Racecar Build: World Challenge TCA RX-8

TechSport Racing’s RX-8s come from different directions – CTSC race car and street car – but they’re coming into their own and have turned out to be excellent Pirelli World Challenge Touring Car A machines.

Longtime Spec Miata racer Kevin Anderson wanted to stay in the Mazda family when he decided it was time for a new challenge.

"I'm familiar with the guys at MAZDASPEED," Anderson, the principal of TechSport Racing, explains. "I like the cars; everything we owned was Mazda. I had an RX-8 street car that I did a little bit of development on before I actually bought the race cars. I took the street car and did some track days just to see how competitive it could be. The feeling I got was most people considered the RX-8 washed up. There was no class for it, nobody running them and you could find them used fairly cheap. The data I was getting from the street car, just doing some test days with simple mods, I saw that it could be competitive."

Anderson bought a couple of former Continental Tire SportsCar Challenge cars and converted one to a Pirelli World Challenge Touring Car, which he raced to a couple of second-place finishes at New Jersey Motorsports Park. Then, at Mid-Ohio, Anderson started last and got the car up to fourth.