Fridays are better when your buddy swings by work to show you his (N)D. Now I just need a ride...

I'm surprised at the alignment that was on the car.

I'm also surprised at how unbelievably easy the top is to operate!

 

-dealer is not required to do alignment as part of PDI
-Mazda runs TONS of caster on their cars. It allows for more progressive steering effort. They're over 7* on the FWD cars too, which is not something any other maker does AFAIK.
-The soft tops are freaking awesome and I want one. SO EASY.

 

And add unnecessary cost? We'd like to think they did.
A lot of caster. I wonder why so high.

 

It's essentially the same design as the NC, correct?

I always loved how easy the top was to put down on the NC vs the NA.

 

No. the NC is easy, but the ND is even easier. It's got a spring setup in it that makes it nearly effortless.

 

 

Really?

Never driven an NC, but I always thought that the NA had one of the best designed tops I've ever used. Granted, it's a pain in the *** to latch closed for the first few months after you replace the cloth, but once it's gotten a chance to stretch out a bit*, I never found anything to complain about.

* = insert Hustler's mom joke here

 

From the driver seat you touch release button that pops it up a inch or so so you can get your fingers under the leading edge. You then swing it forward using maybe ~5lbs of force. From there it's a single latch in center. Done. It's far easier than the NA/NB top and require less force as well. The NA requires me to sorta hoist myself out of the seat and make an awkward bend of arm and torso, sorta outside the normal range of motion with one arm to reach it. The ND requires a bend but well within the range of normal human motion.

 

What about with a roll bar. Putting up my soft top with the roll bar requires a certain amount of dexterity that I rarely have. I end up dropping it half the time and getting out.

Aluminum seats with shoulder supports probably doesn't help either though.

I played with the soft top at the dealership. I was very impressed. Reminded me of this.


But it would have destroyed the NC

 

The NC's top is the Z-fold, but the ND's is an extremely similar design, but the mechanisms were improved to require dramatically less force. In the ND tech doc (Japanese literature), there's a graph showing the difference in force required for the range-of-motion to operate the top. A few Enterprising Individuals over at mnet have successfully put down and put up the top traveling at 25mph+.

The NA/NB top for me has been a pop out of the car situation.

 

With the NA, I always get out to take care of the rear window. I'm ---- though.

My daughter's PRHT . . . that's sweet.

 

Just as easy as Emilio's step-by-step but you use two hands at one point to pass the top from one hand to the other past the roll bar hoop. Because the top is spring assisted it has very little weight to it, so you can easily pass it from hand to hand mid-way with just fingertips. It's really quite good. No getting out of the car or awkward motions.

It's also the quietest soft top of the generations by a good margin. I'd call it as good as a hard top cinched down on an NA/NB.

 

Caster turns into decamber once you turn away from straight ahead. Imagine you have 7° of caster and no camber. If you turn the wheel so the tires are completely sideways, you end up 7° decambered.

 

I had our Reflex Blue Track ND for the Miatas @ MRLS weekend. Bit of a proof of concept weekend for the "GT" recipe; didn't change a single part on the car from leaving San Diego to turning over 300 miles of laps at Laguna Seca to driving back down.

Drove the 400+ miles North in full comfort. Having gone back to my NB now I immediately miss the tech and comfort the ND had. Maybe it's my old age (just turned 30 last weekend ) but for a road car, the amenities really are at the top of my list for must-haves. I'm used to driving my NA to events - it's a hot, sweaty, noisy affair with lots of stretching stops that I put up with for the fun I'll have once I get there. With the ND, I synced my iphone's Pandora to the radio's bluetooth, put the top down, and flew. On 235 RC-1s over 17x9s the ND still ate up miles smoothly. We just launched our line of new NC and ND exhaust choices that implement helmholtz chambers to cancel drone during cruise. I had our most aggressive "race" muffler on the car and hardly heard it on the way up unless I dropped a gear to make a pass.



On the track, what can I say but that the car is just joyful. First half of Saturday we made a few shock and sway bar adjustments and then the car was dialed in. Progress adjustable sway bars front and rear and Ohlins coilovers with race valving. First time you drive the ND at pace, coming from an NA or NB you'll notice all this travel in the rear - you just don't have that in the earlier cars - and it feels a little weird, but once you make a mental adjustment, it all works. I was putting our BBK through its final paces before production as well. We have the front half of the kit already up on the site, but the full 4-wheel version is being finalized. Massive amounts of torque available, and zero fade. It's a lot of brake, but more heat capacity and torque inherent in the hardware means you don't have to go crazy aggressive on the pads to survive a weekend at the track. It's all about that "GT" concept. We'll be exploring more and more power with this car in the future too, so it's good to have brakes that the car can grow into. Wouldn't be surprised if we get to a point with power that we do need a full race pad in the BBK at the track.

So, brakes good, suspension good, comfort good, that leaves power. As detailed previously, right now we're at 165whp with the OVTune and midpipe/muffler. On the street - friggin' awesome. On the track, it's dynamite for half of a session and then power start to ebb away. It's a slow progressive loss so I actually didn't notice it at first. When I wasn't pulling on a Spec Miata that I knew had 120 whp, I knew something was up. Emilio was experiencing the same thing in their car, and we're all pretty sure that oil temperature is the culprit (ECU goes more and more conservative to protect the engine). We'll be doing focused testing in this area soon.

Other notes and thoughts...
- The traction control is just like a Porsche Cayman. When it's off, it's still on the sidelines watching with a careful eye - it will kick itself back on under certain conditions. Brian's line through T6 would get the rear end a little light, get just a tad of wheelspin on exit, and it would flash and come back on. My line through 6 didn't upset it as much so I was able to avoid it. We've never seen this happen in our autocross testing. Long Road Racing found you can mount the yaw sensor in a different orientation to avoid triggering it.
- I'll never get used to not having a key that goes in the ignition.

Last but certainly not least, a big THANK YOU to Moti at Blackbird Fabworx for busting his *** to develop the new RZ roll bar, which is the key to having a do-it-all car with full soft-top function that could go play in the A group all weekend at the track, all in time for us to make it to Laguna Seca. It's been posted before, but it deserves a re-post, my head is flush with the roll bar in an unmodified stock leather seat:

 

Thats not how caster works. With 7° of caster and 0° camber, with the wheels turned and average of 22.5° (normally about 1 turn of the steering wheel) you'd end up with about +5° camber on the inside wheel and -2° on the outside if the akerman is the same as an NA/NB miata.

 

perfectly placed side airbag.... good lord.

 

True, you have positive camber on the inside (which is the case with almost all types of double A-arm suspension) but most of the weight and force is on the outside wheel, so the decamber is there to allow the force on the tire to straighten out and stay flat on the ground. In this sense, caster is good because in a straight line, it does not add to the decamber - only in a turn does the outside wheel get decambered (which is important) and the inside wheel adds camber (which is not important since less weight is on it due to the weight transfer to the outside).

 

Yep.


I'm seriously having a moment. I realize I'm not going to go to the track that often and i miss top down driving. I guess I need to take the BRZ back to stock and see how bad I'll get bent over to get an ND.

I really want one.

 

Thanks, Ryan!
That whole month was the mother of all crunch times between your car and 949's, but man was it awesome to see them both on track at Laguna.
And while I know that most everyone would prefer the looks of the GT3 to the RZ, the RZ is really where the magic is for the vast majority of the owners.
A real roll bar that complies with SCCA regs, fits the soft top and every piece of trim inside and requires no compromises in every day usability.

I'm still having hard time believing that we managed to achieve all of the above, especially given the aggressive timeline.

 

I agree with ThePass about the butt wiggling is a bit unsettling at first. I'm up in the Western NC/Eastern TN mountains (aka: Deals Gap area), and the car just has torque. I've left it in 4th or 5th and it just pulls itself out of the slump.

I've also realized that I'm now an old man because I've gotten all of the public road hooning out of my system by getting into track stuff. I'm more excited that I got 35mpg going around the Cherohala Skyway and Deals Gap than "giving the car a workout".