Second chances are a wonderful thing. Whether it’s with that smokin’ hot girlfriend that you let get away before you realized she was way out of your league, or retaking your driver’s license test to prove you can parallel park better than a Mojito-soaked Paris Hilton, we’ve probably all had second chances in life that we’re thankful for.
In Ken Wagan’s case — an emergency room nurse during the week and a wrench-spinning, tire-roasting rotary fanatic on the weekends — his second chance came after an unfortunate incident at the racetrack. But before that, he got his first taste of motorized bad-assery while growing up in the Philippines near a U.S. Naval base, where he watched all sorts of angry-looking military machines roll past his front door. A few years later marked his official indoctrination into the gearhead fraternity when his uncle taught him how to do an oil change on his parent’s Nissan Stanza. From there, Ken turned into one of those kids doodling NSXs, R34 GT-Rs and FD RX-7s in the margins of his notebooks at school, but once he graduated from university and started working, he realized that owning a FD was suddenly within his means.
As Ken explained, “I had to make a decision between a K-swap for my ’02 Civic DX sedan or stepping up to one of my dream cars. At the time, a K-swap was going to cost me way more than a JDM RHD FD imported from Japan, so the decision was an easy one, especially after I found a red R1 model locally that was in mint condition. At this point, I had paid off my student loans, so you could say the car ended up being a gift to myself for graduating and paying off my debt.”
Parking his piece of ’90s JDM hotness in his home garage, Ken did what any self-respecting RX-7 owner should do: take care of all the known rotary reliability issues, bolt up a sweet set of Advan RGs wrapped in sticky rubber and start competing in time attack events. After a summer spent dialing in the suspension settings and building confidence behind the wheel, he found himself chasing a Porsche around Toronto Motorsports Park. “We all love sticking it to Porsche guys at the track, right?” Ken says. “So I was parked on this Porsche’s rear bumper setting him up for a pass when it puked coolant all over my windshield. Next thing I know, I’m in a tank-slapper through the fast left-hand kink leading into the last corner. Instead of going both feet in and sliding off the track in a safe direction, I tried to save it, but the car snapped back hard in the opposite direction and we ended up going off into a concrete barrier.”
Surveying the damage afterward with his Stage Four Motorsports homeboy, Chris DeFreitas, it was pretty clear that sponsor MakeItShine.ca wasn’t going to be able to buff this one out. But the Kirk Racing rollbar (specially ordered with the diagonal cross-brace oriented in the opposite direction to accommodate the RHD cockpit) did an excellent job of minimizing damage to both the car and its occupants (Chris was riding shotgun at the time), and other than one of his beloved Advan RG wheels taking a hit, the rest of the go-fast bits appeared to be in surprisingly good shape.
After taking a few days to reflect on the incident, Ken decided to start over with a fresh chassis, rather than having the red FD hammered out. With JDM FDs being fairly abundant and affordable in Canada (thanks to the importation law that allows Canucks to bring in cars from abroad that are at least 15 years old), Ken let his fingers do the shopping online, finding the white one you see here in bone-stock condition for $8K. After stripping the wrecked FD and selling what he didn’t plan to use on the new car, Ken was out just $4K and a bit of sweat equity. Not the cheapest driving lesson in the world, but it could’ve been much worse.