Nah mate, they're a good engine as long as you keep up maintenance and manage to avoid over-revving it.

I'll give it a once over and I'll set your tappets and clean your throttle butterfly.

 

Good to hear, and thanks for the offer.

Valve clearances were set recently but I don't know what the throttle butterfly looks like, will have to whip the filter off and have a peep.

Will I want a catch can?

 

what about your gear box temp?

 

One to look into, I'm fairly ignorant as to what sort of temps the gearbox oil reaches.

If it's something to monitor then I'll look into it further, I use much smaller diameter tyres and have a 4.3:1 FD so tend to work the box hard and keep the revs high for the duration of the track session.

 

Don't worry about the gearbox oil temp. Again, it'll be fine

 

If you slightly overfill the oil and don't have a baffled sump, under heavy cornering loads, the exhaust will smoke. This however never seemed problematic and just a feature. This was on right-handers only (or it might have been left, but the point is it's in one direction only)

 

Right-handers. McLeans at Donington being the worst culprit.

I managed 1:53s round Cadwell in my pretty much standard S2000 on road tyres and I'm a very average driver. An Mx-5 with that sort of power and weight and a decent driver will be very rapid!