I know of one lad who has had the 200 conversion carried out and he is delighted with the car, transformed from the standard 158bhp. I’ve e mailed him re this post so hopefully he will be along and give an objective view.
Cost cost cost!!! The thing is, if you want good reliable bhp then you will have to pay the bucks, slapping on some aftermarket cold air intake and a ‘custom’ built exhaust system built out of a parts bin just doesn’t cut it and in the main will be likely to increase noise and reduce power and torque.
What people fail to take into account is the actual cost of R&D to even get the prototypes on the table, then there is manufacturing costs, marketing costs and of course if you can’t do the installation yourself, you want to find a reliable source who can install to a high standard, one that won’t give you issues a few hundred miles down the road.
I purchased the BBR supercharger kit, manifold and full exhaust system for my 2011 Sport Black and installed it at home in April 2013. I did hit a few snags along the way but these were more associated with my unfamiliarity with the kit and the MZR engine itself, a number of calls to BBR during the installation process were extremely helpful and we quickly got past the minor snags. The car started first turn of the key, the ECU was duly re-programmed, a number of logs taken and sent back to BBR for analysis to ensure that the car was doing as it should, it was.
Since then I have racked up some 12,000 trouble free miles including 4000 miles in France in September this year, the car was a dream to drive and returned an average of 37mpg, peaking at 44mpg on one stint, quite remarkable considering it wasn’t being driven ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ style and was fully laden most of the time.
Whilst the above may not be of any direct use in relation to the 200 conversion, it is simply posted to demonstrate that BBR produce a very well developed and refined product. Again I hear ‘but what about the cost?’ and yes, that’s a valid point it was a very expensive conversion even doing the installation myself - but and it is a big but, I now have an MX5 that produces some 260bhp, that’s 100bhp over stock, the performance is blistering and shames many more exotic cars. This is something that will never be achieved by purchasing a number of disparate bolt on components and trying to get this level of performance for a few hundred quid.
Tuning to these levels is an expensive game, end of!! If you want the performance then you simply have to pay the going rates, there are no shortcuts that will give consistent and reliable results. The key phrase here is value for money. I certainly shall never be spending this amount of cash on tuning a car again, it was a one of and a result of having been retired due to ill health, I’m still a relatively young man and whilst my employers may well have considered my health issues such that they no longer required my services, there is nothing woring with the grey matter and it still needs stimulated, the physical aspects, well, the beauty of beeing forced ito retirement is that there is never any rush to finish things, I can pace as my physical imparements allow.
As a retired Engineer and latterly Procurement Officer, I have seen people attempt to take shortcuts on projects, save £150k here on a project and it looks great when the project is complete and comes in under budget. However, when it breaks down two weeks after it has been commissioned and costs the business £1m or more in lost revenue while repairs or a redesign is implemented, it suddenly doesn’t look so clever, the project Engineer suddely goes from hero to zero.