12 months happy driving in Mk 3.75 Tech Sport; basic power upgrade (De-cat Manifold, “nice” exhaust, better air filter and simple re-map) car going just the way I like but a tad sloppy on B-road corners.
Others insist it must be full set of proppa dampers. MeisterRs generally recommended but at £750 plus fitting, that’s way beyond this autumn’s toy-shop budget
I’d really like to hear from anyone with experience of ONLY upgrading ARBs without any other suspension of shock-absorber changes - is this a worthwhile mod for gently enthusiastic raod use?
I am an enthusiastic road driver. I have taken several advanced driving courses and I like to drive… a lot!
I bought some RX8 ARBs (Orange dot) from a scrap dealer for £50 inc P&P and four new standard drop links for £25 and had them fitted last week. There have been no other modifications to the suspension and handling of the car, except for a K&N replacement panel air filter. The ARBs and droplinks cost about £100 to have fitted. Doing this has modified the car in a very interesting way. It now takes bends and corners much flatter with less effort to balance the car and if i’m not careful, much faster too but i’m cautious enough to not get carried away with outright speed over quality and pace.
Now here’s the thing. The MX5 is a great car in standard form. Most drivers are not great drivers in standard form. Most not great drivers of MX5s will look at the mods other not great drivers of MX5s have done and they are then lead to believe that they should do the same thing, because it makes the car ‘better’. It doesn’t. What makes the car better is most often the driver! So instead of lowering, stiffening, hardening, speeding up, making it louder, why not invest in some professional coaching from an expensive driving coach, because by the time you’ve spent a small wad on bits for the car, you’re still the same driver. Cars don’t make drivers better drivers!
However, I found that the amount of body roll in my standard Mk3 2.0 Sport was a tad excessive/soft/wallowy for my tastes and so I changed the ARBs. Last week, I also bought some Eibach Pro -30mm springs (blue) that are also sold by Mazdaspeed as OEM upgrades. I’m now going to resell them for what I paid for them because I don’t want to lower the car since upgrading the ARBs.
What I might do, is buy some new dampers/shocks. Nothing like the Meisters but exactly like the Bilsteins that are already on the car, as those still on my car and have been there since 2007 and probably need changing.
So if you’re asking me, consider looking at changing the shocks for OEM shocks and possibly upgrading the ARBs but don’t get drawn into spending huge sums of money on brightly coloured parts, because more than anything else, it’s probably how you drive that requires the most attention, not what you drive. If you don’t know how to corner properly, stiffening the ARBs will probably cause you to take corners faster and that’s not good. Learning how to properly balance your car is good. Do that before you do anything to your MX5 because knowledge lasts forever, cars will be bought and sold.
You can change the ARBs they will help if you like driving at 7/10 if you like to push on you will need Meisters or similar.
On my previous car I tried the lowering springs & RX8 arbs, four years ago, within six months I had a set of Meisters fitted.
My latest car I went in another direction, instead of ARBs I just upped the spring rates on the coilovers & now have a supple ride on soft & Tarmac terrorist if needed by upping the damper setting.
you don’t want to fit upgraded Mazda parts that cost a fraction of non Mazda parts to your car and you don’t want to understand what effect doing so will have on the way your car will handle?
On the contrary, I want parts designed specifically for my car and definite feed-back from other people who have used them
I respect what you have done and why; I’d prefer to spend a little more on new material and do the installation myself
Still waiting for that feed-back though
Having just recently imported a 1989 Mk1 with uprated ARB front and rear complete with rose jointed droplinks all round.
My other Mk1 has Meisters fitted and for enthuiastic road use I really do like the way you could adjust the settings 0 - 32 with just a knurled thumb screw on the top mounting.
The new import has Tein coilovers and along with the uprated arb’s I found it just not as comfortable and compliant as the Meisters on the other Mk1, so I swapped the Meisters onto the new import and instantly felt a difference but more importantly the settings on the Meisters had to be knocked back a couple of clicks to maintain the comfortable ride, so yes the uprated arb’s along with the droplinks will make a difference, but I do also think if you want to go a step further good fully adjustable shock absorbers go hand in hand.
What do you expect to gain from fitting expensive, after market ARBs instead of ex RX8 ARBs, which are often the same thing, to your car? Apart from the difference in colour of the more expensive ARBs?
Fair question: simply the comfort of knowing that new parts will be fit-for-purpose and no risk of stress damage or weakness which I could not recognise in a pre-used part.
There are varieties of RX8 ARBs depending on the model and BHP , the U.S. tell us a mix of two types from different models works best on the MX5. So if you can decipher the coloured dots on a rusty tube of metal , good luck to you.
Personally I prefer not to take pot luck and am happy to pay for something designed for the car and indeed in some cases offers some adjustability. I chose the RBs ARBs because of there quoted stiffness over stock and their adjustability
Seems like you are not getting the answers that you wanted so…
My current NC3 has the aluminium IL Motorsport ARBs front and rear along with four IL motorsport drop links from MX5 parts, we took that route to cut the initial roll on turn in that seemed quite severe. The ride height is slightly lower than a standard NC1 and is very competent at soaking up bumps, it still rolls a long way but it feels more stable on the initial pitch.
My previous NC1 was lowered 30mm on Eibach/Bilstein combination, very flat and no roll bar changes needed for fast road driving. Due to the drop I scraped the bottom a few times and decided that if a drop was not required on the NC3 I would not bother just for cosmetics as it does not look as 4x4 as the earlier car.
There is a lot of information on miata.net about ARB’s, including the three RX8 type bars, it is a cheaper option and popular in the autoX community, if you want something specifically designed for the MX5 then I would happily recommend the IL motorsport bars as a mid budget option. I had not expected the difference to be so noticeable and was pleasantly surprised.
Currently they are about £200 less Rally discount.
They were relatively easy to fit, look on line for the method of fitting the front without removing the radiator etc.
Fitted myself at an eastern region tech day, Roadster Robbie was impressed with the feed it in method. I cannot remember which forum I found the instructions on but it was quite easy, about 40 minutes for the front and 10 for the rear, did have to grind a nut off one droplink though, car only had a couple of thousand on it but the nut was solid.
MX5 parts usually offer at least a 10% discount at the National and Spring rallies, plus free shipping.
Recently bought a Mk3 (standard height - up on tiptoe !) after Mk1 and Mk2’s, first suspension mod was RX8 ARB’s and new drop links, made a considerable difference now gives much more confidence when cornering, so after getting used to it will be up to WIM for Eibach 30mm springs and proper IL Motorsport ARB’s, go for it , rgds, PH.