Honda Jazz GD1, An unlikely racecar.

When you think “racecar” you don’t tend to think “1.3L shopping trolley”, well, most people don’t anyway.

Long story short, I had spectated at a trackday event and since then I have thought it would be fun to take a car on the track myself but always had a hesitation that I don’t want to risk breaking a car I care about.

To fix that, I bought a car I don’t care about (not that much, anyway);

An NZ New 2004 Honda Jazz GD1 1.3 (L13A1) IDSI 5-speed manual with 180,000km on it. No VTEC, 82hp, no torque and no frills. It’s terribly slow, it handles like a box on stilts, but it’ll still be fun to thrash and should get me home again at the end of the day, all while using very little fuel. It has most of a Modulo bodykit and 14″ alloy wheels, so it looks fancier than it is.

The goal is to spend as little as possible, have some fun in it and then in 6 months or so move it onto a new home when the replacement toy arrives from Japan.

The main thing right now is to prep it for a track day in two weeks, where it will see some legit track time. It does tickle me that as part of the process to register for the track day you have to register your car as an MSNZ race car…

So yeah, it’s a real racecar now.