Autocrossing my 2016 Miata at a Detroit Region SCCA event.
I’m not too keen on tragedies in literature and media. The quintessential classic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, all about love, loss, and fate resulting in an dour ending is a text that I’m sure most American schoolchildren have studied relentlessly right around the time in childhood when idealistic dreams began withering on the vine, and as wonderful a piece of literature it may be, I will always resent it for the deep study of tragedy it planted in my young self.
There is enough tragedy in real life, I don’t need to dwell on more tragedy in my entertainment.
What does this have to do with Miatas? Well, not only did my 2016 ND Miata meet a tragic end, I’m pretty sure that the entire model will reach a tragic end as well. But let’s rewind a bit and start from the beginning.
The new hotness
After a disastrous 2015 season with my Street Touring Roadster (STR) prepared NC Mazda Miata, I was ready to move on to a new autocross class, preferably one where I couldn’t hang myself with terrible setup choices. That meant that Street class, an evolution of the old Stock class, was where I wanted to land with my new competition car.
Conveniently, Mazda had just released a brand new roadster, which meant that I could still have a dual purpose daily and competition car. The 2016 ND chassis Miata had just started arriving at dealerships in late 2015, and I rang up my local dealership to see if I could test drive the single example they had on their lot.
I was too late, as it was sold the day it arrived. Well, let me know when you get the next one in, I told the salesperson on the phone, as I’d really like to test drive one.
A couple of days pass, and my phone rings while I’m at work. It’s the dealership. I quickly excuse myself from work and head to a quiet, isolated hallway in the building, where I continue the conversation. A Soul Red Miata had just arrived at noon, and was I interested in taking a look at it? Hell yes, I was interested in taking a look at it!
After finishing work, I made a beeline to the Mazda dealership. There it was, sitting out front: a deep metallic Soul Red Miata, in the desirable Club trim with the limited slip differential and outfitted with the desirable but pricey Brembo Brake package and body kit.
I took it for a drive and immediately fell in love. The engine was super peppy, and the car felt unbelievably lithe. The seats were awesome, and the steering wheel fit perfectly in my hands. I had to buy it.
My ’09 Miata, next to its replacement, the ’16 Miata.
Surprisingly, despite the fact that Ford and Mazda had split up years ago, I was still eligible for Mazda S-Plan pricing as a Ford employee, and I ended up getting a small discount off the car.
My NC and ND Miata together at home before I sold the NC.
With the ND Miata in the fleet, I sold the NC Miata to my friend Shane in the Washington DR Region. If I didn’t end up with the 2nd ND Miata in the Detroit Metro area, I’m sure that it was one of the first dozen at least.
The first autocross outing
With just a few hundred miles on the odometer, I went back home to visit my folks and run the Miata with my old car club, the Champaign County Sports Car Club.
You may remember that I made a reputation for myself in the club for constantly spinning out and hitting cones in my NA Miata back when I was first learning how to drive a RWD car. What you may not know is that when I had my NC Miata, I had a habit of hitting cones that would then knock the side sill panels clean off the car, resulting in several replacement pieces and the substitution of some plastic clips with metal bolts. (So if you noticed that the STR car suddenly had silver side sills, that’s why!)
The ND out at its first autocross outing in 2015.
I was back to old form with my new ND Miata, hitting cones all over the place, spinning out a whole bunch, and knocking my side sill panel clean off the car. I’m willing to bet very good money that I was the very first autocrosser in the US to lose a side sill off his ND, ha!
I show clips from the video above to teach students at the Detroit Region SCCA Solo School what not to do.
So, what gives? I could provide the flimsy racer’s excuse that I went from a stiffly spring, flat cornering STR car to a softly sprung, roly poly C Street (CS) car, and that I didn’t adjust my driving style, but that’s hogwash. The truth was that all the mistakes that I’d make in the STR car, masked by the massive grip of 255mm wide tires on 9″ wide wheels, were unmasked when I found myself in a stock car with limited grip on its terrible 205mm wide tires on 7″ wide wheels.
Aside: if you’re watching the video above and not sure what’s going on, the key thing to understand is that performance driving isn’t about happy hands or happy feet or aggressive inputs, it’s all about weight transfer and tires. Much how learning how to juggle means learning how to throw, not just catch, or how learning how to dance means learning about frame and movement of your core, not just footwork, learning to drive fast means learning how and when to shift a car’s weight, not just aggressive driving. With such a softly sprung car, I’m simply too sudden with my inputs to smoothly shift weight to the axle that needed grip the most.
Losing the side sill. On the ND Miatas, the side sill slides on from the rear to the front, and there are no clips to keep it moving fore or aft. So if you clip a cone with the front wheel and the cone ends up at the back of the front wheel well, you will lose your side sill. Some autocrossers screw their side sills into the rockers to avoid losing them.
That said, in my defense, the blooper reel only shows all the epic failures I had that weekend. When you have six runs per day, you can take chances on at least five of them!
The tragic flaw: the transmission
I wasn’t the only one to pick up an early build ND. Plenty of my autocross friends picked up examples of their own, and we started the usual sharing of insights, setup notes, and issues right away.
It didn’t take long before we realized that broken transmissions were an endemic problem.
While there were definitely stories of street driven only cars breaking transmissions, it was far and away most common in the competition cars. The autocross cars were breaking in second, with the road race cars breaking in higher gears. The current consensus is that what breaks these transmissions is sudden torque loading, as one might do when rushing up the gears in a max acceleration run, or during rapid on-and-off throttle inputs in a single gear (the failures experienced by autocrossers and road racers).
This may be due to how the ND was designed. While the NC was marketed as following a “gram strategy,” it really didn’t — the paper rags would parrot the line that Mazda shaved ounces off the rear view mirror while missing the fact that it had a completely unnecessary 30 pound dual exit muffler for a 4-cylinder motor. But the ND definitely did everything possible to cut down on weight.
Which would explain the choice around the transmission. I don’t know enough to say what parts of the transmission were offered on the altar of Colin Chapman’s “simplify, then add lightness” religion, but I do know it’s weird, with sixth gear being 1:1 and the rear gear being an absurd 2.866.
There were plenty of stories of workarounds and Plan Bs. For example, one competitor allegedly bought a spare transmission, buckled it in the passenger seat, and took it to Spring Nationals in Lincoln, just in case a transmission swap was required at the event. Luckily for us racers, Mazda Motorsports was extremely helpful in expediting warranty transmission replacements.
How many revisions of the ND transmission do you think would be necessary to get to one that doesn’t break? We’re currently up to number five. So far, I have personally yet to see a V5 transmission break, but I don’t know if that’s because the cars that have V5 transmissions (ND1s that had their transmissions replaced under warranty and ND2s with the increase in power that come stock with the V5) may not have enough miles for the problem to surface or if the problem is actually resolved.
If you want an ND with a bulletproof transmission, there now exists a swap that allows you to bolt the 6-speed from an NC Miata into an ND Miata. You’d have to also swap out the rear gear for something that isn’t so tall.
Or you can buy the ND’s more reliable cousin, the Fiat 124 Spider, or as I like to call it, the Fiata. Fiatas come with the NC Miata’s 6-speed transmission and a reasonable rear gear already installed — you’ll just have to make do with Fiat’s 1.4L MultiAir turbo motor instead of Mazda’s SkyActiv 2.0L.
You know you’re in the mirror universe when you can say, with a straight face, that a Fiat may be the more reliable alternative.
By the 18k mile mark, the shift action in my own Miata was getting really notchy. It was only a matter of time before I would need a transmission replacement myself. I briefly considered letting all my friends codrive and do fun runs in the car at a local Solo event so I could time the transmission breakage for the end of the season, but unfortunately, I lost the car before winter came.
Tragic end for the Miata
As it turned out, 2016 was the year that I did an epic cross-country road trip with the ’66 Mustang, so I didn’t spend as much time as I had planned in National Solo competition. Not only that, I had purchased yet another competition car, and had been using that car instead most of the time.
One of my favorite pictures of the ND, outside the building I used to work at.
I was still happy to have the ND Miata around. It was a perfect daily driver with great fuel mileage and cheap insurance, and a bright spot to look forward to before and after work.
There is a relatively treacherous intersection outside the Ford engineering campus that is also a fun little sweeper corner. Most cars slow down for the turn, but in the Miata, you could cruise right around it at the speed limit.
I was heading home to cook myself some lunch, and the sweeper was on the route back home. As usual, I kept my speed constant as the road swept to the left. On the opposing traffic side was a car making a left turn against traffic into the entrance road for the Ford campus. Thinking he could turn in front of me before I was in the intersection, he gunned it and misjudged my closing speed. We had a full front impact collision, blowing out the airbags in both cars.
The tragic end for my ND Miata.
Thankfully, everyone was okay. The same couldn’t be said the for half dozen pizzas in the back seat of the other car that were supposed to be for a team lunch. Oops.
The cops came out and filed an accident report. Two tow trucks came and dragged the wrecks away. I walked the rest of the way back home, cooked myself some lunch, hopped in one of my other cars, and went back to work.
Another Miata in the future?
I could have simply replaced the wrecked Miata with another one, but I told myself that I’d buy an ND2 in the future, by which time I was sure that the transmission issues would be completely rectified. I now find myself in a position where I’m looking to buy another autocross car for Street class, and an ND2 Miata for CS would be the obvious answer, yet I can bring myself to pull the trigger and buy one.
Perhaps it’s because I’m still not yet convinced that any ND Miata will be able to go any serious distance without transmission issues.
I do wonder what will happen to the Miata as a car if that ends up being the case. Much like how we joke about how one of the regular maintenance items for any RX-8 is “replace the engine every 80k miles,” which has resulted in the prices of an otherwise amazing car to crater into the ground, I wonder if the transmission woes will doom the ND Miatas to a similar fate.
If that happens, it will be truly tragic. It’s the best looking, best handling, most powerful, and safest Miata ever built. It would be a shame if the ND Miata ends up being the end of the line for one of the most important sports cars in automotive history. I think it’s already happening; prices on used Miatas aren’t very strong, and new Miatas are barely moving off dealership lots. Can you justify building a new Miata when the current one is completely shunned by the market?
Still, I think about an ND2 from time to time. A local competitor and friend just bought himself a used ND2 Miata in Soul Red, a Club package car just like my old ND1 but without the Brembo Brakes and body kit. He had it up north the past few weekends at our Oscoda events, and I was all over his car.
It was a blast, he told me. He had driven a fully prepped CS ND2 Miata with a large front sway bar and super sticky tires, and that car was a lot less fun than his completely stock Miata with the stock small front sway bar and no-grip tires. I’m going sideways pretty much everywhere, he told me. It’s a hoot.
Just like my first foray with my ND.
Crazy about the transmission issues. I had a NA model which one poster qouted it as one of the most reliable cars ever made. It’s a sports car to…..
Sorry about the crash. I hope the other guy was charged. Very remindful for me of what happened with (to) my ’96 Cavalier.
I’m glad no one was hurt, but (and I apologize for the analogy) it seems reminiscent of the James Dean death crash. Some drivers simply don’t recognize small cars as being small so in a split second they misjudge distance. They think all vehicles are a normal size, so they’d think the Miata (or Dean’s Porsche) is larger but further away when starting their turn.
As John said, everyone else slows down in this curve, and PizzaGuy very likely factored that into his calculation – to his regret. I think we are all guilty of that from time to time. The one time when everything is *not* like it normally is is when we get in trouble, with our cars or with anything else.
For sure, speed is often a factor, pehaps the Miata was closer than it appeared and moving faster than expected. John gracefully admitted to speeding which suggests his actions contributed to the accident. I didn’t want to highlight OPs speeding alone. Pizza guy does have eyes and should drive defensively and anticipate errors on the part of others.
No, he didn’t “admit to speeding”, graciously or otherwise. In the article he noted that he could take the corner at the speed limit in his Miata.
I’ve long desired one of Ford’s horse vehicles. And a Miata. We don’t really need two 4x4s (my wife has a GX460) and the Mustang will only get me in trouble. The Miata is a fun car that you can drive hard and still stay in legal territory on Idaho backroads. And this is the best one yet. Tough choices ahead.
Not only did your poor Miata end up battered, it had to sit next to a third generation Seville.
Oh, and the important question: what did you cook for lunch? 🙂
I had been developing the impression that the magic seems to be gone from the N4, but this was just a general sense from seeing very few of them on the road. Miata-fever has to cool off some time, and this might be that time.
It is a shame that this one’s life got cut short before you had a chance to really explore it.
Regarding the video – that looks like a great autocross course. Fast and spacious. Some of the few I’ve driven have been so small and so tightly packed that it’s all too easy to loose your way around the cones. And that’s after walking the course several times before the driving begins.
“There is a relatively treacherous intersection outside the Ford engineering campus that is also a fun little sweeper corner.”
Rotunda & Village, I presume.
and that Soul Red is one helluva fine color. Ford’s “Rapid Red” (which I got for my Ranger) is also a tri-coat, but I think Mazda’s is more vivid.
The Saab 96 V4 was also known for a fragile transmission, and there wasn’t really a fix. I accepted it during the years I owned 96’s because I liked the car so much otherwise. One reason I finally got out of 96’s was a concern about how many of the critical parts were available on the planet. When I’d been out of 96’s for a few years I asked my former Saab mechanic what the situation was, and he said, “Getting desperate.” You might have run into this issue with your 96 sooner or later.
Watching the video, you were forcing the car to go at speeds which you were never going to make the transitions. Not trying to be a jerk about it, but you need to go slow to go fast.
Is your background a lot of video game driving/racing? Video game driving tends to encourage people to overdrive the track, by making overdriving much less catastrophic than it is in the real world.
Again, not to be a jerk. About 40 years ago, I overdrove horribly in the autocrosses, until an experienced driver drove me around on a fun run and showed me how to dial it back and go smoother.
It is all about dynamic weight transfer to and from the wheels and tires. Another option is to get one of those devices that measures your results dynamically in the friction circle, or performance circle, or whatever they call it. It is physically impossible to give the car inputs that overpower the limits of that circle without losing control. Experienced autocrossers know how to keep the car at the perimeter of that circle, all the time, without massively exceeding it. Are you exceeding the limits, or below the limits? That will tell you what you need to do to correct it. It is not the hardware (mostly), it’s the driver inputs.
Oh, gosh, John. I’m so glad you were okay. I am glad you have these pictures and great story by which to remember your ND. Also, I didn’t realize that Ford and Mazda have completely broken up by now.
Can’t understand why you would fit a larger front sway bar ( anti-roll bar) without up-rating the rear one correspondingly, it will inevitably give you bad understeer.
That’s what I always thought for ages, but it really comes down to the car, setup, and balance. What’s good for “street performance“ doesn’t always translate to Motorsport. My friend who autocrosses his Tbird actually found the combination of large sway bars front and rear combined with sticky tires made it far too tailhappy and darty, he actually went down in size to stock for the rear bar only, and his runs became faster and much more consistent.
Yup, there is no “killer setup” for all conditions. In general, the faster you go, the more a typical car will tend to understeer, but the more dangerous is oversteer. The challenge is to balance the behavior of the front and the rear of the car ACCORDING TO CONDITIONS. Autocrossers conditions usually require a set-up that gives you a bit less understeer (stiffer rear bar, stiffer rear springs, keep the tire pressure down a bit in back), but once you get to the point of too much of a good thing, you can’t keep the car pointed forward. A slower, tighter autocross course favors a bit more oversteer, a faster, more wide open course, a bit less oversteer.
The thing about auto crossing that makes it so hard, is that in track racing, you get to drive the same course, lap after lap after lap. Dialing in the driving skills and car setup is just a matter of time, if you work at it and do your driving and set-ups within reasonable limits. In autocross, you get three laps or so, and that’s it. NASCAR drivers have a proven set-up, in a notebook or hard drive, for each track. Autocrossers are forced to guess on car set-ups and tweaks for that day, and adapt their driving style to the course and conditions within a couple of laps. The best autocrossers understand the limits of the set-ups and driving techniques, and quickly adapt them, on the fly, at the moment, to the situation in which they are driving. Autocross is very accessible to the beginning or novice racer, but is just about the hardest to master. More than most forms of auto sports, one cannot turn money, parts, and practice into real success, unless one can also adapt quickly to conditions (I say this as one who was once pretty good, but never one of the “best”, at any level of autocross. It is simply so much harder to do well than it looks).
Side sills are apparently the Miata equivalent of hub caps. If they ever recreated the Bullitt chase with a Miata, 3 would fly off 🙂
Sorry to see the end of this car. I generally take curves like that at the speed limit without slowing down too and as I get older I get more fearful of this scenario.
Sad to see the car end that way, but it happens, glad you made it out ok.
I totally understand the autocross video is a “blooper” reel, however can I suggest you try more ice driving during the winter, I think it really helps to teach the whole weight transfer thing and also helps to teach how to actually anticipate the exact moment of the transfer in advance and thus helps you to get your hands and the wheel out ahead of it to make it all work together. Far cheaper on tires too and works with any car. Not just a fast track, but playing around with a simple slalom over and over as well as a long sweeper curve with a transition the other way at the end for example. I think it’s made me a smoother driver overall as on the ice there isn’t much in the way of grip, ever, so you’re forced to figure out how to plan to slide one way while you’re currently sliding the other way, i.e. be a corner or two ahead of the current location. Something like the Bridgestone track at Steamboat is even more ideal than a lake as it also introduces camber (lots of off camber!) and elevation changes into things too. Daunting but a total blast once it all clicks.
I enjoyed the ride along with your video, cause i could never react as fast at my age. I’ve babied my 2016 Launch Edition soul red and beige interior MX5-GT, so it only has 14500 miles on it. I want it to last forever, but its getting harder to get in and out. Its either my knees or it is shrinking. I have it on Facebook marketplace over here in Middlesex County of Eastern Virginia, should anyone be interested.