Flyin' Miata : Superfour Challenge 2005

Some might recall that Flyin' Miata attended the Car and Driver "Supertuner Challenge" a couple of years ago. You can read some of the stories about it. Well, we've been invited back. As before, we're the only Miata tuner attending. The event has been renamed the "Superfour" challenge due to the number of cylinders required.

Last time, we didn't do as well as we wanted. We built a fast street Miata and then stumbled into an event full of more hard-core machinery. Oops. To make matters worse, the car was sick from having aluminum oxide in the oil - not a good idea. Still, we drove the car to California and back for the event and had a good time.

We thought about bringing Elvis back again, but there were a couple of problems with that. One is that our Elvis is the fat Elvis. The car is fairly heavy. The slippery leather seats didn't help our driver stay in place. And the retail of the car was $26,000, giving us a disadvantage on price right off the bat. This year, we've decided to give our Mazdaspeed MX-5 a personality change and bring it instead. The FM Speed, as we call it, has nice grippy seats and a solid chassis. Even better, we paid around $20,500 for it. So it got the nod to attend.

This time around, we're building a slightly different car. We're still going to drive it to the event (1500 miles each way to Michigan), but it's going to be a little more athletic. The required speed has been raised to 140 mph and we know that the competition will have taken a step forward. It's unlikely we'll win the whole thing, but we expect to again have the only car driven any distance to get to the event.

The buildup.
Event photos (updated June 28, 2005)
Results

Car specification (updated June 27, 2005)