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Under new management and moving forward.....
Hi everyone. Hope everyone's travelling well. So as you know, OzMPSclub is under new management, namely me. My MPS initiation was at Willowbank Raceway in Ipswich, QLD after winning a spot at track days Mazda had organised as part of the MPS sales pitch. I was driving an SP23 at the time. Got to cane all the performance oriented models they had at the time. RX-8, MX-5, MPS6, MPS 3. I am fairly confident they turned the tuning up to 12 for the track day vehicles. Someone mentioned that they would all be crushed after the promotion period because they weren't complianced models. I feel a little sorry for the MX-5 and wonder how it fared. Whilst I was driving it I managed to - at fairly high rpm 4th gear - to miss fifth and grab third. I'm kinda surprised it didn't pop I was on the clutch quick but it sure revved it's head off. I hope not literally. It didn't break during the track day, so that was good. I reckon I left a mark or two though. Somewhere in the gearbox, clutch, cams.....all of the above.
That track day included hot laps with Dick Johnson. At first I was just gobsmacked by how hard he was driving it. Then there's this switchback bit on the clubman layout of Willowbank, and we went through that with handbrake corrections at high G's and for the remainder of my allotted time with DJ I just watched his clutch, shifting and handbrake technique. Wow. I was completely starstruck really and I think I said "That's nuts" quite a lot and gave a very awkward "Thanks, that was awesome!".
Watching my 7 foot tall mate try to fit in the MX-5 was another highlight.
Seriously I think mazda tuned them up to 12. Those demo cars had seriously hardcore torque response. I wanted to pull the trigger. Bank said no; I put a few more miles on the SP23 - which I had custom ordered and waited months for. a Strato Blue with larger rear wing, all the options manual. I learned to rev match and toe downshift properly in it. It was a lovely car really and it was still looking good on Toowoomba roads with the same number plates just last year. If I had a criticism of it, it'd be that the cruise control mechanism was a bit of a last decade mechanical thing.
So about 12 months went past and I then traded the SP23 for my Aurora Blue pov pack BK 2007 MPS. It came with a driver training day. Again - at Willowbank. That was awesome too. The last 80kph emergency stop and brake maneuver damn near threw me out of my seat. I totally missed the clutch pedal so I stalled it, but I did miss the cone by just the tiniest bit and came to rest quite sideways. I was actually doing quite well and I'm pretty sure the instructor decided to give me an impossible timing signal. He seemed a little surprised that I didn't clean the cone up.
Really seriously - Thankyou, Mazda. The Dick Johnson track day and the driver training were an awesome experience. Please build some new MPS models and do it again. Like...Very Seriously Please.
For me I joined ozMPS is the early days and was for a while a moderator. I'd been mouthing off on OzMazdaclub and got an invite from Doug I think. Rowan very kindly suggested that I have a wealth of Car knowledge, but truth be told I am very big on theory and love understanding the mechanics and engineering but am a bit useless with a spanner.
I'm sure there's some great pics in the forums from the Queen Mary Falls cruise in QLD around the time the big floods happened, I think. I was travelling from Toowoomba whilst most of the crew were travelling from Brisbane and lamenting roads cut by meters of water. I was first at the destination and my friends were sure that the cruise party wouldn't be showing up. And then appears a parade of MPS having braved shallow creek crossings and various cut roads.
QLD had some epic cruises and meets. Good times. Bathurst 24 hr - I forget which year - was pretty good. Long drive from Toowoomba, I can tell you.
Over the years of BK driving I got the mod bug, thought long and hard about what I wanted to do and then did it - mods are in my signature. There's a few common mods that are notable missing from that list, and there is a method to that madness. It's a torque monster that has most service agents saying "Holy sh*t!" but it could certainly breathe better in the top end, and I might yet do more with it. I'd really like to do the Targa Tas. With OzMPSclub decals plastered on the car!
For a variety of reasons I dropped off the OzMPS radar a few years ago.
Last year I found my much loved BK MPS in need of major maintenance - just an accumulation of wear really. I started looking for my next car with the intention of keeping the BK. I confess to looking at an Opel OPC. Hate the rear suspension and form-over function design, but it does have some lovely design elements. And some awful ones. I was looking for BL MPS too and after testing the Opel, I knew I wouldn't be jumping ship.
To cut an elongating story shorter, I scored a low Kms 2013BL in Red and had Troy (2XS) fit an even lower K BL engine and gearbox to the BK. Of course all this brought me back to OzMPS.
Apologies this announcement is a little overdue. I didn't really intend to turn this into a rambling blog post, but seems that's what I've done. Episode two coming up in coming days.
OzMPSclubs new home pictured below. Some of the nerdier members might have chuckled at T-shirts reading something along the lines of "There's no cloud, it's just someone elses computer"
Not so much. When I use cloud, it's my computer. Pictured is the VMware server cluster that hosts OzMPS which is one of over 16 operating systems on this resource pool.
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