Koolmat is done, realized I never posted a “done” photo.

Shoutout to Supermiata for turning me on to this stuff. We did it Bullet and Vegas and it was such a nice quality of life upgrade.
https://supermiata.com/koolmat-miata.aspx







Brake parts are nearly all here. Almost ready to tear that whole subsystem out of the car.

 

KoolMat is amazing. It is worth every penny. I will find money to buy it to install in any car if I get the interior out that far. Street or track. Just the amount of heat that is cut down is amazing.

 

Trackspeed 11.75 DynaPro kit fits inside 15x8 +28 Enkei RPF1! I am surprised. If this was known, I missed it, but its pretty cool. I like the 8" RPF1 a lot. If I don't splurge on Hoosier H2O, then my wet setup will probably be 8"/205 RE71R.
I also tested the 7420 Superlite kit with spacers and it took 10mm of slip on to clear the Superlite.

 

Had some free time at the shop between customers today. Fiddled around with a couple ideas/plans I’ve had on the back burner for a while.

I’ve had the gutted headlights for years now and have been running with an HDPE blockoff plate in the drivers side. I cut it open to be a cold air intake and never got around to changing the intake with all the engine, uh, hiccups, I’ve had.








The heat shield/“air box” can be cut and bench bent from a single piece. It is bent and kinda 3D to follow the louver separation. I plan to fasten that bend with a rivet or two.

 

More scene points, no major mechanical updates to share, but progress is being made.

 

Lots to update. oof.

Lets pick it up from the last post.

 

With all the logos printed and cut, I was able to finally lay everything out on the car. My first couple Tarmac 88 logos were only 24" long(the size of the hood logo), and far too small on the sides of the car, so I had a second pair printed at 36" so they'd stretch up onto the hardtop:



It looked a little busy with all the masking and backing paper mocked up, but I had 2020 ricer vision with the vertical stack on the fenders. GLTC/ST5 not applied yet, as at this time I was not sure i could make the upcoming NASA event, so Gridlife might have been the first showing. I held off on placing them until I had a better idea of timeline.









That is the livery 90% done. I will be making a new front airdam once the radiator duct is finished, so the front will get cleaned up and re-lettered.

 

Car looks ******* dope man

 

Meanwhile, I received a very important package from Keegan Engineering.







Reinstallation of the many oranges:

 

Thanks. It has been a fun journey from Forza and my imagination to real life. lol

It looks better with the weight of the engine in it and the fresh front airdam... give me a minute to catch the thread up.

 

I upgraded from a set of SPM/AWR mounts to Blackbird drop mounts with this engine install, this is about the only time they're visible:


The intake I have been running is this 21" J pipe. It is the ideal length for these engines, but that length doesn't let you put the filter anywhere ideal. If you go towards the headlight, you only get about 16" of pipe length between a 5-6" filter and the throttle blade.


I bought the parts(spare headlights, 6" dia velocity stack and 6" AEM filter) for this project years ago, but it kept getting pushed to the back burner. This layout results in a 25" pipe length from the throttle to the opening in the stack, which is a couple inches longer than ideal. My hope is that the velocity stack and true ambient "cold" air more than make up the losses from pipe length. Yes, I have more gold foil insulation if this proves a beneficial setup on the dyno.



Fluids in before the first fire:


I did the first fire and break in driving on the existing OEM ignition system in order to keep my variables low. Once everything checked out and I had a couple data logs for VEAnalyze, I swapped over to the Toyota COPs which made an immediate improvement in idle smoothness and general running/response feel. I hit a patch of OEM NB1 coilpack failures the last couple seasons, so this is both a quality of life improvement, and a minor potential performance upgrade.



Post break-in miles/initial street tuning hard parking:



Easing into the higher rpm cells: It is asking for more fuel than the 158whp map, so its definitely a step in the horsepressures direction. I'll talk about power goals in the next post.

 

Sciences!

 

This thing is gonna be insane. It was already fun just putting around watching the laptop lol, even at 30% throttle it felt like my car at full throttle.

 

Loaded Button up for the first shakedown. I found an autocross hosted by the local Porsche Club of America chapter at my second home track: Circleville Raceway Park. I used to be the competition director for the Buckeye Miata Club and started running our autocrosses here in 2014.

I used the first two runs and the back straight for long 3rd gear sweeps up to 7800rpm to cover the top of my VE map, made a couple manual changes to smooth in some gaps and ripped it on run 3. That first flyer set and held FTD for the day. I loaded up and went home at the lunch break after working my course assignment.

 

Yesterday was a big day.

I got a last minute dyno appointment in time to run this weekend at Pitt Race with NASA Great Lakes.






My street tune made 165 on the first rip. Leaning that out and doing a couple timing sweeps got it to 173. Didn't spend too much time on the high power map, but it did make more power with less total timing advance than my previous 158whp hand-ported head engine did.
Most of the time was spent trying to detune, and it took quite a bit of fiddling to get it down to 159 average.

Keegan nailed the power goal. I wanted some gravy on top for fun days, HPDE and the occasional Gridlife GLTC for fun. 173whp is all that. Its just overbuilt enough that I was able to tune it down to my ~159 ST5 build plan. There is room here to play with deleting the splitter and/or running Toyos with even more power.
2453 @ 168 average would be able to run ST5 on my full power map with airdam/wing-only and 245/40/15 Toyos.
2497 @ 159 average with splitter on 225/45 Hoosier R7 is Plan A.

Keegan Engineering BP4W
CNC ported +1mm valve head
stock cams
84mm forged/balanced shortblock
Squaretop, ported to match Skunk2 TB
Racing Beat header-back
e85








Stopped by a friends place to buy more ballast on the way home from the dyno.

 

Incidentally, it'll pick up a few more hp once its got a few hours of track time on it and frees up.

Did you end up staying with the wrapped hotside intake?
Did you get a chance to A/B the coldside intake option?

 

Damn. That also look like enough to have a competitive amount of power for GLTC as well. I'm trying to make it to COTA 2021 if they are a support series for Super Lap Battle again. We could pit together.

 

Car is amazing as usual

Left field question: What midpipe are you running? Is it still the goodwin racing one?

 

He said racing beat header back

 

Teaser