Oh, don't discount the time you need to spend. Trying to get a car together and race it is very time consuming. If you are stuck in a 9-5 workplace jail you may find it nearly impossible. You need a flexible work schedule.

 

Sometimes I do understand why newbies find the interactions on this forum to be a bit, shall we say, brusque? The brown flower badge does seem appropriate.

Anyway, you are vastly oversimplifying things with this response. It is a fact that a well set up Spec Miata costs less to buy/build than a well set up S2000. A lot less. I bought a two-time Oregon region (a very competitive region nationally) champion car for $10,000. The car that won this year's Oregon region championship is now for sale for $13,000. Aside from an expensive pro motor, Spec Miatas are all pretty much alike.

And, by the time I as a driver am as competitive as the car, maybe I'll think about that pro motor (which is what makes a Spec Miata expensive). And even that only costs $7000 (a stock crate motor costs something over $2000).

And, as a matter of fact, I would be perfectly happy being a mid-pack (yes, mid-pack, not back-marker) driver with my $10,000 car, since (unlike, say, an S2000), there are so many Spec Miatas in a race that there's always someone to play with. For some of us, the fun of racing is in the racing, not necessarily the winning. In my last weekend of racing, I had four races on Sunday. In the second one, I won my class (ITA) by .3 seconds. In the third race, I wasn't anywhere near winning my class (SM), but we had a nice race of four cars, which I "won" by .15 seconds. In my last race that day, I was second (ITA) by .099 seconds. And such margins of "victory," for both class win and "race within the race" win, are typical for SM. That's fun for me; YMMV.

I wasn't trying to talk the OP out of racing an S2000 (heck, I love my S2000, and autocross it whenever I get a chance); I was just offering some general advice which I hoped he might find useful.

 

Are you referring to this thread?
https://www.s2ki.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=436040

 

You are completely right. I meant to say "more cost effective"

The point of view I am coming from is the race driver's. If you only want to test your driver skill in W2W racing, you really want to run in a spec series based on a race chassis (not even a production chassis, like SM). This means you buy a car and you go race.

On the other hand, there is certainly something to be said for the joy of building and owning your own ride (and as you mention, the S2000 can be an cheaper option here), for competing with both car and driver. You just have to be willing to pay for it!

 

brown starfish. mxt's not a newbie either.

bah you can spend 10k on 1 sm motor. as you say 7k for a pretty "decent" one. Then there all all the rule tweaks. Front running spec miatas cost in the neighbor hood of 25k. Other regions aren't as crazy as sfr but every one has a handfull of the $20+k sm's. and no sm's aren't all a like.

sm has a whole set of different appeals to it (namely the size of the class), but the costs aren't all -that- different. And the s2k is faster and more fun. The question was about costs to build a s2k. You could buy or build a lot of cars for even less than the sm too. I'm sure they all have their own appeal.

-Ry

 

that would be the one.
As you can see I got as much as possible used.

 

Assuming that was the thread, does the $16k include just the bold items or all of the items?

 

that was for everything.

all the stuff from deception was traded for all my stock crap. interior and shocks brake lines rotors and some other stuff

 

I stand corrected!

 

I'm in the process of building mine for Honda Challenge and I'd say your figures look right.