Mazda 818 (for banger racing!??)

The car was available? It was on car and classic quite a while ago. I understand your point in regards to the binning of all salvageable interior parts, but the car was bought to race, and plans have changed from the owner. The car is sold now, and therefore we shall see it's new walk of life. It would be nice to think there was no longer a warring division between racers and restorers!

Yes definitely, you do have to understand that a hell of a lot of racers are members of owners clubs, and do actually restore cars too, so it is a shame when something pristine gets raced, but where do we draw the line. It is the owners rights to do as they please etc. The CROWN has already been raced in holland this weekend, the exterior was rather scabby but I'm assuming the internals were clean enough hence the sale.

I think this will be pretty close to the mark, looking at the general condition of the exterior, I can't see the underside being exactly mint. If it was worth any money and viable to save for road use, then the owner would have to be silly, silly rich or completely un-aware of its worth to race it till destruction.
I hate seing useable cars wasted, but if something is cheap enough people will race, break or do whatever they want with them.
I'm mostly into vws, minis and mx5s and in all cases there have been examples of perfectly good cars broken for spares (usually after the owner has thrown £££££ at them to make them trendy, taken them to a few shows over the summer, then realised that the only way they will claw back any of the money spent, is to part the car out. Then there are the people who buy perfectly good cars purely to break, as they will get more money back for them, to the point where some people do it for a living)
At least banger cars are still being used as a car, even if it is only for a limited time.
On the flip side it does make spares available (most of the time) for people doing up cars that would have otherwise been scrapped.

Well I only saw the pic in the first bit of the thread. However I have since looked at the ebay advert and seen the pics of the underside. I don't really think the pics are high res enough to say much more than it looks a bit grotty, but saveable if you are good with a welder or have the money to pay someone to do it.
I could show you pics of my mx5s sills, the passenger side looks perfectly solid, but the reality is that a mate and I ended up spending 20 hours, rebuilding the back part of my car because under the solid looking outer sill was a whole world of pain. The outer sill looked solid, the back of it was manky, the inner sill sections were missing along the rear 3rd of the sill! The floor pan was also cruddy under the underseal. If the early mazdas are made of similar quality steel to the mx5 and have similar levels of (or lack of) rust proofing, then I would imagine that car will need a lot of love to see the road again.

This, 110%.

Beyond the realms of banger vs restorer, i'm just stunned by the sheer lack common sense in buying it complete, stripping it, then selling it on for pittance. I mean really, car emotions aside, in what world does that make good business sense? Some people...

being a racer myself and a classic car owner aswell i have to sit somewhere on the fence on this one!

matey who stripped the mazda and binned the interior, sounds stupid, but honestly when i try 2 sell bits of cars that I'm racing, the ammount of time wasters is UNBELIVABLE, i had someone travel 3 hours for some triumph 2000 seats that he won for a pittance (under a fiver) and he turned up at my house (after id dragged sed seats home from my unit so it was closer for him) and he decided they werent what he wanted and left them!
i had a similar issue with a mk1 cav that got raced, i advertised for parts and someone wanted the wings, i offerd to do a swap for his tatty wings for my useable wings +a tenner a wing, he was adament he shouldnt have to pay because i was only going to smash them up, needless to say they got raced.

however i don't like to see cars that realy are to good to be raced, it does happen on a reasonably regular basis, but thats the way of the world, in the old ford "world" alot of cars are bought, cut up for running gear,engines and scrapped, at least the ones that get raced get a blaze of glory.