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Still the answer...?
Well, it's still here and it's mostly been plain sailing. The only real issue has been the alloys, which are shit. I suspect these are Chinese and of much lower quality than the marvelous Enkei's my previous cars had. Evidenced by the fact that one of them had multiple acutal bends in the rim from potholes, another was heavily corroded, and another had corroded enough inside to let the air out of the tyre. All of them were to a degree, buggered. I was trying to snag a single wheel for ages then I was going to get the lot painted properly, but instead I managed to snag a new set from an ex-Mazda dealer that was clearing them out. Which in itself say volumes for the quality of the wheels when they have a giant stash of spares...
So once again, trying to keep things simple and cheap I had a look at the tyres on the car with a view to salvaging at least two of them for the new wheels. No such luck there either as the fronts were scrubbed to the point of borderline legality and the rears, well were rears on one of my cars, they tend not to last long. So with a new set of wheels and tyres I was nearly there, again only to find out that Mazda changed the centre cap design on the wheels so I needed a set of them also... FFS
In order to not have a repeat of the insane amount of scrubbage, I took the car to Blink Motorsport once again and they hoisted up the car on their wonderful Hunter alignment rig for a full four wheel 'road warrior' setup. I can't recommend this highly enough. My wheels it turned out were pointing everywhere but straight and after Rich had worked his magic the car was transformed.
I tend not to update this blog often these days because the little Mazda, wheels aside, is just an all-round good car and mostly works. It's still the brilliant drive it always has been and I'm now at a stage where it simply is my answer to all my automotive questions. I kinda wish I could go back and tell myself that after my first, it'd have saved me a lot of money over the years! As it is, I'm content and that's all there is to it really.