Hi all! For anyone who does not know we are AK Automotive, the mx5 specialists. we are located in the North East near Newcastle Upon Tyne. website http://www.akautomotive-mx5.co.uk/ and facebook here. We are very well known over on MX5Nutz and thought it was about time we spent more time over on the Owner Club aswell.
So here is the story of one of our race cars.
I am not much of a writer so please bare with me 
For the last couple of years we have been competing in the NSSCC (northern saloon and sports car championship) with our turbo mx5 and we also run a car in the MA5DA driven by Alan Henderson who came 4th in the 2011 championship. The MA5DA car is bound by many championship rules and must remain a pretty standard 1.6 mx5 where as the turbo car is free to almost any modifications as long as they comply with the MSA “blue book”. The only other limiting factor is the class you choose to run in and in our case that would be class B. Briefly the rules for our class are over 2000cc (70% increase for forced induction), treaded tyres and no aerodynamic additions over the hub centre lines, pretty much anything else goes!
So here goes… a couple of years ago we bought a 1.6 mx5 with a Greddy turbo kit installed with the intention of using it as a cheap track day car. After a couple of trackdays and already having a karting background that was it, we were hooked! We started looking around for a championship that met our needs and the NSSCC stood out as a winner to us with the rules being very open and the home track being close. That was it, the build began…
We started out by stripping the car completely and having a custom roll cage built that would allow the addition of a hardtop. The car was then fully seam welded to further add rigidity and the initial diet started with every bit of useless material being removed.
More assembly with the beginnings of the dash and the fitting of the seat.
At this point the car was still supposed to be cheap race fun but we decided to ditch the Greddy kit and e-manage blue in favour of a Flyin Miata manifold and a Garrett GT2860r with a FM Link ECU. Not the most desirable setup but it did the trick. We rebuilt the standard bottom end and added a set of H-beam rods for some strength and reliability and ported and polished the head for a little extra flow. When we got it to the dyno it mad a respectable 247bhp at around 23psi.
The first years finished engine bay
As for the brakes we decided to go with a VT Sport setup including master cylinder with a driver operated bias adjuster for the rears. This turned out to be a brilliant decision and when used with EBC Yellow pads and a bit of fine tuning the stopping force was something to be reckoned with. We have since tried a couple of different setups but nothing compared to this for both pedal feel and performance. We still run this setup to this day.
The suspension is a set of gaz gold pros with various diffident spring rates. For the money this is an unbeatable setup and something that we may upgrade in the future but for now they seem to be working great. We originally fitted a set of polly bushes and initially they seemed to work well but required regular maintenance to stop the bushes binding to the crush tubes and creating all sorts of handling problems.
some pictures of the car last year…
During a race at Knockhill I stupidly hung on to the clutch a bit too much on the uphill start and it ended up slipping in the later parts of both races. We decided on a twin plate 3 puck clutch and a super light flywheel from 949 racing. It is rated to 600ft-lb so should be future proof. Operation is not bad considering but it really does rev like a motorbike! We had also been having a few temperature problems so some vents were added to the bonnet.
mock-up bonnet
the finished vents
That was about it for that first year. There are loads of milestones in development I have missed here but if there is anything you would like to know about the car or build please ask on here. I will do an update shortly of what we have done over the winter ready for this years racing season.
I never read the build thread on Nutz, but that’s a very cool car!
