Does that sound like a thinly-veiled Russian mafia threat to anyone else here?

​That is the correct answer.

The Boss is satisfied.

fab9 defense
 

Not to raise the dead on this thread since it has all been worked out, but just for the record in defence of Fab9, and being the guy at ATI that he contacted for your replacement damper, I can tell you for a fact that he bent over backwards and did everything possible to get the damper out to you as soon as possible. Unfortunately or I guess fortunately for us at ATI we never seem to have enough miata dampers made in order to immediately fill our backorders to our vendors as it is much less be able to at the drop of a hat get a replacement damper out. I'm always trying to to get us to do larger batches so our vendors have less time with orders on backorder, but unfortunately The miata damper is a complicated damper to make since it has a hub which incorporates the lower timing belt gear, which is also why it is so expensive compared to our more common dampers.
So just for the record when something like this happens it is often beyond the vendors abilities to satisfy the demands of the customer.

Chris Rummel