mixie5

With the ever-growing collection of Miata's in the race shop, it was time for one for me. I wanted to do something special and as I am in the UK, special means a lot of money in shipping. So I started out surfing through all the MX5 adds looking for an MK2 1.8 JDM and luck would have it I managed to pick up a nice white RS for the upper end of the budget.

Everything went well on the viewing, the car was sound, a few corrosion points in the usual places but overall it was well presented. Driving home the gremlins started to play in the engine bay. After a little over 200 miles, the AC pump caught fire. With all the worst things going through my mind, I was surprised that the car ran ok once I put out the burning AC pump and cut the electrics to the unit. Ok, I lost the power steering too but I drive track cars all day so it is on my list of things to remove anyway.

The end goal? I would love to say this is supposed to be a budget build, but I would be lying. This is going to be my daily driver and I want to keep it sleeper style. 400 horse, capable of destroying a supercar is the primary goal but it should be reliable and easy(ish) to drive needs to be kept in mind. Let us see how we get on.

mixie5

With the 400 horsepower goal, I have in mind, building a super strong base is important. I will add pictures to this over the weekend. I started off with a set of Ohlins race coil-overs using 500/300 springs. To keep everything trim, I corner weighted the car with the new setup. While I had everything apart, a full set of purple PolyBushes went in along with Ultra Racing front and rear roll bars, mid brace, front upper brace and rear brace. To connect the car to the road, I used a set of aluminum race wheels I had spare in the shop with Toyo R888R tires.

ryansmoneypit

iTrader: (6)

@400 HP the trans will have a short life if hunting cars is your goal. Is that a 5 (good for 250 wtq) or 6 speed (350 wtq) ? The only clutch that will hold that in a miata transmission, is the SuperMiata (or equivalent ) multi disc clutch. My FM2 WILL NOT HOLD 22 PSI with an EFR 6258. So thats like 350-375 WTQ Im guessing??

BMW trans in your future.

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

KMiata BMW transmission kit

ryansmoneypit

iTrader: (6)

yup

mixie5

Ok, so maybe 400hp is unrealistic but heck i gotta try. So, the build this far:

• Turbo is in
• quaiffe sequential box is fitted (way harder to get in the expected)
• ME221 ECU is in and programmed
• Coil on plug kit and spec sparkplugs in
• ohlins shocks in
• braces fitted
• Wilwood brakes (omg, trying to find us fittings in the uk is a pain) are fitting with dry breaks on all the break lines

Spent the entire day trying to work out why the damn thing wouldnt start. Then all of a sudden it started. Suspecting a loose electrical cable some where. Yay, MX5 builds are fun. I need smaller hands and thinner arms.

mixie5

So far I have been blown away by the help given from four of my suppliers.

Massive thanks to Trackspeed Engineering for the fine quality turbo kit to base the build on. After some stress trying to find all the fasteners (hidden in amongst the packaging), it all went very smoothly. Minor modifications needed to the down pipe to connect to the rest of the system but all in all a smooth install.

Shout out to 949 Racing for shipping me all the parts over the past 6 months. They are slowly getting installed.

Massive respect and shout out to SuperMiata for helping with sourcing parts from japan and all the parts for a super low compression engine.

And finally to Nick at Skuzzle here in the uk for helping with the last parts I needed, and sending me the electrics. See you soon for the dyno tests.

ryansmoneypit

iTrader: (6)

I dont understand. In 15 days we went from not knowing what transmission, to a near complete turbo car with a quaffe box? No pictures?

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Yes, pictures and more commentary please!