Back story: we needed to buy something with an automatic transmission due to wife's ankle surgery.

We started looking at Mazda3s since we had a 2010 that we sold in 2013. This time around I was thinking first generation years. This was the first one we looked at, a decent '04 but when I spotted rust starting in a rear wheel arch I decided to pass.


While still concentrating on Mazda3s, we decided on a whim to try a Fit just to see if that would warrant further exploring. The first one we tried was a 2010, which wasn't that bad though a hair out of our budget.


The same lot had an '08, which I liked even better.


We kept looking at '08s. I tried this Black Cherry one and liked it too, and the price was right. But purple - ?


Found another Black Cherry at another dealer, but this one was ugly rough. It was an easy pass.


Next up was a Blaze Orange. I wasn't sure if the wife would go for the color, but she did. The price was right and it was a real low-mile car (47K miles) so we snagged it.

 

Welcome and congrats on the purchase!

 

We went straight from the dealer to the Metro station because we had a baseball game to go to.


Next morning, time to clean the thing up. The dealer put this stupid rubber moldings on the wheel arches.


Going going gone


Cleaned up, and it's looking a lot better. I threw a set of 6ULs with R1Rs on and really liked the look. Too bad they won't stay on there.


Anyone have a orange front bumper? The car came with this little 'oops'. I'm going to put a license plate mount on that uses the tow hook hole, and should mostly obscure the trailer hitch receiver impression. But if I could find a replacement bumper, that'd work too.

 

Next stop was to our favorite tint shop. I did not envy my buddy Mike having to deal with some of the close quarters with those little front corner windows, or working around the rear seat belts to do the quarter windows, but he managed.



After that I said I wanted some sort of stripe on the Fit. I figured a traditional sports car stripe along the bottom of the doors, one thick stripe with a thinner stripe above and below it. He said no problem and whipped something up in a charcoal color.



My original idea was to have the middle stripe end on the back door and the rest of that space taken up with our autocross team (Parsimonious Racing) logo.



Mike suggested that he cut the logo out of the stripe itself so the logo was body color. Subtle, but cool. We went with that and it came out great.







When we got the Fit we figured we'd take it autocrossing, at least for the time when the wife was still recovering from her ankle surgery. It made its debut with Washington DC SCCA.





I also took it out for non-comp runs later in the day. It was entertaining but oh so slow.



The next week we ran with Autocrossers Inc. here in town.



Looks like we could probably go up a few PSI on those front tires.





Last picture: we took a road trip up north to visit my folks. Tanker trucks make for good photo opportunities.

 

Just a heads up, it's Black Berry, not Black Cherry.

 

New pics

A buddy of mine offered up the lowering springs he used to use in his Fit in exchange for a box of donuts. Snapped those up and went to work to install them.


Uh oh, something's missing


Another buddy of mine, he who has a much larger and better organized garage than mine, assisted with the spring swap


The results


Remember the marred front bumper? I got a ricer license plate mount that puts the plate right in front of the blemish. Problem solved!

 

Tine to change the head unit. Put the FIT into my tiny, horribly arranged garage


Took a few pictures like this in case I needed a reminder about which heater cable attaches to what


Halfway done?


New on the left, old on the right


Done!


Nice January day = car wash