Junkyard Find: 1980 Mazda RX-7, With Incredibly 80s Custom Paint
First-generation RX-7s aren’t uncommon Junkyard Finds, even though the youngest ones are 27 years old now. However, not many full-on early-to-mid-80s custom paint jobs show up at junkyards these days. Here’s one I found in Denver last week.
Purple, pink, and gold with pinstripes!
With a 5-digit odometer, there’s no way of knowing how many miles this car traveled during its 32 years on the planet. 88,000? 188,000? 288,000? It seems pretty clean, given its current parking space, so the first figure could be the right one.
It’s possible that this wild paint job got sprayed on while Jimmy Carter was still in the White House, or perhaps it was applied five years ago. So many mysteries with a car like this!
28 MPG in an early RX-7? Ah, for the days when highway fuel economy was calculated at 42 MPH… down a steep grade… drafting behind a line of tractor-trailers.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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These early RX-7s do look nice, but I never really cared for rotary engines myself, at least when used in cars. They get gas mileage like a big 4 cylinder or a V6 (but without the torque), they're easy to rev and yet apparently they're not built for that, and I for one don't have the time nor patience to oil an engine every 1000 miles. They're seen as unreliable simply because the RX-7 wasn't built for the common man, but the thing is they're sports car, they're built to have fun in and throw out once something breaks. And no I'm not some lazy non-car buff, I maintain my own car as required by the owners manual. I just have my patience with with a cars "quirks".
The kid who lives next door to me would be all over this. He got a similar one in yellow with a bunch of work done to it: full areo kit, roll cage, huge turbo, rims, stereo, etc. His father has a 10 second Lexus with monster turbos. They aren't messing around either, they got a fully enclosed trailer in which they tow some other cars. Here a video of the Lexus in action at the strip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY85zjXdeYY