Progress on LS1 Miata Alpha Project

Many of you know that Vorshlag has a lot of experience with the three generations of MX5/Miatas for chassis, wheel/tire, suspension and braking upgrades. This is a great chassis that has been sold in huge numbers, which any shop that dealt with autocross and track customers would be supportive of. One thing that is common on Miata owners upgrade lists is power upgrades. Vorshlag isn’t really an “engine tuner shop” but we do have one solution that always adds power.

What you might not know is that we started developing an LS1 V8 swap into the NB Miata chassis about a year ago. This quickly became our most involved swaps we had ever attempted, and in the end only the basic body and interior are going to be left unchanged. Each OEM system we tried to keep intact restricted reliability, so system after system has been replaced.

Late in the Fall of 2013 we made a lot of progress on this Miata LS1 swap and completed our prototype front tubular crossmember replacement. This beefy unit will allow us to have the room we need for the engine, oil pan and custom full length exhaust headers to fit, which the stock front subframe would not. This crossmember also allowed us to upgrade the hubs from the small OEM 4×100 hubs to stronger 5×114.3 hubs from the RX8, which also came with the aluminum control arms and RX8 uprights from this chassis as well. The tubular structure should add chassis rigidity to this convertible chassis as well.

The end goal is to use an 18×10″ wheel at all four corners with a 285mm wide tire, which should help tame the 450 hp LSx V8 that was built for this Alpha car. Once this car is on track and sorted we will look at kit production schedules, so look for this one to be rolling sometime in 2014. You can read the latest updates on this build thread starting here.

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