When Craig D. wanted to go faster he wasn’t about to take the easy option of adding boost.
For most prospective car buyers, the dream is always to find that one-lady-owner, mint condition,never been past 5000rpm and still with the plastic on the door cards classic – that of course hasa ridiculous (she didn’t know what she had) price tag. But the reality is, most desirable models havelong since left the careful ownership of some old lady, and spend their time thrashed within an inchof their lives and buried deep in the red. For Craig Davis, his 1974 Mazda RX-2 fitted squarely intothe latter category, in fact Warren Overton from PPRE had owned the sedan as a teenager, and thephotographic evidence supplied to us that shows the sedan chained to a concrete pad in a haze of tyresmoke would prove our earlier point.
A good mate of Warren’s had been the one to pry it from the old lady’s hands, and it proceeded to swap between a few mates in Wanganui until Warren purchased it, and got busy stripping it bare to execute a grand plan that never quite made it into fruition. It was half-sandblasted, had a Hilux rear end, and everything that had been stripped off was piled inside the shell before Warren sold it back to the previous owner, who then sold the project to Craig.
Despite its appearance the shell was actually in really good condition, it was rust free and had never been in an accident. Every hard-to-find part was there and in reasonable condition, it was just a matter of piecing it all together once a new coat of paint had been applied. The shell was bare-metaled by Craig, and then dropped to Dwyane at Bell Block Panel Beaters where all the minor imperfections were removed, before Craig took it home and got it ready for the paint to be applied by the team at The Paint Shop. Five years on, that paintwork still looks as good as the day it rolled out of the booth, and it even picked up Best Custom Paint at this year’s V 4&Rotary North Island Jamboree.
Before long the RX-2 had one of the first-ever PPRE-built 13B bridge-port engines – complete with an IDA sitting under the bonnet – and Craig was a happy man. A regular in the street classes at the V 4 & Rotary Nationals, he picked up the class win in 2012, but after a few years of driving, the old 1.3-litre just wasn’t delivering the excitement it once had, and the urge to run quicker ETs had Craig searching for a new engine combination. While most would have seen a 13B turbo combination as the next logical step, he had different ideas and no intention of running boost, so instead he called up Warren and placed an order for a short-crank 20B.
The team at PPRE screwed together the 20B using a custom chromoly eccentric shaft, lightened and balanced 9.75:1 compression rotors, and PPRE PP-spec rotor housings. To feed the thirsty three-rotor a custom PPRE tapered intake manifold was employed to house the six ID1000 injectors and three 55mm EFI Hardware throttle bodies. While at PPRE Craig also had the boys mini-tub the rear end in anticipation of running bigger rubber. To keep it as factory-looking as possible, the rear sheet metal was sectioned to allow the addition of 50mm to each wheel tub. Doing it this way it removed the need to build big tubs, and kept the factory look of the boot. The RX already had a Hilux diff, so it was shortened to suit, and a Green Brothers full-spool diff center was added, along with an adjustable four-link.
