The Story
I purchased the car back in 2017 as a strictly track car. Found the car on marketplace and bought it from a guy that just purchased a new car. The only requirement at the time is that it ran good and it was all in one piece. It had a bad wheel bearing and a soft brake pedal but other than that it was great in its 289k mile glory. I am a longtime die hard Mazda fan and in my youth I had owned a bunch of proteges the first one being a 1993 LX that I bought from my good friends mother and the first manual car I owned. I did everything I could to break that car but it held me down and started the Mazda love. I eventually got a 2003 Mazdaspeed Protege years later which I enjoyed for a few years. Fast forward to 2017 I had been through a long list of cars and builds which were mostly Mazdas. I wanted to give the Protege 5 a shot as an adult with more patience. Also wanted to be able to improve the community if possible. Over the years I have learned so much with this car and also been able to add to the Protege community and assist with development of parts. The biggest one was the plug and play standalone ecu from Megasquirt which the Protege 5 was the test car for. I cant say that I have much that I wish I knew before hand because I had so much information before hand to put to use with the build. But if anything I probably would have bought a seat and harness first because that made such a huge difference.
Ive got a outdated build thread that is long due for an update:
https://southrnfresh.com/category/sf-project-cars/
