I’m looking for technical help or recommendations on: __Handling / suspension
Apologies, this might be a long post.
We now have the car looking and sounding as good as we can within our budget.
Steering has also been improved by Paul at Roddisons with a geometry change.
But something is still bugging me. This is our first MX5, and I was expecting the handling / road holding to be better (comfort is fine).
So either my expectations were too high, or something needs sorting (75,000 miles, v little recent history).
The best way I can explain is when driving on uneven surfaces, the imperfections make their way back to the steering wheel in a slight knocking motion. I know it’s not electric assisted so will feel different to modern car setups.
It just doesn’t inspire confidence when trying to plot an accurate line. A bit vague / inaccurate is perhaps the best I can describe.
Before it gets booked into Roddisons, does anyone have an idea what could help?
Thanks for reading,
Matt
To be honest opinions on here without someone actually driving the car would be pointless. Leave it to Paul, if there is something wrong he will find it and, if it’s fixable, fix it!
To me it just sounds like typical road feedback in the steering wheel, the cars have a very short wheelbase and is very light so a little bit of feedback in the wheel is expected, I experience the same in my NC. As Countryboy said though, if something is dodgy it’s hard to tell without driving!
What year is the car? Standard ride height? What tyres?
My 2013 with bilstein sport suspension used to skip on uneven corners even though it was a low mileage car with little suspension wear. The original ride height probably didn’t help.
345mm with Meisters and a Roddo alignment were a massive improvement. There is a trade off when aligning between stability and turn in and it may be the car is a little too pointy.
Not sure how old your suspension is. My 70k miles 2008 NC was on the original sport Bilsteins that we fine for MOT purposes but passed their best for handling. If your car doesn’t have the (yellow) Bilsteins I would imagine they would be worse than the Bilsteins (were not reputed to handle as well when new, so age is unlikely to have narrowed the gap).
If the springs are fine and you are happy with the ride height your cheapest option to address worn shocks (if that is part of the problem) is with aftermarket OEM equivalent replacements. Sachs, KYB, etc all have shocks around the £90 or less mark. Might just be two new rear units is enough. May be sensible to replace all four at once.
If you want to go beyond OEM replacement standards, you have a choice of options from about £500 upwards.
Before splashing money on it, if you are not sure, you need to get someone with experience to assess.
The other thought I had was if you are coming to an old rear wheel drive mx5 from a front wheel drive hot hatch, then they are very different to drive and may not be as sharp/nimble/easy to drive fast as the hatch. But stick with it and they become more rewarding as your experience grows.
Thanks.
Definitely not yellow Bilsteins. Labelled Mazda but unsure if originals or replacements.
Agree with you re getting used to RWD. All my cars have been FWD apart from a brief affair with a Porsche 944 Turbo back in 2003, and it does take some time to adjust.
They could be past their best though, so I’ll ask Paul at Roddys for his opinion when it goes in for a full fluids service.
Going back a ways, I recollect that the NC was demonstrated on its ability to be chucked around the tight turns of a kart track.
I’ve often felt that if they’s demonstrated it on typical UK A and B roads then the suspension might have been better set up for the bumps!
Settles down at about 75 though, but you can’t normally go that fast.
IMHO (and expecting bad feedback here) there’s something basically wrong with a modern car that behaves this way even when carefully aligned, and is so sensitive to tyres.
Only had mine for 10 years and 95k though, so maybe I need to get used to it more …
Mine came out of lockdown with the same symptoms, the steering was horrible. Turned out some numpty had used copper grease on the brake slider pins meaning they didn’t slide anymore partially seizing the brakes on. New calipers, pads, discs & hubs & now all great again.