While not quite small enough to be a petri dish, Mazda's littlest sports car certainly does engender experimentation. With its RB25, today's Nice Price or Crack Pipe MX-5 is a willing research subject, but will its price prove that where there's a will there's a way?
So far this week BMWs have gone two for two. That is we had a Baur-topped 323i on Monday and yesterday a homeskillet M7 with more miles on it than the Birth of Cool. Both Bimmers also fell to substantial Crack Pipe losses, maintaining consistency but probably causing our friends at Bimmer Forums to pour out a 40 in honor of the fallen.
The movie Skyline is a special effects tour de farce in which alien interlopers modify people for their own nefarious purposes. The fact that the people the film chose to focus upon were a bunch of characterless Gen-X hipsters meant you might just have rooted for the aliens. In contrast, today's ‘99 Mazda MX-5 has been invaded by an engine out of a Nissan Skyline and the video of its dyno run sounds pretty damn special effect-ie.
You want to listen to that again? That's okay, we'll wait.
The ad claims that wonderful noise comes from a Nissan RB25det, which has been stealthily slipped beneath the Mazda's hood and puts out what is said to be 300 horsepower at the wheels. That's apparently backed up by the Nissan five-speed, and there's a whole bunch of stuff from the Greddy catalog along for the ride. That ride so far means 125K on the car overall - and 50K on the monster Nissan. That means 150K tot. . . wait, that's not right. Nevermind.
Outside, the car's typical second gen Miata, which sadly means fixed lights like everybody else, but this one in black does have a somewhat sinister appeal. Maybe that stems from the dark tinted Rotas and riveted plastic ground effects applied to the car's lower half. Inside it's a little less tidy, the underdash looking like Medusa's bobbing the knob down there. Stock seats, some curiously placed extra gauges, and a roll bar wrap up the cabin tour.
The seller says that his mechanic will no longer work on the car, forcing the sale. That's one of the oddest reasons I think I've ever heard, but peek under the hood shows that completion may have proved too daunting a task for the wrencher. Still, that means the car is not complete and in fact the ad notes that neither the speedo nor tach is presently hooked up making potential Youtube videos of pegged needles less thrilling because no matter how balls out you'd be going, they'd still be pegged at zero. There's also some nonsense about needing to fabricate exhaust and A/C, but there's too little detail in the ad, and it already sounds pretty wicked in the videos.
As noted, the MX-5 is a perfect platform for such experimentation, and the two and a half litre RB25 seems to slot under its hood like it was meant to be there. The question of course, is whether anyone is meant to spend $10,000 on this molotov of a Miata. What do you think, does that price make this an MX-5 with an impressive Skyline? Or, is this an experiment that should have stayed in the lab?
You decide!
eBay or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Ken Sangster for the hookup!
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