Last season at Laguna Seca, Roger Foo drove his '95 Civic DX to a flag-to-flag win against many of the top names in the Speedvision Touring Car series. The victory (SCC Feb. 2002), put the quiet, San Francisco privateer on the fast track to professional racing stardom.
The decision-makers at Mazda Motorsports immediately took notice. Circuit City's marketing people, who were intent on sponsoring a couple of cars in the series, were interested as well. "We talked about me switching to a P5 at the SEMA show later that year," says Foo. "A bit later we worked out the details and that was it. Steve Sanders, Mazda's director of competition, told me a couple of weeks later that they'd have a new Protegf 5 ready to go for the first race of the season at Sebring."
Foo promptly went home and sold his Honda.
It was a major change in racing lifestyles for Foo and crew chief James Chin. "Before this, we had to do everything ourselves, not only building and prepping the car, but scraping the bucks together to run," Foo laughs. "Then we had to get there and figure out the set-up. Being a club racer is tough. Now, we just fly in and the crew has it ready to go."
"The crew," as Foo innocently calls them, is a team of Mazda competition specialists, with years of racing experience. Headed up by Jim Jordan, Mazda Racing's team manager, Jim Mihal of JT Designs and his crew of three converted Foo's yellow Protegf 5 from production model to Touring Class racer in just eight weeks, finishing just in time for the season opener at Sebring, Fla. where he ran a ran as high as 10th before brake problems forced a 12th place finish.
"It was originally the H&R Springs show car," says Mihal. "We got it with just 395 miles on the clock and have been putting in 14-hour days just to have it ready for this weekend."
Mihal's compact fabrication shop in the hills of Vista, Calif. is crammed with all the necessary equipment to squeeze speed from production cars. Mihal, who goes by the nickname "JT", gave us a detailed tour of the changes he's made to Foo's car.
"After stripping out everything we didn't need to lighten the car, we built-in a full cage of 1.5- x 0.095-inch chrome-moly tubing," JT explains. He used a pulse-type TIG welder to stitch the roll cage together because pulse welders put a lot less heat into the material, so tensile strength is retained. On the driver's side door opening, a very neat set of three, horizontal, angle-braced tubes protrude into the door cavity to form the anti-intrusion structure that protects Foo in a T-bone crash. And check out the beautifully formed inner aluminum door panel that carefully matches the shape of this structure (page 168).
The cage tubes forward of the door structure are cleverly routed through the voids in the tops of the inner front fenders, attaching to the shock towers just below and aft of the slotted camber-adjusting plates. "By routing the cage tubes through the fenders," says JT "we leave a lot more useable space in the engine compartment."