I thought the Sport Recaro came out in 2014 it was only made in four colours the silver being aluminium silver because I was looking at buying on when I purchased my Sport Venture which came out the same year just before the 25th Anniversary .
interesting one? It is a 3.75 bumper on a 3.5 car by the looks of it. The last facelift was 2013-2015, so the car they have, being a 2012 model, is a 3.5 I presume? The drivers seat has plenty of wear on it too, more than its 45k miles would suggest to me? Nothing wrong with " upgrading" a car though and it wouldn’t have been a cheap alteration to do. Depends if originality is what you’re after?
Whoever owned it spent some serious money on cosmetic upgrades. Wonder if they picked up the parts off a written off Recaro Edition? As it even has the low rise instrument cluster cover that was only ever on the recaros and sport graphite models in the uk. A part that Mazda uk don’t sell.
ideally you would want to speak to the previous owner. We managed to do that with both our previous 5’s but then the dealer knew the previous owners well. Always worth asking…
To me this looks more like a labour of love than a ringed car made to look good. 3.5 to 3.75 front end, recaro seats won’t have been cheap, rare instrument cover. If you were just trying to turn a car round to make a quick buck then these won’t have been the cheap conversions I would have gone for. Have they even gone to the trouble of changing the roof panels? Sport techs didn’t come with a black roof option…
As for mot clearly it would be labelled as multi coloured. How do you know that the seats that it’s referring to weren’t the previous ones that have been swapped out for the recaros? Whilst the recaro seats do look a little worn. Alacantra never wears well and always shows marks due to the fabric pile. As for the wear on the bolster is it really noticeable? On the video it Looks like the leather is quite shiny on both passenger and drivers seats. Could be just bright light as all the leather looks shiny. I don’t see anything that would lead to a note saying seat needs repairing. Then again I did have a letter the other day from spec savers saying I’m due for an eye test…
Looks like this car was one of three press cars supplied by Jota as the GT, but they’ve taken the good bits off. Might be worth poking around to see what actually does remain:
The orange Jotas were all clearly NC2s, but Autocar et al had cars that had all the look of the NC3. Personally, rather than being an incredibly early NC3 supplied to Jota by Mazda, this is probably a NC2 converted expensively to a NC3 appearance, to entice new NC3 owners to get a conversion. The Jota GT were supplied by a single dealer only (Lodge Mazda in Aylesbury).
You can either look as a potentially historic car (but then you have to find the missing bits to Jota XP6), a well worn press hack (despite the low miles, probably a fair few on the track), or an interesting footnote (I don’t know of anyone on the forum who actually shelled out for a Jota). It might have the original engine still, or someone has replaced it when returning the car to stock. Having said that, the car above that was tested was reported to have a different exhaust (now clearly removed), different intake (is it still there?) and ECU remap (did the set it back to standard?). I have a feeling the intake was nothing more than a change in filter, not the throttle bodies on the orange cars.
Car magazine reported that the very car was a MX-5 Roadster Coupe 2.0 Sport Tech, and was on Ohlins shocks (crawl under the car, and look at the shocks
[quote=saz9961]
Looks like this car was one of three press cars supplied by Jota as the GT, but they’ve taken the good bits off. Might be worth poking around to see what actually does remain:
That’s why I love forums so much!!! Thanks for enlightening me and others. Now rather excited to go and see it and figure out whats left on it!
