Dang, I should have checked Demon Tweeks... just bought new Hans III for myself and my wife and they're considerably less than the US vendors are charging.

You want 20*... 30* is for layback seats. FWIW, the neck opening is fairly tight to slide them on so we ended up with Large for both of us.

 

Copy that, thanks for the insight Roda. I took my collar measurement and it looks like I'm gonna land in large territory anyways. Just placed the order for one off of Demon Tweeks along with the necessary helmet anchors. Thanks for the peer pressure, everyone

 

Happy New Year to all! Hope your celebrations were a blast and your New Years Day was as unproductive as mine.

I didn't want to clutter up the thread too much but I got to installing the 1" brake master cylinder on Sunday. Extremely happy with the result, going from the 7/8" stock MC to the upsized Infiniti Q60 unit firmed up the brakes a ton and got rid of the touchiness I disliked even with the stock front calipers. Quick breakdown here:

So the stock NC master cylinder is a Bosch unit that shares the same mounting nut pattern across a range of different vehicles/sizes. I found a few different vehicles with a 1" MC that can be substituted from, namely the Ford Transit and a slew of Nissans. No matter the MC you use, you'll need to mount the Miata reservoir as it's shared with the clutch MC as well. Also, the Miata MC uses M10x1.0 ports whereas the 1" options use M12x1.0. The ports on every viable option are also on the opposite side of the Miata MC.



I found a used Infiniti Q60 MC (same unit as the 370z with factory 4-piston brakes) on eBay for $38 shipped. NC unit on the left, Q60 on the right. The Q60 piston depth is actually the same as the Miata MC, so you don't even have to adjust the brake booster rod. From what I gathered, the Ford Transit MC uses a piston that's slightly longer.



A little bit of material needs to be taken off the Q60 MC for the Miata reservoir to fit. You can see the divot I cut out right next to the fluid level switch. I did this project in my garage and only had a hacksaw on hand so it got a rough cut.



Reservoirs side by side. Washers just happened to be laying there from another project.

Finally, we get to the adapter solution. There's a few ways to go about this but I just went dumb and simple. M10x1.0 inverted flare to 4AN adapters on the hardline side, 6" 4AN stainless braided brake lines from Allstar Performance, 4AN to M12x1.0 inverted flare adapters on the MC side. I briefly thought about bending, cutting and flaring the factory hardlines to make routing more direct but decided this way was easier and reversible just in case I ever wanted to go back.

Figured I'd document this because there isn't a single thread I could find that confirmed that one could do this and ran through the process start to finish. I pieced together some info from a few M.net forums but none of them had any closure on the parts needed or how the project turned out. Notably, they were also punctuated by lots of comments saying that messing with the factory brakes was bad and that the OP's car was going to immediately crash and explode into a million pieces.

The whole project cost around $150 and the brake pedal feels soooo much better. Even with the stock front calipers, I was immediately displeased with how squishy and touchy the brake pedal felt compared to my 1" MC-equipped NA. Kinda just got used to it over the last few months but I'm very happy with how it feels now and can't wait to drive with the improved modulation on track.



The finished result. Don't mind that crankcase breather in the bottom right. I ran both of the breather lines to that corner next to the firewall/fender well "temporarily" after the engine swap, with plans to route them to a catch can soon after. Neither breather has showed a lick of moisture though so that project fell to the wayside and I all but forgot about it. That's on the list for future Zak to address on a rainy day.

I couldn't help myself and signed up for another track day this weekend at WSIR. There weren't any other viable track days going on within the next few weeks (I'm not going to pay $500 to run Chuckwalla with the Porsche Club) and driver count for this event on Saturday is low. Only 31 people are signed up and each run group is getting seven sessions followed by an hour and a half open session at the end of the day. I think I'll get my money's worth.

I swapped out the two most smoked NT05s on my car from last weekend with two other slightly less smoked NT05s from the first set I purchased. The tires that I just put on the rear have less tread wear but a lot more heat cycles than the previous ones. Like Curly stated above, I don't think I'll be getting any solid setup data from this weekend. However, I'm still gonna record my current settings and see if I can make the car quicker throughout the day by recording what data I can and making adjustments accordingly. It'll be like a practice event of sorts, haha.

 

Weird that infinity parts fit on a Miata, but if it works, is cheap and is easy I won't question it too hard.

 

Great upgrade... and a for figuring out the parts interchange!

I was also looking at the PCA event at Chuckwalla until I saw the cost! That's a little steep.

WSIR should be a bit chilly in the morning in January... be careful in that first session!

 

Very cool, love the MC upgrade. My buddies NC on stock brakes is TOUCHY. I swear I'm not a bad driver but I have trouble driving that thing because I'm so used to my old cars. That seems like a good idea.

 

Great stuff @Z_WAAAAAZ ! The car looked awesome in the videos and pics and it was great seeing you hang with the C8 and Shelby.

May be too late for HANS talk, but I use the Schroth SHR Flex. Haven't tried an open-wheel car with it, but have used it across Miatas, Lotus, and a Caterham with different seats and harnesses, which are all likely around the same angle anyways. I too have ordered from Demon Tweeks and they have decent prices across the board. They're also the only ones I've found to carry the 6th belt for the Schroth Profi II ASM harnesses I use in silver.

 

My project needs a new MC and now you've got me looking at random early 90's cars trying to find one that looks close enough to swap.

Good stuff! Love seeing people share new ideas.

 

Words I live by. Probably to a fault lol.

Roda, I didn't realize you do/have done Chuckwalla before. Did I miss that somewhere in your thread? We oughtta line up a date to link up out there sometime.

Just checked the weather for WSIR, looks like a low of 33 and high of 58 on Saturday. You're right, first session is gonna be slippery but that means session 2/3 should be the fastest of the day! Big fan of that compared to first session possessing the best PB weather.

Glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about the NC brakes! My initial impression was that I was just used to the firmer brake pedal coming off of my NA. Oversize MC the world, baby

Thanks man! Yeah, it might not be at peak performance yet but at least it looks the part lol. More stickers coming soon. It's still wild to me how almost everyone here has ordered their helmet restraints from Demon Tweeks too.

If you do, please make a post as detailed as your S2 throttle body retrofit post haha. Yeah, it makes me wonder how many other parts on our cars could be substituted with an alternative from a different manufacturer. One of my favorite quips about my last car was that it had parts on it from five different manufacturers. Is that worth bragging about? Guess it's subjective...

 

It was pre-K swap, so not in my thread here. We haven't been back since the swap was finished, but maybe this spring? Like the track a lot, though it was 102*F last time we were there!

 

That's a great idea. Wonder if this will fit with a fab9 intake mani.

 

Heck yeah, I'll stay in touch! Spring would be good. Chuck gets hot fast once Summer gets close, although I'm sure that's the case for all your AZ guys' tracks haha.

Another kick *** weekend tracking the car. Rough start to it, but a great middle and conclusion!


So the weekend story actually begins on Thursday. I want to focus on the track aspect of the weekend but I feel like I gotta follow up on the master cylinder project.
Abridged version of what happened: Brake warning light comes on Thursday while driving home from work. Get home and check the brake reservoir. It's low and fluid is pooled under it. F*ck. Clean everything up and pump the brake hard 30-40 times. Isolate the leak to be coming from the master cylinder and its adapter fittings. Bite the bullet, remove the MC and adapters. The female flare on the adapters is steeper than the male flare on the MC. Luckily both components have machined flat sealing surfaces. Grab some crush washers from the auto parts store 5 minutes down the road. Reinstall fittings with crush washers. The roommate and I bleed the brakes and retest. No leaks. Drive the car around for a bit. No leaks. Car's back up and running by 9:30PM. No leaks after that, or after a tank and a half's worth of gas in track laps.




So this weekend was teed up really well. I got everything done on the car that needed doing, remembered everything I needed to pack for once, and got to the track at a decent hour Friday night without hitting a lick of traffic. It was too good to be true. What gives? Well, this morning I go to pull the car off the trailer and one of my "ramps" (a 2x4) slips out and wedges itself perfectly between my passenger side splitter mount and the ground, bending the f*ck out of it and shoving the splitter forward a few good inches. I wish I had taken a photo of how it was wedged. I literally cannot explain it. Had to jack up the trailer ramp to pull the 2x4 out of the front of my car. Spent the next hour and fifteen minutes removing the splitter, hammering the mount straight using the trailer as an anvil, and repairing the tire spats and L-bracket supports as best I could. The kicker is that it was below 40 degrees out and windy as hell in the morning. I had to cower in the van multiple times to warm my hands up enough to keep working haha. Ended up salvaging the splitter mount and having the car ready just in time to catch a bit of the second session. Pain in the ***, but not crippling.



There were opportunities for a ton of seat time today so I wasn't too heartbroken about missing the first session. Got out for session two just to get a baseline time but it was WINDY still. Probably gusting at around 30-40mph. Coming through turn 9 the wind was perfectly perpendicular to the car and I could feel it trying to push me the opposite direction as I turned into it. First time experience for myself and not one that will be missed. I pulled off track after three hot laps and had put down a 1:35.23. 1.5 seconds faster than last time out here, but there was more in the car for sure.

Session three got cut short by a driver having a tire failure on the front straight that caused his car to tag the wall. Luckily the crash wasn't super violent and the driver wasn't injured. The track went cold for another hour, which wasn't actually a bad thing because the wind died down during that time. After lunch, there were three sessions left followed by open track from 3-5pm, plenty of time to mess with some settings and try to squeeze extra time out of the car.


Every photo taken of my car from the day was from behind, I don't know why that is.

Next session, I knocked my time down to a 1:34.28, with what felt like pretty solid driving by my standards. Now it was time to screw with the car more. Both of my Miatas have seemed to show a bias toward understeer more at WSIR than other tracks. No change in that today, the car still felt a little understeery almost everywhere despite flattening the wing and raising the rear of the car 4mm last weekend. I busted out my angle finder, dropped the wing AOA from 0.6* down to 0.2*, and went back out. Dropped a tenth of a second, not sure if due to the wing or other factors, but the car felt a bit easier to rotate at high speed so I left it that way. Once it was open track, I went out for a bunch of 2-3 lap sessions and made more changes. I raised the rear 2mm for a session, then added 2 clicks of damping in the rear and one in the front. The car was starting to feel really good at this point, with improved turn in and super easy rotation at low speeds. Over the course of these sessions, I dropped tire pressures incrementally, eventually landing on 27psi hot. Second to last session, I PB'd with a 1:33.83. Hell to the f*ck yeah. That's almost a whole two seconds faster than my NA was on wastegate pressure running 205's here. And today it was on tires that looked like this again...


Hey look, some of that leftover brake fluid made it onto my fender....

Dunno why the fronts are starting to get a case of tire-gina again. They aren't making hard contact with anything in the wheel well and I don't think I'm overheating them either. I measured 150* as the hottest temp on the front left today which I don't believe is outlandish. Might just be this specific batch of tires? Either way, doesn't matter, these are smoked anyways and I'll likely be on a different setup for the next track day.



Aside from the splitter and tire spats needing a little attention, it was another smooth track day and everything bolted to the car is still intact. The new engine is still chugging along, oil pressure looks good, no noises, and the additional power on tap was great today. Top speed through turn 8 increased from 119 mph with the 2.0L to 125mph today. The Xidas are magical at WSIR as well. The suspension soaked up the numerous bumpy areas all over the track better than my previous coilovers despite their stiffer spring rates. I'm actually curious about tossing my stiffer sway bars back in now that the car has aero and is generating a little more body roll (as can be seen in the above photos).

Also, the 1" MC feels so damn good on track. It's so much easier to control brake modulation deep in the stroke compared to the stock MC. Beyond worth it for $150 even though I caused myself a minor headache with it Thursday night.

Still gotta order up the dedicated set of track wheels and RC-1's I'll be running for NASA races. I'm planning on taking all the surviving tires I have left and running one more track day before the first 2025 NASA race at Chuckwalla on 2/15-2/16. Not sure where that's gonna be yet but I'll keep the thread updated!

 

Great lap time at the big track! Especially after overcoming some difficulties...

Did you get a chance to chat with Andy Hollis? He's on a road trip and was driving the GRM 'Triple Threat' ND at WSIR this weekend. You had almost 4 seconds on him BTW...

 

Thanks man! Real amped on the time the car put down for now.

Ha! No way, I thought that ND looked familiar. Not many of those around with the 9LR street ****. I did see it but didn’t put two and two together. Should’ve gone by and chatted with him.

 

Haven't been doing much in the way of mods/tweaks but I'm a lot closer to having things ready for the start of race season in a few weeks. Ordered the RC-1's a couple weeks back and will be ordering another set of 17x10 Dekagrams in the next week or two to mount them on. Can't wait to get that setup together and on the car. Thing's gonna look sick running a set of semi slicks.



Since I have a proper set of high end track tires to smash on now, I decided to change up my "street" setup. RT615k's are consistently cheap in the 225/45/17 size, and I scored a killer deal on this set. Will likely be running these off the track for the foreseeable future. Sounds like these should wear longer than the NT05's too? Side note, I didn't heat cycle (do a canyon run) this second set of NT05's before tracking them and they wore out WAY faster than my first set that I took for a couple canyon rips on before tracking.

Gotta measure the mounted 225/45 RT615's against my 235/40/17 NT05's tomorrow. Mounted up they seem to almost the exact same width. Real mild stretch on the 10" wheels.



I'm signed up for an event at Buttonwillow this weekend, and am gonna run the 615's. Should be fun and I'm loosely considering it the last test of what this car can do on non-competitive tires. Next event after will be NASA Chuckwalla the weekend of 2/15, running the RC-1's!

 

The car is looking really planted through those fast sweepers with the aero. Well done with the PB, excited to see you get a lot of seat time in this thing, i bet you keep getting faster in it. I'm not surprised at the pace vs your na on wastegate, tbh, ncs have incredible cornering traction.

 

Nice driving and work on that MC! If I ever get an NC I'll come back and check your thread for the MC swap. Once you get used to a very stiff brake pedal there's no going back.

 

Thanks dudes! Hopefully I can pull of more PB's and get even closer to the times my NA was pulling at its peak.

All ready to rip this weekend. The slightly taller tires fill out the wheel wells nicely. I cut a new pair of spats and removed the front fender liners just in case they make contact. Also took out the 2mm of rake I added at WSIR while the wheels were off. Drove the car in the canyons last weekend and it was real tail-happy at low speeds.



Also, it's only a few months too late, but I finally mounted this sticker on my car. Hope nobody minds me representing us lol. Thanks again @sixshooter

 

Looks fast! Also... did you cut speed holes in your hood structure?

 

Gracias, dude!

I wish I could say I was that brilliant but the hood comes with the holes like that from the factory haha. And it's still heavy, like twice as heavy as an NA/NB hood. Thanks for the reminder, I should cut out the rest of that substructure...