Fast As A Shark: The Pursuit of Awesome

Navy Small, please.

Kudo’s to @Rileyanneoh.

1983/4 RX-7 Turbo

Allow me to indulge my supreme nerdism about early RX-7s…

In Australia this is called a Series 3 RX-7. People will tell you all sorts of stories about what makes a Series 3 a Series 3. The things that identify this particular car as a Series 3 are the high-shouldered seats and the barely visible vents in the lower front bumper.

Or you could see that this car is a turbo and know that what we call a Series 3 is a direct result of the power upgrade that the factory bestowed on the RX-7 when they gave it the 12a turbo from the Luce/Cosmo luxo-barge twins in late 1983. (Australians will tell you that the Series 3 is a 1984/5 car, and that is mostly true and is a good rule of thumb as most 1983 RX-7s in Australia are Series 2.)

But, the Series 3 and the power upgrade. The RX-7, as originally conceived, is sort of a massive facelift of the RX-3/Familia Rotary. Anyone who argues this point is willfully ignoring that both the RX-3 and RX-7 wore Savanna badges (as the car in the pic above does). Unlike the RX-3, which had a leaf-sprung live rear axle, the RX-7 has a coil-sprung 4-link live rear axle. So far so good. But, the RX-7’s rear axle design is such that under hard cornering it binds, that is, it gets itself situated in such a way as to become rigid with the body rather than supported by the springs. This leads, in normal road conditions, to undesirable handling traits such as snap oversteer and particularly snap oversteer while accelerating.

When the factory decided to up the RX-7’s power from about 110hp to about 150hp they also decided to try to fix the handling. A bit. So all the cars after the introduction of the 12a turbo engine had the mounting for the lower control arms of the 4-link live axle moved just a tiny bit to try to take out some of the snap oversteer under power. And because that was a change to the chassis pressing, all RX-7s from late 1983 on had the same rear axle mounts. There are a few other tiny detail changes, too. The windscreen wipers are different and the windscreen squirter is a single nozzle rather than two (or vice versa, I can never remember that one). And the front suspension strut-tops are corrugated in the Series 3 and flat in the Series 2 (though I know of one car, that was never crashed, that had one flat and one corrugated strut top. It was a late ‘83 car. Go figure).

But, in their infinite wisdom, the factory, or their local distributors, also decided that the 12aT was only suitable for the Japanese Domestic Market and everywhere else in the world (AFAIK, some weird things popped up in Greece recently) got the plain ordinary 12a which had been the RX-7s lot from 1978. Except the United States which received the semi-mythical GSL-SE which received the fuel-injected 13b, also from the Luce/Cosmo twins.

Oh, yeah. The car above? Love it. It’s brown, obviously. And it has the red interior which people hate, making it all the more desirable in my eyes. And it’s the turbo, though I am actually an atmo rotary fan. But the thing that makes this car? Factory steelies. Yeah.

Love the write up. Love the car. Everything about this is right, clean simple lines, great colour scheme, and Steelies, you can never go wrong with factory Steelies

fuckyeahmichigan:

My girlfriend, Kaycee, is inking up some sweet tats at the shop she works at in Ypsilanti.

(submitted by underagekatz)

Too sick.

rileyanne:

ktgt:

Paul Newman. Dream man.

YES. I need to locate my “Paul Newman is my homeboy” shirt asap.

I can’t find that shirt anywhere. All I have to say is Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, & James Dean… no one will ever measure up to that awesomeness, manliness, it may sound like I have a man crush, but that’s because I do. Brad Pitt doesn’t have shit on these guys.