On my way down to Texas, I stopped to Atlanta to have some parts installed at R-Speed. I didn’t do any meetings because I had a lot of work (emails) to take care of and I wasn’t ready to organize anything yet. I also knew I had to stop in the city again on my way back.

I left from New Orleans in the morning, and the weather just kept on getting worse and worse.

But, as I’m a renegade, I kept the top down as long as I could… even if I shouldn’t have.

At one point, we stopped to put the top up as we were starting to get wet. We drove with the top up for a while and had to put gas into the car. We were about 150 miles from Atlanta. The first car failure of this whole trip happened. The Mazda Infotainment System decided to stop working. No more USB charging, no more music and the screen was blacked out. We solved the problem by putting music on the cellphone (mounted using the ZOOM Cellphone Holder) and using the GPS to guide us to our destination.

After I arrived in Atlanta, I parked my car for about an hour and when I drove back, everything was functioning again. Weird. I’ll go to the dealer after my trip to see if we can troubleshoot the issue.

The weather was looking real bad but I decided that I would attend the REV9 Atlanta Meet at Red Brick Brewery despite the rain (it would actually make awesome pictures). The sun coming out (and beer) saved the day!

The meeting was last minute, too early (for Atlanta’s traffic) and under some super sketchy weather conditions. Still, 2 NDs showed as well as 4 NAs (looks like the NBs and NCs were sleeping that day…).

A VW was also up there (the passengers were Miata owners, but their Miatas were broken)…

You could really see a ton of popup headlights… and it looked SO cool!

Since we were so few, I took a good shot of every car there:

Black NA on BBS Wheels (and I quote the owner saying “at least it’s not broken”). It sounded pretty good, too!

Red NA #1 on Kosei K1 Wheels that seems to like cutting body panels, haha!

Red NA #2 on (?) Wheels that look pretty nice with the silver/red combo.

Red NA #3 on 949Racing Wheels with Garage Vary Front Lip and Project-G Hardtop Spoiler.

Dark Gray ND on 949Racing Wheels that also had the Integral Kobe Rear Spoiler and (some of) our REV9 Black Chrome Emblems installed on it!

Soul Red ND with lowering springs!

And my car that I cleaned with Quick Detailer… haha

It was a fun meeting and super great to meet all the locals in Atlanta. I let the owner of the red ND test drive my car so he could feel the Nielex Knuckle Support and he did seem to like what I had done on the car, and could definitely feel the change in the steering stiffness.

I am now heading to Charleston, South Carolina. I’m planning on doing a meeting there, too. Hopefully we’ll have some people show up, it should be fun! Check out the beginning of this awesome trip in our Roadster Trip section!

Here are more of my artsy shots, enjoy!

After leaving Texas, I headed to New Orleans, Louisiana. I didn’t hold a car meeting up there for the simple reason that I wanted to have some kind of vacation/cultural stop during this trip. As many of you know, I am from Canada, more precisely Quebec. Quebec is the only French-speaking place in the whole of North America. Louisiana is an old French colony and I just wanted to see what it looked like. So this post will be a bit less “car related” than the others.

Fleur-de-lys flag, which is also shown on Quebec’s National Flag.

It’s quite cool to see signs in both languages on a single pole. For your information, “rue” means “street”. And for those who know New Orleans, Bourbon Street is where the magic happens.

I had never heard of this place except for the huge flooding that happened about 10 years ago (Hurricane Katrina). After some research, I discovered that it’s pretty much USA’s city of vice. This becomes obvious pretty quickly with a look at the signs…

Still, it was a beautiful place to visit during this very long road trip!

More fleur-de-lys here and there.

Alright, so that was the culture/history part of the blog. REV9’s more about cars, right? I didn’t drive the car during my two-day stay because it was securely parked indoors and I didn’t want the drunk people walking in the street to pour beer on it… haha. When I left, I decided to do a photo shoot in front of a cool background I found.

Here’s a little close-up of the Beatrush Front Tow Hook, RS Factory Stage Chin Spoiler (unpainted) and the REV9 Black Chrome Emblems.

And here’s a close-up of the (coming soon) REV9 License Plate Frame, Beatrush Rear Tow Hook, REV9 Black Chrome Emblems and awesome sounding Fujimura Gentle Exhaust.

This photo style is called the “Dilly Shot”.

This is one of my favorite picture angles. It shows the beautiful shape of the fenders as well as the concavity of the Advan RZ 17×8 Wheels.

And a last one, just because I don’t take a lot of pictures from this angle…

Here are a few pictures I took while driving towards Atlanta, GA, for our next meeting.

Finally, I took this video as we were driving away from New Orleans. It was sunny right before a rain storm and that was just awesome to watch. That’s something you don’t see when you take a plane.

You can read more about this whole trip by checking the Roadster Trip section of our blog. So far it’s been a blast and my mileage counter is now at 3800 miles since the end of July!

 

 

After travelling 10 hours straight from Birmingham, Alabama towards Houston, Texas, I was super tired, but also ultra excited about my first ever REV9 Meeting. It was really an informal meeting that was set up a day or two before, so I didn’t expect much.

I held the meeting at a local brewery called 8^th Wonder Brewery. Why choose a brewery as a meeting point? Beer makes people socialize. Also, if no-one showed up, I could at least have a cold one and chill out.

Let’s start with the Houston Meeting:

First thing I did was to wash the car because it was covered in rubber:

Now it was fresh looking and ready for the meeting. I went there with our Instagram manager, Francisco. He has one of the nicest NBs I’ve ever seen. Long time customer, too.

These are actually the only two pictures I took of the meeting. I know, I’m really bad at blogging and keeping it entertaining, but luckily I’ve had some help from fellow photographers who were attending. I won’t post all the pictures as there are hundreds, but I’ll show my favourites here (in no particular order).

Photos by Alan Bynum:

The sexy lineup.

Francisco’s NB rocking Work Meister 16” Wheels (in WMB finish), Jet Stream Front Fenders, Jet Stream Side Steps & Rear Fender, Garage Vary Eyelids & Autoexe Front Bumper.

His car’s interior is as awesome as the exterior. It’s a build that took so long, but just looks legendary. You can see the Jet Stream Shorty Console installed in there paired with the JoyFast Leather Handbrake Handle.

Blue NA rocking Enkei Apache-II 15” Wheels, Car Shop Glow Turn Signals, Car Make Corn’s Mirrors, Garage Vary Tail Lights & KG Works Rear Spoiler. The Merlot NA with Panasport 15” Wheels & Garage Vary Front Lip was also pretty rad looking.

Harris’ work in progress! Right Hand Drive NA with Jet Stream Turn Signals, REV9 1028 Mirrors, Cusco Intake Chamber and Autoexe Ram Air Intake. The GOLD colored Carbing Front Strut Bar sure was a nice touch among the rare parts going on this car.

This was a really nice and clean supercharged NA. It has an awesome retro look with these Work GooCar 15” Wheels as well as the KG Works Turn Signal Intakes installed on it. The Runabout M2 Mirrors sure were a nice touch, too.

This was a pretty cool looking NC2 with evil eyes~

Some of the cars at the meeting made more power than the others…

Photos by Chris Diaz

Nic’s BRG with awesome RS Watanabe 14” Wheels & awesome Garage Vary Headlight Intake Lid.

It also had awesome ZOOM Tail Lights installed on it for an even cooler retro look.

Francisco’s NB back is as awesome as its front. The Chargespeed Rear Lip and Autoexe Rear Spoiler really sets it up.

And another shot of our group. The white NB had some massive 12” wide wheels up in the back to fill its widebody (and somehow, we didn’t get to take pictures of it…).

Photos by Nicholas Johnson

These are some artsy pictures and I absolutely love them. Here’s a good shot of our REV9 Sticker and he also managed to take a good picture of the ZOOM Cellphone Holder.

A Volvo showed up at the meeting. We then found out it was not a Volvo but a Toyota Cressida Wagon (and it was NEAT).

That shot is the classiest one showing what the Autowear Seat Covers look like in real life. That’s an incredible shot.

Here’s another shot of the clean supercharged NA with a very nice looking NB that was rocking some Advan 15” Wheels next to it. Unfortunately, we don’t have more shots of the NB…

And here’s a shot of my happy face after a couple of beers!

About 20 people showed up to the first meeting. It was great to put faces to names and meet other enthusiasts. I would have loved to show all the cars that were at the meeting, but I didn’t take pictures as mentioned at the beginning of the post, so that’s all I’ve got!

Now let’s see the Austin Meeting:

It was held at ACBG Brewery on a very nice Sunday afternoon. It’s also a meeting I set up pretty late. I posted the event on Saturday at 9:00 PM and it was on Sunday 1:00 PM, so I was not expecting many people to show up.

To my surprise, about 15 cars showed up (and there were 3 NDs who came by)!

(Bad) Pictures by Maxime Lacroix

We had a nice little lineup of very different types of Miatas in there.

This 2.5L NC was a track monster. It was really cool looking with the Enkei RPF-1 17” Wheels and ultra faded Sparco seats… haha! I’ve heard many stories about this car being a beast at the track. It sounded mean, too.

Austin’s bright sun is brutal on some people’s cars…

I was, as always, trying to show off and look pretty.

This black NB is owned by the president of the Tejas Miata Club. Very cool group that do a lot of racing and driving events.

This is an ultra clean, low mileage NA that seems to be kept in the shade as the paint was pretty immaculate. The owner is Austin from Austin.

Work in progress here. The owner had great plans for it.

Out of the four NDs at this event, three of us were in Ceramic Metallic color. The other one (not pictured) was Soul Red.

Someone arrived later with a nice M-Edition NA with that cool and rare blue color (soon to be repainted). He was waiting for his Jet Stream Headlights & Garage Vary Tail Lights to be installed before painting the car.

The 15” OEM BBS sure were nice looking in here.

So that’s pretty much it for the two meets I’ve organized (or not organized well). I’m happy with the turnout, and it’s always fun to meet new people and discover new places. I’m super happy to see that people are actually interested in seeing the demo car and are as passionate as me about the Roadsters in general. Next meeting will be held in Atlanta, GA. Follow our Facebook page to see updates on the upcoming events and you can check our previous blog posts about this trip here.

 

After leaving Deal’s Gap (wish I could stay there all year long, the roads are just way too much fun), I headed to Atlanta, Georgia. The total trip before arriving to Atlanta at around 1900 miles on the car. Still running strong and sounding awesome.

During my drive, I took many awesome shots of the car. It’s interesting to see how the Ceramic Metallic color just looks nice even if the car was literally covered in rubber from the previous runs. The new stance of the vehicle just looked right. I can now go pretty fast everywhere without being scared of destroying my bumper or bottoming out.

I went to a city that’s more precisely called Smyrna to meet an old friend of mine : Joe. Joe is the owner of R-Speed and I visited him to have some parts installed on my car and discuss business stuff!

Before we drove to his shop, I had to take a look at his shop car that’s full of rare JDM parts. The car was fitted with some KG Works Turn Signal Intakes, Enkei92 Wheels, R-Speed Front Lip, KG Works Rear Spoiler and had some pretty awesome Nielex/AWD interior parts (which I forgot to take pictures of…).

After the quick check of both our cars, we drove down to R-Speed’s new location in Smyrna (close to Atlanta downtown):

After the quick visit at the shop, it was time to install some parts I’ve had delivered from Japan especially for this trip. I had the ND RS Factory Stage Chin Spoiler installed (not painted yet) as well as the ND Beatrush Front Tow Hook (as well as the ND Beatrush Rear Tow Hooks, but they were not taken in picture). I basically installed this for the main purpose of saving my front bumper when I’ll park in the city in parallel parking!

Since they don’t have any ND Demo Car, I let R-Speed use my car to test fit their new R-Speed ND Exhaust and it sounded great! The sound level was much lower than my Fujimura Gentle Sound Exhaust, but it still was pretty nice to see and hear. They took videos and more photos, but here’s just a preview of it:

I then took an artsy picture of my car in Atlanta Downtown in front of an abandoned building. Love that shot~

Temperature was quite hot when I left the big city. Even my LCD screen wouldn’t want to work in such conditions…

I then drove about 180 miles to do a stop in Birmingham, Alabama. Temperature was insanely hot, so I had to do a beer stop. Luckily, they had a great choice of beer flights~

And then, I decided to test my stomach and eat some Chicken & Waffles. That was a terrible decision.

A train stopped me and that was about it for Birmingham.

I only stayed about 12 hours total in Birmingham (including my sleep time) as I needed to be in Houston for the first official REV9 Autosport meet! You can check my previous Roadster Trip posts if you haven’t seen them and follow our event schedule on the REV9 Autosport facebook page!

Here’s the blog post about my (probably) most exciting event of this whole trip : Miatas at the Gap. It was their 20^th anniversary of the event and we were over 500 Miatas in that 11 mile with 316 curves. Let me tell you, it was amazing! It’s a small coverage, simply because I tried to enjoy the thing more than having to think about making this blog post…

It was a 330 miles drive from Charlotte, and outside temperature was crazy hot.

I’ve had my car washed because I like to show off 😀

The event lasts from Thursday to Sunday. I arrived on Friday noon, but did not miss much! I first stopped at Andrews Brewery for some refreshments :

After relaxing from this long drive, I decided to hit the Dragon’s Tail. It’s known as one (if not THE) most dangerous road in USA. I think it was really the case, because during the weekend, at least 5 Miatas crashed and one even fell off a cliff. Scary stuff.

I did not take much pictures during the weekend, unfortunately. The photographs (expecially Killboy) took most of the awesome pictures of my car during high speed cornering:

The Nielex Knuckle Support and ACRE Light Sports Brake Pads really made a difference to the car and it was great to have these items installed at the gap. I felt the rigidity during cornering and the extra power the brakes made. It was totally worth it and gave me a solid advantage on this road. I just wish I had better tires, because they were used over their limits. I’m not racing the car usually and they are perfect for my type of driving, but in the curves of this road, I would definitely have benefited from better grip.

I also had the chance to meet a new legend in the Roadster community : Sam! He’s asked me many times to get him a Garage Hundred-One Widebody Kit and I finally gave up and hooked him up. He also bought the Zeromotive NA Hood and Jet Stream Turn Signal Intakes to add some styling to his ride. Here you are :

  

The car is really legendary looking and has a Honda K engine swap from KMiatas. They are really good guys. I also met the people at V8Roadsters and many other vendors and customers during this trip. It was awesome.

Even though I did not take many photos, I did a lot of GoPro videos of my driving at Deal’s Gap. Here are two of them showing how many curves there are. I really had problems during cornering due to my greasy tires (Yokohama S.Drive) and, most of the time, stayed in 2^nd gear to be on the safe side and not end up down a cliff, or into the opposite lane.

Video 1 : REV9 ND + Brian’s NC + Chad’s FR-S (both of them are on RE71R tires)

Funny thing is that I met these guys during a stop I did to adjust my camera. One went at me and asked me if I was the “REV9 guy”. We rode the whole weekend together~

Video 2 : REV9 ND following (loud) Hayabusa & ZX10R

I met these gentlemens after chasing them with the ND. They were super cool and one of them really had one hell of a loud exhaust. I’m glad they were here to make the slow cruising bikes move over so we could enjoy the road.

Funny thing was that on the first video, my friends told me that they were pushing their cars, but on the very safe side, where their tires were not pushed to their limits. I was pushing mine to the limits and really got scared a few times. As for the bike chase video, it was real fun to see that the ND could follow them without too much problems, especially in cornering. I’d like to see how it is using better tires. Anyways, my MPH suffered a bit during this trip compared to what I’ve been doing in the past.

I’ve also had the chance to meet a new bike friend; Mike. He knew how to drive his ride and I really couldn’t follow him as he was much faster than me. My tires really suffered on this run.

It was lots of funs, and you can see the video below:

It was an awesome event and I even made friends at a random hotel in Robbinsville. Those Miata people were just hanging in the parking lot at 3:00 AM and I asked them if I could hang out. They answered positively, gave me a chair and a small gift… Moonshine.

I did not turn blind, so I guess it was good stuff. They were awesome people and I couldn’t thank them more for the time we’ve had. It was fun.

At one point, I had to pack up and say good bye to the dragon. Packing in this little car ain’t the easiest thing to do…

I’m so glad I made new friends during this event, and hope I’ll be able to meet the again in the future years.

Here are some more photos for your viewing pleasure. I’m now preparing my blog posts about my visit at Atlanta! Check out our full trip at our Roadster Trip blog section!

 

I’m really sorry for the late update. I’m writing this as I’m about to move to Birmingham, Alabama. I thought I’d have time to keep you all updated, but I wanted to enjoy this trip a bit so forgot about this whole writing thing. Now, I’m pretty much up to date with my work and I’ll try to post all updates for the blog posts today.

Here you go…

After leaving New Jersey, I moved 2 days to Virginia Beach, at some friend’s house to cool off and explore the city with locals. It was just a few hours drive and I was now at over 700 miles driven in this trip:

I really enjoyed this moment and just tried some good beers and saw a (free) concert of Third Eye Blind. That was a nice look to the past. Car got super dirty from staying under trees, but with all the driving I’m doing, it does not really matter anymore.

I then headed out to Charlotte, NC. As usual, many stupid things happened to me, because I’m not the luckiest person on Earth. First thing that happened was for me to pay for a car wash that my car wouldn’t even clear:

This is a very stupid system. I had to back off the whole single-land road and dry my car while not being reimbursed because I typed the numbers on the keyboard.

Car was all wet.

When I arrived near Charlotte, I stopped at a shop to have my car dynoed and have a few parts installed. First of all, the dyno : I wanted to have a baseline of my car before I start going too crazy on modifications. Right now, I have only an Odula Air Filter, Autoexe Sport Induction Box and Fujimura Gentle Sound Exhaust. I will make full review of these parts after my road trip, into the ND Shop Car section. Here are the results:

First pull was doing 134whp & 134wtq, but the warmer it got, the less it made. Please note that the outside temperature was 38 degrees Celsius (or 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit)… so it was extremely hot. The Autoexe Sports Induction Box pretty much makes an open filter under the airbox and is not the best modification to have in hot environments. I normally live up north (Canada) where it’s cold, so it’s perfect for me, but not for the North Carolina, it seems. Still, the curves were pretty impressive showing maximum torque at 3700RPM and maximum power at around 5700RPM. Car is very solid and nice to drive… and makes 40mpg!

Here’s a video for your viewing pleasure:

The other things I’ve had done at the shop was to finally raise my car’s suspension (by about half an inch, or 1cm), change OEM brake pads to ACRE Light Sports Brakes and install the Nielex Front Knuckle Support. Let me tell you that now the car really feels like it should. The brake pads give that extra power it needs to feel more aggressive and less “old man’s” car. The Knuckle Support makes the front end super stiff during turns and really makes the steering of the car different. This is a very short review of those 2 parts, but I’ll also make a good writeup about them in my ND Shop Car section later (after more mileage is put on them). My friends at SB Garage also did a review on the Nielex Knuckle Support and seem to like it as much as I do!

I’ll now prepare the blog post for my visit at Miatas at the Gap in the border of North Carolina and Tennessee (Dragon Tail). This was one awesome event. I hope you’re enjoying the read on my USA Roadster Trip!