Shifter

The one complaint I had immediately about the car was that the shifter felt extremely long and sloppy. After some research, I had two good options, the TRD shift kit, or a combination of a 93+OEM shifter with a JonO short shift kit. The JonO combo appeared easier to find, a little cheaper, and performed almost as well, if not the same as the TRD kit.

The parts were ordered from Twos'r'us and installed a couple of weeks later. I went ahead and ordered new shifter base bushings and cable bushings as well, as rubber on a 17 year old car is iffy at best. The installation was again fairly easy, minus having to pry the shifter cup off of the old shifter, which managed to provide me with a nice gash on my finger! We did have our first bolt casualties, as I snapped two of the bolts that hold the shifter assembly onto the car. I'm sure we will have more.

The shifter is much better, though a little stiff. I intend on getting back in there, taking it apart again, and making sure everything is greased properly. It is a little hard to downshift into 2nd, and the 3rd gear synchros are going bad.

First Wrenching Day

Just to make sure things were up to date, and just because you should when you buy a car, the first work to be done was changing the oil and transmission fluid. This was fairly simple and straightforward, just had to go buy a 24mm socket for the transmission drain and fill plugs. Oil used was Mobil 1 Clean 5000 (5w-30) and transmission fluid was Mobil 1 75w90.

The Master Plan

The first order of business is to get the car ready for HPDE weekends (PDX for SCCA). This will mainly consist of making sure all the stock pieces are in good condition, along with some upgrades such as brake pads and fluid. Of course as bad components are found, they will probably be upgraded if possible and reasonable.

It will mainly be a HPDE car for the time being then, maybe do some time trials if the requirements are not too stringent. Since we neither have the funds or time to devote to making it an amateur race car, the DE events will be a good compromise.

Eventually we would like to turn it into a car for SCCA/NASA competition, probably in the ITA class, but that could change of course.

Step One - Buying the car

We purchased the car used from a local seller on September 15, 2008 with 172,800 miles. It is a white, 1991 Toyota MR2, NA. It does have T-Tops and power windows/locks. We had been looking at ads for awhile, and the cars somehow seem to be going up in value and are increasingly harder to find. This one looked to be in good condition, especially for its age, so we decided to pay a little more than what our ideal price was. It will obviously need some work and cleaning up, but that was expected.