Ricky_Flowers_

It should put the car in the 2:25 range. Impressive, but imagine what that car would do with a real engine under the hood.

teamking

I'm sure you are being facetious by saying it's not a "real" engine, but the new lump is pretty impressive. In a car that does 0-60 one tick slower than my AP1, I got 35MPG when driving my brand new Miata home to Virginia from Cleveland, with the a/c on the whole way since it was raining (I probably would have gotten 28 or 29 in my AP1 in similar circumstances). Now granted, this is the R&C forum, but the efficiency of the whole package and lack of compromise provided by direct injection, atkinson cycle, and 14:1 compression are impressive. I'm not sure how far away Mazda is from putting spark controlled compression ignition in the Miatas, and it will be very interesting to see how that affects performance, but Mazda is making some very "real" progress in terms of what a normally aspirated 4-banger can do, IMHO.

Ricky_Flowers_

100% being facetious. It's a fine motor, and works really well in that car, but (bloviating, passionate, dumb opinion incoming!) it'll never hold a candle to the lump in an S2000, to me, from a purely subjective standpoint. It doesn't have the sound or the visceral feel of an F20/22, or even a K. This is a purely subjective opinion, and I don't expect everyone to agree with me.

From the standpoint of performance, the older car makes more power out of the box, but more importantly has the potential to make much more power than the motor in the ND by a pretty large margin. The ND engine is effectively crippled by its fueling system, and I'd hazard a guess the head doesn't move as much air as an F head would. That's my main gripe with that car. It's hard to justify spending over $30k on a car that effectively has a horsepower cap that's less than what a stock AP2 makes out of the box. It's a real shame, because the ND is better in almost every other way, apart from subjective stuff like styling. Not a bad car, and objectively a QUICK car, but.... meh.

Sorry, got caught rambling haha.

teamking

Yeah, you make some good points. I have missed 9K RPM ever since I sold my AP1. It was visceral. The AP2, particularly in STR form, was faster than the AP1, but I still missed winding up the engine all the way.

Now it will be a different story in the ND2. I'm hoping I fall in love with it the same way. I told the guy that bought my AP2 that the ND feels like a toy, the AP2 feels like a weapon.

But, that toy with a lesser engine has been doing pretty well in autocross. That will go a long way toward winning my heart!

BoboTheMonkey

Now that they are moving on from the old cup car, we can get the old ones on the cheap right? RIGHT????

cracknut

Makes sense. The old MX5 cup cars should start showing up in 2019.

Ricky_Flowers_

I don't know about CHEAP haha. Give it a few more years.