When Jeff Kiesel bought this 1994 Mazda RX-7 for $30,000 back in 2002, he thought he was buying a fully built and prepped racecar. But he found out the hard way that if you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.When he brought it home, the RX already had some serious mods. The original unibody chassis had been made into a hybrid, with a rear unibody construction and a tube-chassis front half. The outside sported a widebody kit and under the hood sat a turbocharged 3-rotor engine. A mean machine by any standards, the Area-51 built machine looked the part of race car and even found its way to the cover of Turbo and High Performance magazine. There was only one problem: In Jeff's eyes, the Mazda was anything but a built and prepped racing machine.
"The car was all bling-bling and no go," recalls Kiesel, and while he says he can appreciate a good-looking racecar, eye candy doesn't win races and bling takes a backseat to performance in his book. It had some serious balls, but the RX's 3-rotor engine simply wasn't legal in the SCCA BP class he planned on racing in.
The engine wasn't the only thing that wasn't up to the racing standards either. The suspension was deemed inadequate and the widebody kit didn't do anything to make the car faster or more competitive, so before he could pursue the SCCA BP championship, Kiesel needed to make some changes.
Thirty grand may seem like a lot to spend on a racecar that's not legal in the class it is supposed to race in, but thankfully, in Keisel's case, the bling ended up helping to pay for the car's rebirth. After selling the killer 3-rotor setup for a cool 10 grand and fetching the handsome sum of $8,000 for the body kit, he had a nice chunk of change to sink back into what would eventually become a $70,000-plus build.
With the unwanted engine and body kit yanked from the RX-7 and sold to the highest bidder, the rebuild began in earnest. The rules in SCCA's BP class dictate that Kiesel must run a 2-rotor turbocharged engine, so he turned to Craig Stevens Motorsports in San Diego, California to build him a class-legal unit. Internally, the engine has an Extreme Street Port, Stage Two stationary gears and lightweight high-compression rotors. But even those not familiar with the internals of Mazda's rotary engine can appreciate the external engine mods, like its honkin' ball-bearing turbocharger.
When Stevens Motorsports was finished with the new engine, it was putting out an impressive 460 wheel hp and 380 lb-ft of torque. Not too shabby for an engine that displaces 1.3 liters. With the help of a GT35R turbocharger, a 7 Parts exhaust manifold, a 3-inch custom downpipe, a custom V-mount intercooler, a GReddy BOV, and a Turbo Smart wastegate, the engine has the mechanical parts it needs to reliably put down the power it takes to win a championship and run for a whole season. A crank-triggered MicroTech ECU makes the engine management decisions, telling the RC Engineering injectors when to open and orchestrating the MicroTech LT12s ignition when to fire the NGK plugs.