I had been on the look out for an early mk1 mx5 for a while, the reason being that I wanted to have a standard mx5 to go with my modified ones, and if I was to have a standard one it needed to be something a little special.
Well, one evening while looking on a well known auction site I stumbled across a red mk1 on an F plate, my thoughts were it was either a dvla mistake, or it was a really early car, either way it would have been an early G plate.
It wasn’t far from me so I contacted the owner, loaded up the trailer and headed over to have a look, when I got there the car looked OK, as is the case with the earlier cars it didn’t have much rust with only the outer sills needing work, and a look around the car confirmed it was an early car, I didn’t know how early at this stage, so a price was agreed and we loaded it onto the trailer and took it home.
Once I got it to the workshop I had a good look over it and confirmed it had all the early parts and differences, light weight sports crank engine, only one hole on the slam panel, no cooling fins on the diff, gloss black roof catches on both the soft top and hard top, no heated screen on the hard top, different seatbelt stalks, different shock/Spring top mounts.
I then started looking into how to read the chassis numbers to find out how early it is, and in my research I discovered that 2500 cars were made in the first month of production in April 1989, and this car is number 2331 meaning it was made in the first month of production.
I have since had number 2336 in the work shop and to my surprise it doesn’t have all of the early parts, which could mean that my car is one of the last to have all of those parts.
So what is my plan with the car, a light restoration keeping it as original as I can, the sills will have the outer skins repaired, full respray, and general clean up where required, oh and put some standard wheels back on it.