Ohen The Barra-swapped MX-5 is already our fastest and fastest car. Massacre Fleet, capable of low nines and close to 150 mph!
The nines aren’t good enough for the Scotty though, so now we’re looking for eights with the little Mazda. Scotty recently replaced the stock bottom-end, LPG-spec barra with upgraded rods and pistons, as we had reached the limits of the factory Ford internals.
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Once we took this engine for a spin on the dyno, we found that the old turbo was the new limiting factor, so this episode corrects that with a brand new Pulsar G42 1450. That ‘1450’ stands for 1450hp, and when you see it in the Little Mazda’s engine bay, you can believe it!
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Because we’re the only people crazy enough to put one of Ford’s monster mills into an MX-5, finding an exhaust manifold that fits its specific engine bay is really a no-brainer. We previously ran Stockford Ones with our little low-mount turbos, but this time we had to switch to high-mounts, so we commissioned the guys at Max Performance to build us a custom stempipe manifold to fit the car. , as well as a new dump pipe.
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Another upgrade needed that Scotty ticked off the list was the sump. The MX-5 Territory uses a front sump, so during hard launches, the rear of the engine had issues with oil leaking and pulling away from the pickup.
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To fix this, Scotty upgraded the steel pan with a Russell oil pan. They surprised him and reduced the overall height of the pan as well as increased the ability on both sides, as we also found that the car was touching the ground a bit when coming down from a hard launch. .
The final upgrade in the Eight’s pursuit was some fresh engine management from Haltec. Until now, we were running a twelve turbo ECU, which worked, but had its drawbacks at this level.
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We wanted things like two steps and more tunability, so Bill Hooton from Hooton’s Harnesses built a patch loom for the Elite 2500 ECU and the guys at Maxx installed it neatly in the dashboard under the passenger side airbag cover. .
In the next episode, you’ll see the new package impress the dyno with some truly impressive results, before Scotty hunts down the eight at the Ford Powered Nationals at Heathcote.