Modified Eliminator Wars in the 70's

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Originally Posted by Hemi Moose

That's Terry Hoard's "Samurai Warrior" 70 cubic inch rotary-powered C/MC Mazda RX-3 SP. It appeared to be a nice, well-built car, and he did have some notable success with it. I think it ended up in Puerto Rico under adverse conditions. I think there has been at least one "tribute" type car built after it.

Although almost all class racers have a lot of...class, Terry was an unfortunate exception.

Right after NHRA killed Modified Eliminator, I switched from bracket racing my street/strip Nova SS, to bracket racing a street/strip Mazda rotary door car.

There was no internet back then, and Terry was the only guy in town involved in rotary performance. He ran a greasy little auto repair shop in a seedy part of Portland Oregon. Whenever I came to him for rotary performance stuff, he wasted massive amounts of my time preaching his Amway cult to me. He was always talking about "dreaming", and making millions of dollars pressuring friends and neighbors to buy strange soap. He had some employees that were fairly helpful, but Terry was just plain creepy. I found out years later, that the success he had enjoyed with his race car, was mostly the result of other people's work, to include a really nasty dispute over an intake manifold.

Initially, I just needed a header. So he welded me up a piece of junk with unequal-length primaries, on the shop floor, with no jig. Then he sold me a "racing" tune-up, with the promise that it would make my car much faster. It was performed out in the parking lot with used parts from a pile in a stolen shopping cart, and included "converting" the stock Nikki 4-barrel carburetor to manual secondaries by wedging a wood screw into the throttle linkage. That "racing" tune up, on my otherwise stock engine, involved setting up both distributors to fire right on top of each other, with enough advance to ensure the demise of my engine on the very first pass I made afterwards. When I told him what had happened, he was all to eager to try to sell me an engine.

About that time, I became aware of Racing Beat out of Anaheim California, and sent away for their mail-order Mazda rotary performance catalog. It had a significant amount of very helpful technical information in it. I was eventually able to put the car in Pro ET with the assistance of Racing Beat's equal-length header, exhaust megaphone, spark plug wires, underdrive crank pulley, clutch, bridge port templates, 4-barrel Holley intake manifold, and the aforementioned technical information.