You wonder if the more expensive and complex alternative is higher functioning?

You'll have to spend time on designing pulleys, brackets, vacuum regulators, etc.

The comment was if you were going to spend all that precious time on R&D why not do it with dry sump pump ;) Somewhat more expensive but your engine will be happier

The only cons is that the drysump total weight would most likely be higher than the traditional setup with vac pump. Now is the weight penalty worth it performance wise ... :)

Having just done a custom dry sump setup in my car, I'd probably go the vacuum pump route. It just makes life easier as far as plumbing goes and the stock oil pump with some BE gears does a great job.

Now if we didn't have BE gears available and were having this discussion, I'd say dry sump all the way to get rid of the gear failure point.

I was all excited till I read this. That area is pretty tight with the Rotrex and tensioners.

I would like to see some posts on dry sump systems, and how people designed and administered them.

administered in low doses only.

Did you lower the engine? Dry sump is great for preventing oil pressure loss (under braking in the case of the miata) but the biggest reason pro teams I work with go dry sump is vehicle dynamics. You can drop the engine several inches in many cases, providing quantifiable benefits for a full race vehicle.

At present I still have the msm PVC valve dumping who knows how much into the intake. The driver side port was dumping into the msm separator which was dropping about 1 quart per track weekend into the intake. I put a valve on the return of the msm separator to see if oil was coming up the return pipe. This didn't change the oil dump rate. Not running much boost, leak down and compression good. Probably going to go with hustlers setup before looking at vacuum pump. Basically, the stock setup is not very track friendly once you drive past 1.2gs.

By the way most vacuum pumps I've seen like to run at about half the engine rpm. If the stock damper is used the pulley on the pump itself would have to be huge (twice the size of the crank pulley).
Maybe the better choice is to make a small pulley which bolts on in front of the OEM crank pulley and drive the pump with a tiny belt?
Or are you using some high rpm pump?

Come down to the shop and check it out in a few weeks. BTW, where are the pictures of your car?

I'll resend the email

Not really feasible in a Miata, either with an LS or the factory BP - the proximity between the oil pan and the steering rack makes lowering the motor difficult/impossible. Even with a dry-sump pan, there just isn't room to significantly lower the motor in the chassis.