Took the MX5 over to Canterbury to have JackH's mechanic put on the sticky tyres. Nice day, roof down, almost everything good apart from the nagging feeling that it could be running better.
A poke around underneath the car while it was up in the air suggested that my overall impression of it is not too far off - nice try, but some work could've been done better. Went for a quick spin with JackH afterwards who confirmed that the car is a little bit quicker than a standard MX5.
After that I dropped off a rear subframe complete with stronger 1.8 diff over at my local tuner's as they could fit in the replacement of those components. Which means that once done, I should be almost ready to take it on the track...
*Should* being the keyword here, because my local tuner took the car for another spin and confirmed what I had suspected - the "map" that is on there is a bit, well, crap. I'm putting the term 'map' into quotation marks because the adjustments necessary for the turbo are done via a piggyback (E-Manage Blue) and it's not been done very well. Looks like it is running a little too rich when it shouldn't be.At this point the I went down the slippery slope to more expense as I uttered the harmless words "let's have a look at the piggyback" and pulled back the carpet in the passenger footwell. First, no ECU cover plate (hence the comment in the subject) - wiring, pulldown resistors, piggyback ECU and the original ECU are all nicely exposed to the passenger's feet. And by all that is unholy, who did the wiring? It looks like something Luigi would do after being fired for incompetence from both Alfa and Magneti Marelli. After the third bottle of Barolo, no less. Ouch.
They're going to look at trying to tweak the map for the moment but it looks like I'll have that piggyback pulled out and replaced with something that can run fuel and injection without talking to the regular ECU - not quite a piggyback, but not quite a full ECU either. Oh well, it's only money...
Yes, I've thought about selling it - trouble is that if I go out and buy something else for track use, I'll still be fiddling with it by the time the trackday season has ended.