Supercharged mx5 built for Welsh roads

[W17GLE]

Hi everybody

I've owned this car for about three years now and it's sole purpose has always been for weekend drives to Wales. It all started off with a road trip down to Oxford area to pick up a fairly standard mx5 but with the addition of a Jackson racing mp45 supercharger kit and a megasquirt ms2 diypnp ecu. The car had just been serviced, had a new cam belt and water pump. The body work was fairly good but on the test drive there was spluttering around the 4.5k mark and it didn't want to start very well. Most sensible people would of walked away and left it but I bought it anyway and put it down to a mapping issue.

This is one of the first pics of the car which shows the bad start I got off too



The problem I was having was that we could not get a laptop to connect to the megasquirt ecu to start trying to solve the running issue. I got help from a few members of the mx5 nuts forum that knew about the megasquirt ecu's but even they couldn't get it to connect to a laptop. Me and my dad ended up pulling the ecu apart. Nothing on the boards looked faulty so we just cleaned the serial port connected with electrical cleaner.

Here the ecu in bits and being tested



Cleaning the serial port worked but being a newbie at tuning I made a school boy error. I thought seen as it was now connected that I'd update the firmware not realising that this would wipe all the settings. I now had a car that wouldn't run at all. The car sat in my back yard for ten months till I finally gave up and sent it to a company to be sorted.

Here's the car sat on the lowloader being sent off to be sorted



After a couple of weeks at the tuning company and a lot of money I got my car back for twenty minutes and then it blew one of the main coolant hoses so back it went to get a full set of new hoses fitted.

It's not the best of pics but you can just about make out some of the silicone hoses. I've always regretted the blue hoses you'll see why later.



The car finally came back running which was a bonus and with 140bhp at the hubs which I was told equates to about 180bhp fly. Either way it goes alright but it never idled right. I just put up with the rubbish idle for a couple of years and started buying goodies for the car and driving it. Here's some of the goodies in no particular order

Bc br coilovers



Wilwood four pots with 280 mm disks and ferrodo ds2500 pads for the front with hel brake lines, spacers for the new rear callipers so I could run 276mm disks



Red leather cobra Suzuka bucket seats and Luke 5 point harnesses




As you can see in the pic above I went for the competition clutches stage 4 paddle clutch and I also went for the lovely competion clutches ultra lightweight flywheel



When we fitted the brakes we ran into issues of the wheels not clearing the calliper so I ended up getting team dynamic prorace 1.2 with nankang nsr2 tyres



I had a my first track earlier this year so got a tr lane gpv rollbar



I didn't really like the trackday and with whole intention of the car being a road trip car any I decided to fit a nice stereo as I love my music. I tried to keep it light but sounding nice so I fitted focal k2p component, jl audio 500/5 amp and a jl audio 8inch micro sub which hardly weighs a thing.




A few other bits were fitted like a genuine Mazda hardtop, oem splitter and a milltek exhaust which takes me upto recently and how the car stands now







Recently I've really got into the megasquirt tuning as I'm off to Austria to worthersee for ten days so I needed it running perfectly. I finally after a couple of years found out what was causing the idle issue it turns out that it was three odd cells in the ignition timing table causing all the problems.



I smoothed out the idle area and set the timing advance right and it idles just fine now. I've been building a custom dash so I can monitor the car and also make changes to the map easily. This involves a netbook connected to the ecu at all times and a small lcd screen to display everything



I've loads of pics of the car on the many road trips it's done but for now I'll leave it at that

[W17GLE]

Thanks for the comments, the nankangs are great in the dry and they are wearing down surprisingly slowly. Mine are the 180 spec ones rather than the slightly softer 120. They do alright in the wet too obviously they are not as good as normal road tires but they are good enough that you can keep driving if it rains without them trying to kill you.

I need to programme the dash to warn me of any danger to the manifold

[W17GLE]

Here's some various pics from road trips in no particular order










And when it had it's silly red roof and bumper

Edited by W17GLE on Monday 22 December 15:42

[W17GLE]

This is the only other pic I could find of the engine bay I don't seem to have any. I'll try and get some more at the weekend when I'm up at the unit. I want to make a custom airbox for it as I hate the way the cone filter sits right next to the supercharger. It doesn't seem to affect the way it runs but the intake temps could definitely be lower



I love the way it drives with the supercharger it's really torquey down low and just keeps pulling all the way to redline. It means you can happily drive round country lanes at about 3k rpm and not have to be constantly red lining it to make progress. It actually makes it more relaxing to go quick. Its taken a good while to get here but it's actually my perfect weekend car now

[W17GLE]

I love the supercharger and the instant torque I'd not be as happy with a turbo. I'm used to driving diesels so mid range power and torque is what I like.

[W17GLE]

Well I've finally done the sills after putting it off for about two years, thankfully they weren't actually that bad when we cut in to them. Both sides have been done and now it's just a case of filling them with waxoil. I've painted them, they're not the prettiest but they are functional till I get back from my holiday in May. The cars off to Austria for ten days to do lots of alpine passes and then on to the Nurburgring. We are staying in worthersee.



I've got myself a mishimoto xline radiator and I had got an oem thermostat but I managed to drive over that before fitting it.



Me and my friends that are going to worthersee had a shakedown run round Wales the car seems great at the minute and I'm happy that the nankang ns2r's will be able to cope with wet weather after getting caught in torrential rain. I was going to change them to rain sport 3's for the trip but I'm not going to bother now. Here's the cars there's two mx5's an s2000, Impreza wrx and out of view an audi rs2



The car looked filthy after the run

[W17GLE]

RoadRunner220 said:

Ooooh, I know where that is, that's a cracking road leading to that lay-by, in fact all the roads round there are pretty great.

Nice car BTW.

It is a great road I've done it a few times before it's got a great variety of corners and surfaces to enjoy.

I've finally washed the car it's been sat in the unit filthy since the last drive

[W17GLE]

Medic-one said:

Nice!

Any idea how much bhp it's putting out with the supercharger now ?

When it was tuned on the hub dyno it was 144bhp at the hubs which I was told was around 185bhp at the fly. That seems about right for how quick it is. It's about the same pace as a Clio trophy

Edited by W17GLE on Monday 13th April 11:46

[W17GLE]

Medic-one said:

Excellent, that's good going.

I just got rid of a Clio 182 not long ago but am after something similar again (fun to drive, good handeling etc, just to through around on the local B-roads) but not another Clio.
This could be an interesting alternative...

Having had three 172's in the past I know how different the mx5 is to drive but if you get one with a similar power you'll have just as much fun as in the clio's if not more. The only thing that annoys me with the mx5 is that it seems to be invisible to other road users they just pull out in front of it and cut you up.

[W17GLE]

I'm hoping the car will be spending more time like this now the weather is picking up

[W17GLE]

Yesterday I fitted a set of super pro diff void fillers to try take up some of the slack in the driveline. A combination of twenty year old bushes and an agressive paddle clutch meant there was a lot of juddering pulling away from lights and when changing gear. These seem to have done a good job of removing some of this play. The engine mounts will be the next change. Over all I'm impressed and they were nice and easy to fit.

[W17GLE]

Here's some of my favourite images of the car from a recent trip through Holland, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Austria. The car performed faultlessly and was perfect for the trip

[W17GLE]

We went for 9 days and spent 5 of those days based at a couple of houses ten minutes away from worthersee in Austria. We did this so each day we could drive a great route and then in the evening we could go in to worthersee to see the cars that had turned up for the massive worthersee car show. I have no real idea where we went as one of the lads planned everything and I just drove what was planned. There was eight of us in total split into four cars. An audi rs2, Impreza wrx and a bmw 130i. The Impreza had a tracker so I can put the routes we did Each day below. I was really happy to get to drive the Nurburgring as it was a flying visit on the way back to the ferry and when we turned up it was closed due to a crash. Luckily it opened up with just enough time for me to do a lap. We did around 2800 miles which I thought would kill me off in the bucket seats and harnesses but it was surprising comfy. The car performed faultlessly the only time it really struggled was at very high altitude it could of done with a bit more power then other than that it kept up with the other cars easily.

Here's the routes that we took

[W17GLE]

Well since the road trip I've hardly used the car it's been tucked away in my unit but me and my friends are planning on doing ten days round Scotland so the preparations have started again. I've had a bit of a spending spree to address little areas that needed improving.

This is the little pile of goodies I've got so far. Windows tablet and mount to run the megasquirt, new hoses to replace the out of place blue ones, genuine mazda thermostat, silenced decat pipe, twin slimline fan setup. I've got a mocal thermostat controlled oil cooler coming tomorrow as the oil was getting too hot on spirited drives.



The cars really solid but it's being fully stripped down and under sealed to keep it that way along with a full respray it'll be like new when we've finished with it

[W17GLE]

Today has been a busy but very productive day I started with a pile of parts and slowly worked my way through them

Silenced decat pipe, this would of been a ten minute job if the last bolt hadn't rounded off and needed grinding off



Twin fan setup went on nice and easily



Thermostat and full coolant and ancillary hose set took a while



Jackson racing ht leads took a minute or two



Finally bad shot of my two red and black cars together

[W17GLE]

They are addictive little cars, it's getting a full respray soon its a never ending process