This is a feature I wrote on my Mazda MX5, which was originally published in Japanese Performance Magazine Issue 142, dated November 2012. I have combined it with a smattering of pictures taken throughout the first 3 years of the build, between 2009 and the feature date. The car continued to evolve for a further year beyond this, and I shall endeavour to release a follow up post covering this very soon. In the meantime please enjoy this little retrospective!
So I guess we should start at the most logical place; the… err… start. The year is 2009, the dying embers of it at least. I had recently graduated and the last couple of years of university had been spent – aside from annihilating my internal organs with various budget brands of vodka – fiddling with and abusing an old MK2 Golf Gti. Into it I had dropped a Passat 2.0-litre 16v lump, and out of it I had taken… well pretty much everything. It was absolutely hilarious when it was working, but this was unfortunately very rare. It seemed to spend most of its life being broken down into component parts, in order to fix some decaying piece of precision Wolfsburg engineering, with Sellotape and garden twine. This was fine, as I needed a car at Uni about as much as I needed a vacuum cleaner, that is to say – not at all. But suddenly I was plummeted deep into the terrifying world of ‘reality’, and found myself needing a mode of transport that would survive the journey from A-to-B, and back again, without catching fire. So my less-than-trusty steed was forced to make way… for a Renault Clio. Eugh, real life sucks.
That car had about as much character as a baked potato, and a similar amount of horse power. So before long I was craving a change. Something fun. Something a bit silly. But also something reliable and within the tight constraints of my heavily depleted post-grad piggy bank. Can you see where this is going? Yep, the spritely little Japanese convertible ticked every single box. A few short weeks later and I was on the M25, in the dark, in the rain, and in nose-to-tail traffic, yet I was grinning like a deranged hyena. Why? Because I was sat at the helm of a lovely Brilliant Black Mk1 Eunos Roadster. So maybe this reality business isn’t so bad after all!
It all started out so innocently, with some Raceland coilovers introducing the arch lips to a set of 7x15in Mim Cups, and a Garage Vary front lip introducing itself to the tarmac. Paired with an MX5-Parts exhaust it transformed the car into a tidy, low and sleek Euro-look cruiser, which never failed to earn a compliment. The addition of a ducktail spoiler, a pair of RS Active low profile headlamps, a Carbing six-point rollcage, and a few other little touches, served to keep things fresh over the following few months.
It was around this time that my long running interest in the world of ‘stance’ was morphing itself into an all-encompassing obsession, and I just had to cut myself off a big slice of the pie. So the search began for the perfect set of hoops to tuck, poke and stretch under the Mazda’s unsuspecting metalwork. To cut a long story short, I ended up going in a massive circle, and swapped a fistful of twenties for a much more aggressive set of my previous rolling stock, albeit under a different brand name. And with the help of some rubber rings several sizes too small, the staggered set of ATS Cups got the Roadster sitting prettier than ever.
Then something crazy happened. I lost all sense of reason… and bolted a fapping great lump of carbon to the bootlid. A friend of mine had bought it over from Japan on the back of an S13, but somehow, inexplicably, it found its way into my garage, before taking up tenancy on the rear of my car with the help of some rather anti-social custom-made risers. I had a feeling it was going to look just the right amount of outrageous, and my god was I right. It just… worked! Still, I was fully primed for a serious tsunami of hate, especially seeing as the first outing the be-winged beast made was to a Volkswagen show! For some strange reason however, the reception was quite the opposite, with people falling over themselves to get a closer look. Camera shutters couldn’t have gone off at a greater rate if Jessica Alba had turned up and decided to disrobe.
I struggle to put my finger on a point in time when the main objective changed from having an awesome looking car that happened to drive really well, to a car that drove really well and happened to look awesome, but that’s certainly what transpired. The ride-height came up, just a touch. The interior got well and truly gutted and a Cobra Monaco S and TRS harness were bolted into the driver’s side. The wheels made way for some slightly less girthy Rota Grid V’s, wearing tyres with significantly less angle on the sidewalls. The front corners each sprouted a carbon fibre canard to balance out the aero-effect of the huge wing, and later on a colossal fibreglass diffuser, originally destined for an RX7, found its way under the rear bumper, continuing the trend.
Beneath the skin, the old Raceland coils were replaced by some shiny HSD units (a quite phenomenal improvement, by the way), followed by a 1.8 version of Spec’s 2+ hybrid clutch being dropped into the bell housing, sending drive back to a Torsen Type II limited slip differential. Finally a far less restrictive, single silencer exhaust got welded on, culminating in an immensely rowdy 4.5in slash cut tailpipe.
Then a particularly angry piece of road, just outside of Chippenham, decided to stop play by chomping a great big hole in my sump. The little bugger.
Still, undeterred, I used this as an excuse to keep the car in the garage, emerging a couple of weeks later hiding a little metal snail under the bonnet. I had been gathering parts for the install over the previous year, including (among other things) a TD-04 turbo, GReddy manifold and downpipe, a big ol’ front-mounted intercooler, and a little white box with ‘Megasquirt’ engraved in the top. Having spent many, many hours with my head buried in the internet, ingesting several million megabytes of information on the subject, getting everything on the car and playing nicely together went without too much drama. The power delivered by the super-spooler just brought the car to life, the chassis seeming to wake up from an 18-year slumber, relishing the chance to finally show what it was capable of.
I lifted the ride height again (the whole sump-popping saga was not something I wished to repeat in a hurry) and hooned about for a while without too much changing. Then I got a phone call from my bank manager, informing me that I absolutely had to ease up on my addiction to super unleaded. Although I did love the utter stupidity of taking what was essentially a racecar to the supermarket every weekend, it was starting to become a little restrictive. So in October 2011, I road-tripped up to Bradford, and laid claim to my new daily bus. A VW Polo TDi Estate. Oh yes, if it was practicality I craved, I’d absolutely nailed it. This meant that its smaller, lairier, Japanese cousin could be tucked up over winter, waiting patiently for the arrival of some sexy new parts.
First on the list were the wheels. I was never overly fond of the Rota’s previously gracing each corner, so they had to go. The story behind their replacements is an interesting one in itself, and I’ll give you the heavily abridged version. I had seen them advertised online and fallen in love with them again. I say again as a friend of mine had owned, what transpired to be this exact set, many moons previous. Anyway, the current owner wasn’t very clued up on them and I really needed to know offsets. Several messages were exchanged without any solid answers, so I decided to stop messing about, armed myself with a ruler, and drove up to have a look. Minus Nineteen. Oh dear, they were never going to fit. But I bought them anyway.
This left me in a bit of a predicament. I calculated that each corner was going to require at least 40mm more girth in order to run my desired 215/45 tyres all round. This meant one thing. Well, four things actually. Over-fenders. After considerable deliberation, I settled on a set of GT rears and N2 fronts from American company Autokonexion. The shipping and import costs were pretty crippling, but as soon as they landed on my doorstep, I knew I had made the right decision.
The two months that followed saw a pretty extensive transformation occur inside the three-by-five metre concrete box hanging off the back of my house. Many sparks were thrown as angle grinders, dremels and high-speed steel drill bits fought their own little battles with various bits of car. The result was an interior which housed little more than a couple of composite Corbeau stool’s, barely wide enough for two malnourished infants. Outside, the huge wing had been replaced by an even huger, wingier, Japspeed item, the RX-7 diffuser had made way for a preposterous custom aluminium number, nestling below a large centre-exit exhaust. The front-end had spawned an ankle-worrying splitter-cum-undertray, an outlandish Bomex bonnet vent and a pair of canards so vast, they make Wolverine’s sideburns look feeble.
A few additional touches like the Feed skirts, kit-car wing mirrors, vented front wings, and plethora of braces, catches and fixings, all conform to the same concept; a concept where function certainly precedes, but also intensifies, the overall form. To recite a previous phrase, I had created a car that drives really well and happens to look awesome. Really awesome.
To make use of all the extra aero it would have been rude not to enlist a little more shove from the modest 1.6-litre lump. A 2.5in turbo-back exhaust was fabricated, giving the blower substantially more breathing space, and a quartet of 460cc squirters ensured the setup could enlist as much go-go-juice as it desired. The final piece of the puzzle required a trip up to Telford to meet Dale at Bailey Performance, who, after copious fiddling with his laptop and the loud pedal, managed to guide 240 raging stallions and 215lb of twist down to the rear wheels. Great success.
So we started at the start, but are we ending at the end? Truth be told, I’m not too sure. As you may have gathered from the previous paragraphs, I get as much pleasure from building cars, and trying new things, as I do from piloting them down a B-road or around a circuit. However, there is only so far you can take something before you reach that point where you really do need to stick the anchors on, stand back, and think seriously about where it’s going to end.
Right now I’m enjoying driving the thing, revelling in the outcome of three-years hard graft. However, my fingers are already itching, my imagination slowly brewing new and even more ridiculous ideas. Of course there are small details I want to tweak and tidy up but, in the long term, it is either keep it and shoot for 300+ horsepower, or perhaps think about writing a for sale advert and moving onto pastures new – although space-framing the chassis and dropping it over RB25 running gear is becoming increasingly tempting…
Either way, this may or may not be the last you see of my MX-5, but I’d hazard a guess that it won’t be the last you hear of me. I like building my cars, my way, and it seems, inadvertently, I happen to cause quite a stir whilst doing so, dividing opinion like that well-known brand of sandwich spread. And I don’t intend on changing any time soon!
Wreckless Abandon 