Ahh, yeah, I read through your other thread regarding the lack of power. I just didn't chime in because I had no worthwhile information to add hahaha.

Yeah, that map I shared with you netted me 270whp on a Dynojet at 17psi. Middle of Summer too so I'm assuming IATs were high enough for the ECU to be pulling a bit of timing. We had a big *** fan running in front of the car but weren't spraying the intercooler down or anything.

Crazy to see how much you've learned in the last couple weeks regarding knock sounds, the timing map, VD, etc. I'm a little jealous of your educational journey regarding this stuff, as silly as that sounds haha. Thanks for keeping the threads updated with everything you've found.

 

No problem man, I'm glad somebody gets some benefit from my ramblings

I still can't figure out how you made that much power with that little timing. Maybe the Kraken stuff is just that good or your engine was a lot tighter than mine? Maybe my geriatric FM setup is just that bad?

I think I'm still peaking at 15+ PSI with 3-4 degrees more timing just to get 220 WHP.

I'd say it could be Virtual Dyno as well, but when I've played with parameters like frontal area and coefficient of drag they don't seem to have a huge impact. I know the weight is spot on since I just weighed the car. Roads are relatively flat and I've started using 3rd gear which seems to give more accurate and consistent data.

Similar compression ratio, similar/same octane, same turbo, similar boost levels, similar timing (arguably in my favor)...
Main differences I can think of are the mani/downpipe/intercooler, the dyno and the quality of the engine work. My compression test numbers seemed low, but not terrible and I have no idea how that gauge reads. Boost leak test didn't show any notable leaks. Haven't done a leakdown, but I did check my lash and made sure everything was within spec.

What gives?

 

Yeah, maybe a combination of manifold, intercooler setup and the fact that my car was dyno'd at 900ft of elevation? I think VD compensates for elevation, though, no? My motor wasn't super tight by any means, I got a pretty decent amount of blowby even after break in. My compression numbers were all within 2-3 psi of 160 when I tested it after break in. However, I did that so long ago that I can't remember if that was with the motor cold, hot, or somewhere in between...

Also at some point, I found out that my trigger wheel was off and I had to run -5.0* of trigger offset to attain correct base timing. I set it to -5* when I first started the motor but my tuner thought it was a mistake and set it back to zero when I got the car dyno'd, so the whole boosted portion of the map was actually advanced 5* from what it said. I can't remember if I sent you my map before or after I figured that out and corrected everything.

 

That would make a lot of sense actually. I added about 4-5 degrees from where I was at, which was really close to the table you sent me, which would align with that offset pretty well.

 

Took a sick day yesterday and went for a drive. Mental health day FTW.

Really enjoying the Tecnas. I've almost stopped clenching over big dips in the road. I suspect it'll take a while before that reflex totally goes away, but so far so good.
Keen eyed viewers will note the MT.net sticker on the right cross bar through the window.

 

Good stuff man. The mental health day, driving, MT.net sticker, all of it haha.

Do you always run with no plate, or did you just take it off for the photo? #Racecarthings

 

It's actually just the magic eraser tool on my phone. Does a good enough job of editing out the plate without making it so obvious that it's distracting.

I'm still not sure how much of a difference it makes posting/covering your plate, but it only takes a second so I pulled it out.

 

I used to not care. I still don't really, but moving gave me a fresh chance to be slightly more anonymous. Not sure what that's worth when I use the same username across far too many platforms. At the end of the day it is publicly displayed info after all.

Honestly most of the appeal of removing the plate, or at least the numbers on it, is for a less busy and cluttered photo.

 

im sure ive missed the boat, but where do you get the MT stickers?

 

https://www.miataturbo.net/insert-bs...decals-109681/

@shirtz If you send an envelope to sixshooter he can hook it up. That is, assuming they're not all spoken for.

 

Busy but great weekend!

Took 10th Raw of ~88 drivers on Saturday and 10th Raw again on Sunday. Pretty sure Sunday was my highest Pax placement ever as well, at 12th!

The car held up well. Ambient temperatures around 25 C (75 F). One of my friends who usually drives a 1.8 Turbo swapped VW Rabbit ended up codriving my car on Sunday due to cording his tires on Saturday. First time anyone else has driven the car since the engine rebuild. He ended up taking 3rd in class out of about 10 people, and we nearly got the 1st and 2nd spots.

The Tecna's felt really good. I ran them about 2/3 stiff for the weekend and didn't feel a need to change them. I swapped wheels and tires today though and saw that there was some contact between the wheels and springs/tophats. I don't believe this happened with the old setup, but there was a particularly hard transition on Sunday. One car punched a splitter rod through 3/4" plywood, and a low CRX bottomed out pretty brutally on a few runs.

For context, this occurred when running a 245/40R15 Falken RT660 on a 15x9 +35 Advanti Storm S1. Both Front's showed contact, while the rears were unscathed.
Pinch weld height on my street tires was set around 110-115 cm, and my race tires are about 9mm shorter in diameter, which I admit I forgot to take into consideration when setting the ride height. This was with sport springs.





So I might be looking into some small spacers (maybe 3 or 5mm?) to try and prevent that from happening in the future.

After we ended on Saturday we were hanging out discussing the day and somebody was talking about how they were discussing buying an NA from someone else in the club. He was still doing research and such, but seemed pretty serious about buying it. In the most serendipitous car buying experience I've ever seen, a tow truck with a red NA drives up 20 minutes later and tells us he wants to sell the car. Apparently he saw all the Miata's driving around earlier and decided it would be a good place to try and find a buyer. ~250K miles, 1.6, single owner car, running and driving. Definitely rough, but the guy was looking to build a pretty well prepped car anyway, so he didn't seem to care. Pinch welds and frame rails looked clean. A little bit of rust on the A pillar, but nothing major at first glance.

We'll see how good of a deal it was at $1200, but he bought it and was doing some test laps about 30 minutes after that tow truck pulled up. Worth it for the story alone.

 

Nice update(s) and congratulations on the great result! Bummer about the tire/spring contact but hopefully an easy fix. Haha that’s going to be a great story for the NA. Great coincidence

 

Thanks! I've got another event with the PCA next Sunday and it's looking like 3mm spacers can be here on Saturday, so I'll probably grab a set of those for the fronts and see what it looks like.

I really didn't think much of it when I threw on the race tires. I just figured they'd fit fine like they did with the last shocks. My fault for not checking the clearances closer, but oh well, nothing catastrophic, and the course last weekend was probably about the worst case compression these will ever see.

 

The tire contact is normal for 9's on an NA/NB. Only 3.5" wider wheels than OEM
One of the reasons we dropped the offset on the 15x9 6UL to +32 from +36. But you're always going to have some rubbing unless you put flares on the car and push the wheels a few mm further out.

 

Yo congrats on the result man! Glad the car's been continuing to rip for you.

That's incredible about the on-site sale of that NA haha. The seller had the title and everything on him and they did the whole deal right there?

Not that my feedback is totally needed after Emilio, but I got a similar amount of rub as you with the same wheel/tire setup (Dekagrams instead of S1s but still 15x9 +35). That was at 120mm pinch weld heights front and rear, slightly stiffer springs and shittier dampers lol.

 

Thanks for the feedback on the springs guys. I did end up grabbing some 3mm spacers, so I'll play around with those and see how it looks. I'm not worried about the tire rub outside of the contact with the springs. I think 3mm should be enough to keep things from contacting, but not too much to push the tires into the fender.

Indeed. The tow truck driver had the title in hand. Our buddy held it up in disbelief right after the sale. Fingers crossed there isn't a bunch of rust under the carpets. It did look like it sat outside for a while with the top down.

 

Mountain run last night with some friends. 16 Miles uphill and the car didn't overheat, just got a bit hot. Thankfully we had to slow down for my roommates stock NA at a couple points so I had time to cool down. This is the local ski hill so I've been driving/riding up it since I was around 5 years old.

A couple of things in the works as far as projects, but I decided to postpone them until after the event this weekend. The alignment on the front seems to have slipped based on my steering wheel position, but I'm going to wait and get the front subframe replaced before I realign the car. No sense to align it, replace the subrame a month later and pay another $100 to align it again. Not sure if I mentioned it, but one of my buddies was at the junkyard and pulled an entire subframe for me since he knew of my camber bolt hole woes. The car was mostly stripped already so it was pretty easy. $60 and some beer seems like a good price to me. Bonus points for him grabbing me an in tact PS dipstick as well.

A couple more projects are lined up including LS coils and possibly going to a Skunk 2 throttle body. Currently in talks to grab a 3.63 Torsen to swap in too. Additionally, I started looking at houses this week, so it's all a bit of a toss up at this point. Hopefully this winter will involve major projects involving a refresh of the car and a garage to go with it!

 

I notice you mentioned the house last which must mean the LS coils and throttle body are higher up on the priority list, right?

Stoked to see the upcoming progress! $60 for a front subframe is a steal. Install should be super fun too lol.

Jealous of your guys’ mountain roads up there too. Not that ours are a slouch, but every time I take a road trip up to a ski resort, I just wish I was driving my car up the mountain passes instead of a bulky van.

 

Getting to houses to look at them is a little more involved than working on the car, so likely the car projects will get done in the background. Trust me, I can't wait to have my own garage with my own tools and have everything organized properly.
I've done a bit of research on the subframe stuff now. Doesn't look fun, but it seems like you can do it without having to pull everything off the car. Hopefully that'll just take a night or two. Considering I've touched just about everything in the front end in the past year I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what I'm getting into.

Didn't drive as well as I would have like this weekend at the PCA Event. I couldn't break the 50 second barrier, while a good number of our (SCCA) members were hitting sub 50s. FTOD was one of our guys in his Evo 9 @ 44.9 I believe. Not sure if that was that the course favored their cars or if I just wasn't pushing as hard as I needed to. Still fun regardless. I haven't pulled my wheels yet to inspect, but the 3mm spacers in the front seemed to work. I should do more to confirm that everything will be OK in a hard compression... Maybe when the subframe's getting done. I'm sure more photos from the event will trickle in throughout the week, and I might upload a video if I'm feeling ambitious. The organizer of the event came up to me and told me that my car sounds great and looks like it's setup really well. I had another kid come up and tell me my car looked really fast and sounded great as well. Doesn't make my times any faster, but I'll take it as a consolation prize.

I really need to get this turbo kit replaced. This course had me close to or on limiter in most of the faster sections. I didn't log every run, but on the last log I have I was starting the run with IATs at 44 C (~111 F) and spiked up to 60 C (140 F) by the end of the run. This is with me spraying the intercooler down between runs on a ~26 C (~80 F) day. Self inflicted issues as usual, but that's part of the learning process I suppose. It'll be interesting to see what a 25 year difference in intercooler tech looks performs like

Honestly, my car doesn't look too terribly out of place in this lineup


Look at all those GT cars



Oh, yeah, you ever seen a Tracker on RT660s?



There were 2 of these running this weekend. I'm not exactly sure how they passed tech - actually I do, because it was a self tech - but neither of them flipped. Pretty fun to watch these get tossed around.

 

Holy hell, that last pic is gonna have me making a visit to GeoTurbo.net today. That thing is so sick hahaha.

Glad to hear the car ran well for ya this weekend, despite the high IATs still!

I feel like every driver will at some point run into a track they don't jive with for some reason. I remember the first time I drove Buttonwillow, I was 3-4 seconds off pace from where I should have been all day. Just couldn't figure it out at all haha. Depending on how you look at it, running into a course like that might be a good thing because it means you have something to learn still. And that something may be a low hanging fruit.

Or the track just favored a different type of car. I cant say lol. Stoked you still got props from the crowd regarding your car and I'm assuming it was still a fun time!