a rookie team....eh.  Big thanks to McParland Motorsport for coming through with a spare hose.  We took our time with this fix, so we missed about an hour, but we got back out and ran strong.  No other major issues the rest of the race.  A few incidents of "agricultural driving" but that was it.  We ended up 15th overall, and considering our cooling hose debacles, we felt like we won the race.  We had three goals to start the day, take the green, take the checkers, and drive it on the trailer.  All three goals accomplished.  

 

I have to say the experience was amazing.  Great atmosphere and great people.  I thought all the Chump staff did a excellent job, so thank you for putting on a great show.  Since the fam drove to CT for the last race, we are making the long journey to VIR in December.  I'm looking forward to meeting more great people and having another exciting race.  

 

I included some links to photos below.  The build photos are from the day I bought the car to the Thompson race.  The second group is just photos from the Thompson race itself.

 

Build Photos - 

Thompson Race Photos