Short deck, long hood, low belt line. The Miata Story.

Prof. Norman H. Garrett III - Automotive Engineer for Mazda

His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena, with notable success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials. He has supported Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Lab. He has worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru and Volvo.

Contact: Prof. Norman H. Garrett III at Visit Online!

  

• Origin Story – Who/What/Where/When got you into cars? Was it a childhood passion? Came from a racing family?
• What led you to automotive engineering? (and to Mazda) + Miata development
• Sports cars of the past
• General restoration of old cars discussion
• Engine tuning for power and performance….
• The ridiculousness of autonomous driving and EVs
• Hydrogen as the best fuel ever

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports.

If you’re a fan of the Mazda Miatas amazing balance and handling characteristics, then tonight’s break fix guest is a hundred percent to blame. He is best known as the concept engineer for the original Miata, and he developed the original suspension as well as the packaging layout achieving the group’s goal of the ultimate lightweight sports car.

Norman h Garrett II is an accomplished automotive engineer having worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru, and Volvo. His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena with notable success in specific markets related to energy emissions and material. He has supported Georgia Tech as well as Oak Ridge National Lab, and if that wasn’t enough, you might recognize him from some of his most recent articles on Haggerty.

Like a [00:01:00] few things you should know before you steal my nine 14 and right seat confessions of an on track driving instructor. And with that, we’d like to welcome Norman to break fix, to share some of his stories. So welcome. Good evening, Eric. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Your petrol headness, if that’s a word, it, it goes way, way back.

So why don’t we rewind the clock and talk about your origin story. The who? The what, the where, and the when that got you into cars. Was this a childhood passion? Did you come from a racing family? What led you to become an automotive? Uh, I’d have to say the good Lord just kind of put the gene in me, motor oil and the blood and all that.

My father was a physician. My grandfather who lived near us was a businessman from New York, but I got the bug early. He was taking everything apart in the house at the age of four. It would be decades before I could put it all back together again. But it was, uh, one of those hellion kids that read every label in the cabinet when I was three years, 40 years old, just started reading every jar in the grocery store and thirsty for [00:02:00] anything I could get my hands on.

And then found the public library, had books on cars and from second grade, third grade on was bicycling to all the libraries and Guilford County and getting rides with my parents to check out every book I could check out 12 books at a time and memorize ’em if it had cars on the cover. I got the book back then.

What was the car that got your attention? The. Boy, you know, you get imprinted as a kid and as a gosling I guess. I got imprinted on big American cars and then very cooled European sports cars in the hometown I was in in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was a pretty good center for sports cars, a lot ofcy, Hillary, three thousands, Jaguar xk.

But at the same time, 66 tornados spaceship cars, just things that the executives would drive that would just knock your stocks off. I mean, it was an amazing time to be a kid growing up in the sixties. The arrogance of Detroit as they moved away from the gaudy chrome age to the space age. It was fascinating to me.

It really didn’t matter if it had gasoline in the tank from a lawnmower to a jet engine airplane. And it was fascinating to me anything that was [00:03:00] motive I loved coming up through the sixties. I mean, what an amazing time for bespoke cars too, where automotive design was all over the place compared to now where things are extremely cookie cutter.

To your point, to use the phrase, the arrogance of Detroit, they went from that to the muscle car era, thanks to Pontiac and John DeLorean and others. Right, but then we headed into the Malaysia era and it all seemed to go downhill very quickly. From there, it got pretty sad. Yeah. When I graduated engineering school in the early eighties, it was like not the best time to be slowly recovering from the mugging that the seventies had done to the automotive industry.

It was pretty sad time, but the sixties were just amazing. We call them designers now, but I call ’em stylists, where the stylists were just ruling the day and the engineers took a backseat. Cars were made to look a certain way in the, in the US made to look like a, an object of desire. Whether they drove that way or not would be another issue.

Whereas the European cars were, you know, more sporty and more set up for racing or you know, at least spirited driving. So early on you, you could choose a path in [00:04:00] the North Carolina, south it being stock car country. Even in the sixties, you would choose your path. Either you were gonna be a Detroit Musclehead or you were gonna be one of those Tweed cap wearing guys at like the European cars.

So I fell into that cap pretty early. I had my Hot Rod Magazine subscription at age seven, but I had my road in track in Car and Driver and Motor Inn at age seven as well. Love them all, but aggregated toward gear to driving, drag racing and all that was fun. Turning left around an oval for a hundred laps.

Just didn’t introduce me. We needed left and right turns. You’re talking about European sports cars? This predominantly during that time, British Roadsters, right? Right. Because Porsche hadn’t quite established itself yet as a juggernaut in the United States. The Italians have been floundering forever, the state side, so it was really the.

That were leading that charge. It was, and, and there was dirt sheep. I mean, I was mowing grass, you know, $3 a yard in my early teens. My first car we can talk about. But my first sports car was a spitfire that I got for 150 bucks in today’s dollars, you know, $800. It was something you could buy by mowing yards.

So I got it when I [00:05:00] was 14 years old and fixed it up to drive when I got my license. But they were cheap. They were everywhere and they were all broken, and so they were all cheap. So you mentioned your first car. So that spitfire, that triumph was not your first, so what was your first car? Well, it becomes a long legacy.

Before I was born, my grandfather retired from his company in New York. Sold the company and came down about 150 acres of raw land and started playing basically sim City with 150 acres, but pond in and Barnes and all that. Of course, he bought what everybody did in the early sixties, a an old World War II Jeep, a leftover Jeep.

First year after the war, CJ two A at the age of six. I was driving it, sitting on a phone book and driving that around the farm, learning how to double clutch and drift, uh, in two-wheel drive and, and had a lot of fun. And we still have that in the family. So that was my very first car, even though I, it was not titled per se in my name, my first car car was when I was 12.

My dad had a patient that owned the Chrysler dealership and someone had traded in Ford Galaxy with a throne rod, which was worth nothing at this point in [00:06:00] 1962, galaxy in 1969. Would’ve been through four owners already and fully depreciated such for the sixties. If you didn’t change a car every year, you looked like you were poor.

It’d be like having a flip phone today or whatever is the, the football you have for carry something in public that you shouldn’t be having. And this car, even though it was only six or seven years old, had been fully depreciated through all his sons and a thrown a rod. So we got it for free. He towed it into the backyard, much to my mother’s chagrin, and I started playing with it.

So that was my first official car. It traveled all of 100 feet or 50 feet to the end of the driveway one day. And then, uh, we blew it up just for fun, but not a functional car. But I learned a lot, changed the rod bearings in it, painted the valve covers aluminum silver because that’s what you do. Had a lot of fun.

I think when I was 13 we got rid of it and I got into motorcycles and started racing motocross and that consumed my interest until a great turning event came with my father. Through some great wisdom and sheer luck, I had another patient who owned the Dotson dealership and lo and behold, he bought a Dotson 5 10 19 70 Dotson five 10, and that became my autocross car when I was [00:07:00] 15.

I was autocrossing. About having a license and we go to s c events and auto across that car and modified it with, uh, Peter Brock’s, uh, b e suspension and got into suspension design and theory curiosity with that car that kinda lined me up along the way. Had had a lot of TR three s after the Spitfire, T four s, Europas, JAG X Ks.

Got into nine fourteens. I’ve had like a dozen, nine fourteens, got into nine elevens. I’ve tried to have more cars than my age. I’ve had 73 cars and I’m probably, I dunno, 40 motorcycles. So I could be on, uh, lifetime as a hoarder. I do flush them out. Right now I only have a few in the driveway. So, and not all of them run my excuses that don’t all run.

So it’s okay. You know, sometimes we ask this question of our guests, what’s the most gorgeous car of all time? The sexiest car of all time, prettiest car, things like that. I wanna ask you this question because it goes so far back into your history. The cars you thought were awesome when you were a kid.

Are they still the most awesome cars? Now that you’re an adult? Looking back, is it still that [00:08:00] prettiest car? Is that that one that imprinted on you or is it something different when you kind of compare A to B 66? Toyota still knocks my socks off. Uh, and I actually had a weird experience, uh, three years ago.

I was at a race shop in Concord, North Carolina, and a guy had a 64 Imperial. Which is not a car you see often it’s the Green Hornet car. Yep. And you see Cadillacs in that era and you see Lincolns all the time and you never see Imperials. Cuz most of them were ruined in demolition derby cuz they were impossible to actually, they got outlawed for demolition derby cuz they didn’t break.

I ended up buying the darn thing. It was a 60,000 mile car outta Oklahoma. I named it Edna and fell in love. And that era again, just that audacity of this thing was huge. It was like having a porch, you know, attached to your house that you could drive around the block. It was an amazing vehicle. So I’d have to say the imprinting lasts still with me.

An engineer. I’m still a very visual person. So the sleek things that were happening in the seventies, if you’re gonna lead to the question of what is the most beautiful car ever, I’d have to say the very few ugly cars in the sports car world, the dangler may be the worst Fluff one. The Jag [00:09:00] e type coop.

That and the, and the Ferrari. Two Synagog, gtb and the Mur. You can’t say anyone. It’s like asking which of my children was best looking. I mean the commando to always said, you know Enzo, right? Yes. That the E type was the most. Beautiful car that he had ever seen. And look at all the cars that he had penned over the years.

Right, exactly. So we can jump ahead. When I was working in the design studio at Mazda, I was a studio engineer and I was able to work in the studio and watch the process of someone building a car from scratch out of thin air, literally out of clay and trying to make it beautiful. And it’s very difficult to do.

I’m not a sketch artist, barely make something that looks like what it should look like. I have a daughter who’s a Rembrandt level artist and she can do amazing things with pin and ink. And the clay modelers who interpreted with the stylists designers who were saying at Mazda to watch that process was remarkable.

And it really came out of that saying, it’s really hard to make a pretty car. It is very hard to make a three dimensional object. Gorgeous. God does it very well with people and horses and giraffes. But for us to make something and with amata of [00:10:00] the RX seven, third Gen RX seven was a great exercise in that how beautiful can a shape be?

And I think that was a penultimate exercise by um, chink. When he did that work, watching that come together, I’d walk up to him at night and I’d say, guys, you know, it won’t cost me any more money to tool up a very beautiful fender, so why don’t you stay late tonight and make this fender beautiful cuz you’re not there yet.

And we all would be critical of the shapes. And that’s also very difficult for a dialogue slash designer to do the work because everyone’s a critic. They come in and say, that’s just not right, but then they think it’s beautiful and the person may have bad taste, the executives may not get where they’re going, et cetera, et cetera.

I really came to appreciate how difficult it is to make a shape beautiful, and that makes me appreciate all the more, any type, the covered headlight. E types don’t have a bad angle. But on the same effect, we’re all used to seeing C4, Corvette’s and we’re tired of seeing C4 Corvette’s maybe. But that shows the skill level of GM’s design studio that there is really not a bad angle on a C4 Corvette.

You’re so used to it, you may not appreciate it, but if you’re to drop that car in the 1940 into a car show, [00:11:00] people would go crazy. It takes a lot of skill to have a car that looks beautiful from all angles. I was working at Subaru prior to Mazda when the first Subaru XT came out. I remember this is like it was yesterday.

We walked into the warehouse and the XT was facing a sideway. We saw the profile view of the XT and we went crazy cuz a Subaru XT 1985 model 1986 model in side view, profile view is not. Ugly. It’s actually pretty interesting looking car for 1985. The minute you walk to the front three quarter, the whole thing drops like a house of cards.

Again, it’s very difficult to make a three-dimensional object, gorgeous, and you have to appreciate the skill level it takes ’em. There’s very few people in the one that can do, there’s not a, there’s probably not a hundred guys in the world and women that can do three dimensional shapes that are gorgeous, that has nothing to do with engineering or how cars drive, but just on their sheer look.

In some ways the automotive industry is like the women’s shoe business. It has to look great to sell, and cars don’t look great. Don’t sell. I haven’t thought about the XT in a long time, and it reminds [00:12:00] me that visually it’s a precursor to the svx, right? It’s civil or sort of design. It might not have been thought of that way, but I kind of put those links in the chain together.

Sometimes when I see a car and go it, it has heritage right there. Right, right. So it’s kind of funny and And you don’t see xts ever on the road. I mean, if they don’t even exist anymore for that matter. You said you started at Subaru and then went to Mazda. How did you go from growing up in the Carolinas to suddenly finding yourself in design studios in California and things like that?

What was that transition like? How did you get your way in? I’ll leave it a statement. It’s very difficult to get into the automotive industry. Or at least it was in the eighties and it still kind of is, but once you’re in, it’s pretty easy to move around. I went to Georgia Tech to learn how to design race cars or to continue my education in chassis suspension and race car designing to punctuate that statement.

Now that Miata is the most race car in the world, cuz there’s a great satisfaction to that circle of life. And not just due to my credit, but what Mazda did with that design. When I graduated in early 81, I had offers, it was a great time to be an engineer. I had a lot of job [00:13:00] offers. I did not really want to go to Detroit and no offense to Detroit, I did not want to be the right rear door Cadillac ashtray engineer and there is one, and I didn’t wanna be that guy.

Due to my father’s not influence, he never asked me to be a doctor, do anything else. But I wanted to use my skills to help humanity in a moment of, uh, 22 year old empathy for the world. So I went to the West Coast to do cardiovascular implant research and I was hired by heart valve company in Southern California and Irvine and designed artificial heart valves in annual pesty rings, cardiovascular implant for, uh, about a year and a half.

And ironically, my window in my office in that building looked out across to the Mazda design studio, but I realizes my heart wasn’t. That’s bad punt. My heart was not in that job, so to speak. And so left and went to Subaru when they were looking for a design engineer and did that job for a couple years.

And then Mazda had an opening just as they were getting the studio going for a studio engineer jumped at that chance. And it was amazing because. First day on the job, they said, we’re [00:14:00] thinking about doing a lightweight sports car. What do you know about race cars? And I said, well, I have, that’s, you know, my number one fan.

Uh, that’s what I’ve been my whole life, is trying to do race cars or sports cars. So at that point I’d had probably 30 European sports cars. So it was a perfect melding of opportunity and preparation for me. So did you also come up through an s SAE type of program back when you I was, I joined S SAE as a student.

I’m actually a 40 year, remember 42 years now. I’ve been an S sae joined as a student. We didn’t have Formula s sa then we had mini Baja. And we had student competition on relevant engineering at Georgia Tech. All the schools did this. Georgia Tech bought a hydrogen car, hydrogen powered vehicle based on a Fiat 1 28, which is, that’s a whole nother story.

Uh, sort of like your dots in five 10, but I wasn’t gonna go there. Whoa. That’s a, that’s damning by harsh praise to say that they’re the same. They both have, uh, a boxy shape and there’s no more similarity than that. That was very heavily involved in s sae and it was a pretty strong program at tech, although Michigan would’ve been better, or you know, [00:15:00] where there was an automotive engineering, you know, masters in PhD programs.

But it was a very interesting time. We were reeling off the seventies where EPA and crash protection and the insurance lobby had just crushed the industry. All the research dollars had gone into a emission certification. We had 455 cubic inch oel wheels making 160 horsepower. Just a horrible time.

Horrible time. We had a 55 mile hour speed limit that was clamped on the year I got my driver’s license. It was not a great time, but at the same time, We had all these great British port cars that dentists and doctors had bought and then couldn’t keep running so we could buy ’em for nothing. For a few hundred dollars, you could buy a t r six.

Buy. My Jag I bought for 600 bucks and I got it because it was just an repair shop and a guy couldn’t afford to fix it, but it was a different world. And a a sidebar. So if you knew how to do your own work, restore your car in the seventies there was no internet. There were no manuals. There were no parts.

It was a lot of blacksmith. Luckily, English cars are largely blacksmith together, so you could blacksmith one back together. The NG TD that’s behind me is largely built with a hammer and some pig iron, [00:16:00] so you can fix it. Pretty readily with a crescent wrench and a hammer, but you get into more sophisticated things.

There wasn’t a microchip or a computer and anything except my early nine fourteens, and we immediately put carburetors on ’em. But the seventies is a very difficult time. Now you can be very bold and buy a complicated. The car next to me here, the 9 64 car worth 30 year old German processors that are dying as we speak.

You can listen carefully and hear them crinkling themselves to death. Yet on the. There’s not a problem yet. I’ve had with it that you don’t find 20 guys that have already fixed it and they’re telling you how to fix it, where to get the part or where to get the Woo fit part from Advanced Auto instead of the one that Porsche wants you to buy.

So it’s a great time now to restore these old cars. You decided that there wasn’t anything exciting as super anymore, and you get this opportunity at Mazda. How did that play out? Well, it’s funny. I wasn’t really looking for a job. Someone just told me, Hey, Moss was looking for an engineer just for Yucks.

I sent the resume over, but I was very happy that Subaru is a phenomenal company, four day work week company, car. Everything was perfect about Subaru of America at Subaru Technical Center, but just sent the resume out at Georgia Tech. They had told us that you [00:17:00] should change jobs every two years for your first 10 years so that you experience different companies and grow.

A lot of people have 20 years experience in a job, but it’s really one year, 19 times. They really said, be aggressive until you’re 30 or you know, 32, and try to get as much experience as you can in any engineering and they’ll make you a better engineer. And so I’d been a Subaru not quite two years, but the Mazda thing, they built the Arc seven and I love the rotary engine.

I was very fascinated by it and people were racing them and all that. So it just seemed to be like, well, let’s go see what they had to say. And I’d kind of learned the Subaru world had kind of caught up to what they were doing. And we had just done the design work for cars that were coming out in a couple of years and there wasn’t gonna be, it’d be five more years when we did any more new cars.

So it’s just kind of a perfect storm. But once I got there, it was perfect opportunity. It was kind of a perfect match for the new Autumn, for the Arc seven programs. It fit with my interest. I worked, you know, 60, 70 hours a week for free. Basically, um, after the 40 hours a week I worked because I just loved it.

I had a great appetite for the work they they’re asking me to do. All of us felt that way. [00:18:00] Everybody was just working their tail off cuz it was a dream job to be able to design whether it was a Miata or the third gen R X seven or the second Gen RX seven. To be able to work on these cars and get paid for was kind of a dream for all of us.

Gearheads. So if we align the stories of some previous guests, Also from the world of s Rro, you were rubbing elbows with folks like Dean Case and Jim Jordan and others who have been on Break Fix as well. Right. So I mean, talk about a long history there too. All roads lead to Mazda it seems like in some ways.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it was an attractive company from an employee standpoint, engineer. Anyway, you’d be like, I’d like to work with this company, and it’d be like, poor. I applied to Porsche when I was a junior at Georgia Tech and I got, I had this flush letter from them saying, no thank you. But it’s, it’s very, you, there’s certain companies you’d like to work for.

I was the first engineer hired by Mazda and, uh, a couple years in they said, okay, we need to expand. And so we, we posted the job in Detroit and in southern California we got like 200 resumes. All of, a lot of guys from Ford and GM and Chrysler wanted to move to, you know, Newport Beach, [00:19:00] Irvine in Southern California.

And I had this stack of hundreds and hundreds of resumes and I’m going through them and there’s this one from, this guy from Cal Poly San Obispo, and he had an essay paper that he had written stapled to his resume. And I’m going, this guy’s got enough moxie to write an s SAE paper on his own. He’s 21, 22 years old and he drives a mini Cooper, like the original Mini Cooper.

And I’m like, okay, we gotta interview this guy. And Dean walked on the door and I said, okay, you’re, that’s it. You’re done. You’re, you’re hired. There’s no question we need you. If you have a Mini Cooper, you can keep it running and have a engineering degree. Where’s that? So did he have long hair then? Like he does.

Now if you Google Jack Nicholson, 1960 is what? That’s what he looked like. He looked like a, A young Jack Nicholson Dean told us the story of the Miata from his perspective, but I wanna get it from your perspective when I ask you some pointed questions as well. So, how early or late in the Miatas birth process did you get engaged?

I came in just as the first clay model. Was finished. And so the first clay model [00:20:00] was just a flyer. Let’s just do a two-seater. The package development underneath it was a Mazda GLC front engine, rear-wheel drive car, live axle. Very tall engine, very tall package. And you look at the image of the first clay model and the first running prototype very, very tall.

So they needed a packaging engineer to bring that down to Sports car World. But that was just more, and MOS was really good at making a clay model and or making a running prototype of a concept. To their credit, they really were brilliant in many ways. By design. They would build, in many cases, a running clay model, fiberglass version, and put it out in traffic.

And I, I remember many times we would take the cars down to Laguna Beach and drive these. Rickety prototypes, almost a kick car, but with a shell on it up and down Laguna Beach, while our executives would sit at a cafe at a sidewalk and watch it in traffic. And it was really excellent cuz you can look at a car in a, a curtained viewing yard and you get a real war view of what it looks like seeing it in traffic.

You really get to see what a beautiful car looks like. So I came in just as we started building a running prototype of that first play model and it was commissioned [00:21:00] by I a d, international Automotive Design owned and run by the late John Schutz in, out of. And they built the running prototype and shipped it over right hand drive.

And I remember the night we unpacked it and I haven’t told the story before. I actually snuck it out and drove it around Newport Beach for about a half an hour at night knowing no one can get a picture of it. Realizing gonna had British electronics and they’d never been driven before, was a great risk.

I didn’t have a wreck or break the car. Brought it back and, and then later we took it to Santa Barbara and there’s a trip that’s been talked about a lot where we showed that car up in Santa Barbara. So from there, the program got go ahead to go to the next phase, which would be to do a serious package of a sports car.

And that’s where my work began of put the engineering under the shape and that’s where the push and pull the tug of war began of Haan and Yagi. Sun Mark, Jordan comment, and Shinon all wanted a very low PowerPoint. The windshield wiper area wanted a very low hood line. I wanted a low belt line because the spitfire that I had, you could put your arm out the window and it would just spit your arm.

And if, and that’s really important so that you don’t look like you stole your dad’s car. [00:22:00] I think it’s the Lexus s SC 300 that even a six foot tall guy looks like he’s 12 year old kid. Not flattering, nor is it fun. Low belt lines, things like that. We all talk about how to get this package correct from the first clay to the second clay.

And if you look at pictures of the second clay model, it’s actually a really tight, it’s not that glamorous of a shape. That’s a tremendous accomplishment, if I may say so for the engineering team in Japan and the work I was doing to get that tight and get it small along the way of getting it small, I was working on making it traceable.

And that is double wish. One suspension, weight distribution inside the wheel center lines weight distribution left to right, correct. All of the things that make a cartoon tuneable for racing. If you have the weight distribution and the suspension geometry is wrong in the layout stage and you get locked into that, you can never tune that out.

You can’t take a live axle Camaro and make it, you can’t make it a fantastic race. You can make it competent with great tires, spray bars, and lock down the rings and dampers so the thing doesn’t move. Make it into a go-kart and then it handles. But it’s not what we were shooting for with the [00:23:00] Miata. We were really looking for a car that communicated lightness and nimbleness to the owner, and that starts at the design stage of the initial layout.

Where do the components go and what kind of space do you leave for the suspension that you need to give you the camera patterns that you want so that you can let the body roll? So you touched on something really important, the lightness and the speed. And that’s the mantra of Lotus, right? And it’s been often said, you know, when you ask people, the answer is always Miata.

And then the joke is, the original answer was always lotus. And when you look at the Na Miata, you see a lot of inspiration from the Ilan. There’s always been rumors and things like that that Mazda bought cars and took ’em apart or this and that, or they were copying this and the other thing. But it sounds like you guys were starting from scratch, but did you take inspiration from Lotus?

No, not, I mean, you can say that from a styling standpoint, only because there’s a long hood short deck car, as is a C4 Corvette, as is a lot of cars. So proportions of there and a lot is actually about. 70% or 75% the size of a Miata. It’s actually a very small, fragile car. I don’t know how many thousands they sold, but it [00:24:00] was not that greatly accepted of a car as good a design as it was.

And I, I’m not dissing the design at all, being a former Europa owner, I, I loved everything Colin Chapman did with Lotus Cars. From an engineering standpoint, there’s not one iot from it. So it’s kind of a, an naive ninth grader kind of a mentality to say that it’s designed after the Ilan, cuz you look under the skin immediately.

The Lotus Ilan had a backbone chassis, uh, actually has Colin Chapman’s version of McPherson’s struts. He had had Chapman’s trucks in the rear and just not, not anywhere near the same car. We actually, I e D. After they did the first model, we commissioned them because Maza had no manpower to do this work.

We were all working, living hand to mouth, so to speak. With time. They asked ID to do a chassis proposal and they proposed a backbone chassis. It looked just like a lotus lawn, and it was heavy and long and wouldn’t have passed. Sight impact, crash testing. It didn’t have the torsional rigidity that we needed for the convertible, uh, lawn work because it didn’t have very much of a heavy chas.

Uh, the chassis was fine because the body didn’t weigh anything. The whole car’s 15, 1600 pounds, and it’s hard for people to understand this, but the real feat of the n a Miata [00:25:00] is a thousand kilogram car that can take a 30 mile hour crash in the front. There’s not an M GB or a spitfire that can come close to that.

Particularly well they were frame on body cars, a uni body car, like the two 40 Z. All of those had to change as they got into the eighties and and the insurance companies required that crash test. We were locked into that from day one. We had to have 30 amount hour crash protection. An interesting side story, we were worried about rollover protection because in 76 Cadillac said the last convertible that’ll ever be made is the Cadillac El Dorado.

You better buy this. There’ll never be another convertible period. And so the Japanese have taken that to. And I remember they came to me and they said, can you look this up because I don’t think we can go to convertible anymore. Literally had to read the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, which is just reams and reams of boring, boring regulations.

And I got to the section on rollover protection and I fell in love with the GM lawyers for this one moment because they had petitioned subparagraph 5 99 6 B that said all the things that had to happen. And then there’s one little clause said convertibles. Ex exempt. I [00:26:00] copied that and faxed it to Japan and everyone said, oh, we can make it convertible.

Funny you bring that up, because I remember reading in’s first autobiography where he mentions that when he gets to Chrysler and he said, there hasn’t been a convertible for sale for so long in the United States. And the story goes as he writes it, that he waltzes down to the production area where they’re building the loons, right.

And he goes, cut the roof off. And they’re like, excuse me, what? He goes, just saw all the roof off. I wanna see it as a convertible. I love it. And they’re like, you’re crazy. And then the next year there’s a LeBaron convertible. It’s the first reintroduce convertible in the United States since that El Dorado.

And that was in the early, early eighties, right? There was a 20 year blackout period there. Not so great convertibles. Yeah. Although, you know, the Laverne was, the K car wasn’t improved by having a stop that. No, no, no. It was not. To go back to what we were talking about before, the Miata, if it isn’t a copy of the Ilan, which we know it isn’t, it does derive its inspiration from classic British Roadsters.

Sure. When you [00:27:00] look at it, sure. You think Lotus Ilan or Mgb or Spitfire, whatever it, it just has that appeal to it. It’s, I’d hate to say one of the last true Roadsters, right? If you look at, especially when it came out, right, and we joke about this all the time. In some cases, certain cars, they’re designed early and come out in the next decade, so the Miata.

Is like the best nineties card designed in the eighties, if you think about it, right? Because how long it takes these vehicles to come to market. But if you look at everything that came before, even the Italian Roadsters, like the Fiat 1 24 Spider and the Alpha Duetto and things like that, they were all gone by that point, right?

Where they had been sunsetted. It’s the last hope for anybody that wanted a true Roadster until obviously the boxer came along many, many years later and things like that. Yeah, that’s a really good point. So that being said, why flip up head. You’re building this revolutionary car and you hang onto something that is so eighties, well, you have to go back to the FM v s s, the headlamp height requirement, 19 inches to the center or [00:28:00] whatever it is.

I can’t remember the exact number. You would have to have a bugeye Sprite or a two 40 Z or, and you had to put the headlights up where nine 11 has em. And we won a low hood and the RX seven first gen had already done it. So it was just a, it was really a part spin kind of a decision. The mechanism was off the shelf, so to speak.

It made the front end look great. So back to your point about making it look old when it was new, we wanted it to look five years old when it came out. That it looked classic and that it would look the same 20 years from now, that it would still would be a proper looking car. It’d be in its own right, an attractive feature.

And then the same thing happened for the FD R seven. The last generation R seven was let’s make a gorgeous car just as gorgeous as it can be. Cuz Ferrari never worried about what era they were making these great cars in this in. Yeah. Look at the mirror. It didn’t matter what year that came out, it was gonna be gorgeous.

So we tried to disengage ourselves from the trends. Now you look at a modern Prius and this crazy back end, they’ve got on ’em. That car’s gonna look horrible in five years or 10 or in five minutes. However, it did, it didn’t look good to begin with. So it’s, well, yeah, so it’s not gonna age well. So we’ve purposed, we the stylist and the designers and the team we’re like, let’s make this thing [00:29:00] look classic when it comes out.

But age Well and that comes from the classic proportions you’re talking about and the Lan I, I’ll say, uh, praise for the engineers. That was done by an. As was the nine 11 and you know, certain shapes are just naturally, almost mathematically correct. And even the Jaguar E type coop is a combination of three ellipses.

If you could draw it, that’s the only car I can draw. Cause it’s three ellipses. You can put certain standard rules of proportion into play and come up with some pretty good shapes. And that’s what the na and nd ncn, of course the nd all have that same kind of proportion. Short deck, long hood, low BeltLine.

The NC put on the freshman 15 though. I mean, we all know that right? Ford got their hands in that, so it’s all another star. Yes. The NCS are actually great driving cars. They’re amazing to, to drive. They’re, they’re absolutely fantastic. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve been around Laguna Osaka for a bunch of hot laps and a specked me outta NC version and it’s a blast.

It got heavy because Ford got involved and, and asked for off the shelf items and then mixing heavy. That was the beauty of the na. It was a thousand kilogram. So we are gonna make a thousand kilogram sports car. And it was beautiful because the RX [00:30:00] seven was already there. Ffc, R X seven existed as the 9 44 competitor.

Like it or not. It was a great car. A lot of technology in, it drove like a dream and for its period was attractive when it came out. And, and to me, you know, it had its moment in time. Bob Hall will tell you this, every product plant will tell you this. Every car moves up in its price and weight as it ages.

And the Miata was not exempt from that. Neither was the RX seven, neither was the rav4. Everything gets bigger kind of as it grows. And that was the beauty of what happened with the ND was they said, wait a minute. This is not what, what needs to happen is they need to get back to the formula. And they did.

You know, we were under a thousand kilograms for the NA in the non airbag spec. Well actually even the airbag spec, the US spec was 2168 or something. So right under 2200 pounds, which is a thousand kilo. And the ninth grade. Physics doesn’t go away. If you have a tennis ball on a fishing line, you can swing it all you want.

You put a brick on that fishing line, you can’t turn the corner. It, it doesn’t matter how much you love your gtr, it is a very heavy car to ask to grow on corners. I teach driving schools at the tracks in the [00:31:00] Southeast. Love the GTRs, but it’s a whole lot different action around the track then am auto or an MR two or you know, some of the lightweight.

At that time at Maza, like you said, there was a lot of rotary action going on, right? You still had the FC and you had the FD coming out and other vehicles. So why put a British like Kazi inspired twin cam four cylinder in the Miata and not a rotary? Who made that decision? That’s excellent question. The team in California, we’ve fought for three or four main features.

Had to be front engine mirror, wheel drive, had to be convertible, it had to be a four cylinder engine. The rotary is great. Did not have the character we were looking for. We wanted the noisy communicative vibration of a Lingham four, like an alpha may, it would’ve, and we had alpha two thousands. They had great engines and we all loved their five speeds.

All that was great. So we really wanted that character of the classic sports car. From an engineering standpoint, the center line of a rotary engine is much higher than the crank chef center line of the four cylinder. So it intrudes in the bell housing and the [00:32:00] firewall area such that the HVAC system is very difficult to package.

I made a drawing. I, I packaged a 12 day in one of my layouts for the Miata and it fit, it’s all fine, but you pick up three or four inches in the center under the bell housing and now the clutch and flywheel are where now the radio is in the Miata. It also messed up with the center of gravity. A couple things happen, the RX seven.

FD had this phenomenal low hood line, and that’s what the rotary can give you. And that was where we were going with the N amniotic. Great. Let’s do a low hood line. But we did it with the force owner, which was actually, it was a lot of work to try to get that to happen with a low calpoint windshield wiper area and a low hood line where the force owner was very difficult, but, The rotary character to, to summarize with the team, Bob Hall, to myself, Mark Jordan, all of us, uh, Jim Tilburn, we all were like, this has to be a four-cylinder raspy note car.

Another point is naturally rated rotary engines have really good power, but the torque curve is dead flat and you don’t feel even the, uh, normally naturally ash aspirated fc rrc sevens or very, very fast, [00:33:00] but it didn’t feel fast. It’s like going down an elevator. Once you accelerated, you kind of didn’t feel.

And in the Miata it was purposely tuned so that the Turk curve has an ever increasing slope. Your inner ear is constantly getting pulled to another degree of acceleration, and it makes you think you’re a lot faster than you are. It was very entertaining and very rewarding. An eight second or nine second, zero to 60 feels a lot faster than it is because your inner ears, getting the satisfaction of ever-increasing acceleration millisecond by millisecond road ranging really doesn’t deliver that in a naturally estimated sense.

You said earlier you’re not an artist. Maybe akin to styling of the Volvo eight 50, not to talk about Volvo, but we can go there. I mean, spin edge, right? My daughter can draw Volvo eight 50, but that’s okay. That aside, and you are an artist, right? If you look at the Miata, it is a gorgeous design. It’s timeless.

The FDR X seven even more so you can take that car today, show up at a car show, people go, I don’t know what year this is from, even though it’s from 1993. The same is true of the Mark four Supra and the Audi R eight. There’s a lot of [00:34:00] designs that are just time. But when you look at the original Miata and maybe the Nmb, you would see the flaws.

What are some things about the Miata that just irritate you, that maybe you had to compromise on, that you had wished were different or you had planned to be different? I’ll have to say, Eric, this sounds like, um, I’ve drank the Kool-Aid many times over, but there’s not a thing about it. I don’t love. I drive a B R G every day and I look back at it every time I walk away.

And there’s not an angle to my C4 Corvette comment. There’s not an angle about it I don’t like. And the MB actually in its own right, was an excellent, if you’re gonna do fixed headlights and move a car forward, it’s actually a better car. Not necessarily a better Miata, but it’s a better car. It’s the same car underneath.

Essentially. Those two are very satisfying shapes to me. Drove the first, uh, it was a service prototype in, oh gosh, this would’ve been April of 89. Three months before the official introduction. I got my hands, I was at A S E C A event and I was invited to speak and Mazda had delivered one of the service cars, cuz they put those out to the service training centers early and they trailered it to this autocross event [00:35:00] and they let me take it around the track.

And I’ll never forget had a passenger, uh, Vince TI was with me. We get in the car and we go up to this J turn, uh, you know, Probably a 30 mile an hour entry and whatever you wanna do on the outside. I’d never driven the car before. I’d never driven any production Miata. This is the first one anyone had seen in the us.

I, it was this sweeping left turn with a real sharp apex and I, I went into it full throttle and probably. 50 miles an hour and second lifted the back end, stepped out three degrees like you expect it to nailed the apex, stomped on the gas and the thing took a set and shot corner out was perfect and it was like, this car is perfect.

It was unbelievable. It was a weird science movie kind of moment of, wow. They took this two-dimensional object. We all drew this three-dimensional clay model and with the brews of Mazda engineers turned it into the dream cuz we made a laundry list of what it should be like. It’s one thing to say, here’s the beachfront property.

I want a three level modern house along the lines of falling Waters by Frank Lloyd Wright. There’s another thing to actually get that, to actually make that happen and Mazda made it happen. To your [00:36:00] point, what would I change? The only thing I didn’t like about it was a shift knob because the Mazda guys were so good at N VH and they could have made that car very Lexus quiet as Toyota does.

They were very much a stickler had been ding in the past about vibrations to the shift handle. So they put this half a pound shift knob on it and it, that was the only thing I could find at fault with is, is that it would, that was just a little heavy the rest of the car’s. Perfect. You say yourself, it puts a smile on your face.

That you see the success of the miada, especially in amateur racing and all the right, you know, Miata cups and MX five cups and things like that, that have existed over the years. But when you walk through the paddock and you see a Miata that’s been converted, has been modified, has all these things that they’ve come up with, do you kind of scratch your head and go, why, or does it upset you or, You just kind of like let it roll.

I mean, that’s your baby, right? It’s the Miata and then you, you see, you just said the suspension’s perfect and here they are throwing it away going, ah, that stuff is junk. This is what you really need. Well, there are a lot of people that are messing up the suspension, but that, and in my, my book, uh, I wrote about how not [00:37:00] to mess the car up as far as the customizing all that.

When we, when we designed the car, we literally, Eric said, we’re designing this car for the guy cutting grass that’s gonna have 500 bucks to buy me out. The blue car behind me is my son’s car. We got for 500 bucks. He got it when he was 12 and he fixed it up and drove it when he, since he was 16. And that’s that fifth owner is who we wanted the car to have because we got cars that way.

So we said, we need this car to be that fourth, fifth owner guy or girl they get to sing for working at McDonald’s for X dollars an hour, can afford to buy this entry level car when they’re a teenager in high school. Whatever they do with it. I think it’s fantastic. Some of the creative stuff’s amazing.

I’m not really that much a fan of 10 degrees negative Canberra, but other than some of the other things is, and it’s fine, it’s expression. When we had our British cars in this. Seventies and sixties, we were just trying to keep ’em alive. We did not have any time to be creative. Um, now here we have a car and mi honest don’t break.

So what are you gonna do with it? Well, let’s modify it. I’m all for it. Everyone has different tastes. If I was 30, I might have a lot more to say about it, but being twice that I’m kind of like, I see what everybody’s expressing themselves. I think it’s [00:38:00] great. I meant even in the spec series, right, where it’s like, thou shall use this suspension and it, it feels like sacri, right?

Oh, well, no, no, but I get that for spec. So for racing, I’m more of the sixties bar Prix where you just do the best you can do and the rules are very loose and it’s a very short rule book spec series, though you, you have to either, uh, cheat really well or drive really much like an. And be really aggressive or just be really talented.

But the spec series is there. I mean we saw that with the dotsons and, and all that stuff as it began where you have a spec series and I understand the spirit of what a spec series is trying to do. So your question was more of clamping down the creativity of how this design could be changed or maybe changing it in such a way that goes against what you initially designed, like the car actually handles worse right than you intended it to.

A lot of people have an knee jerk reaction. They got a release stiff springs and really high sway bars because they have terrible can patterns. And when you have a b BMW of three series that has semi trailing arms and fierce and struts, yeah, you need to clamp that down. Don’t let the darn thing roll cuz the [00:39:00] camber patterns are terrible.

And then the OS cases, we designed it to have, Very good canor patterns. And the journalists always talk about how much body roll, even the ND has body roll communicates to the driver that tells your inner ear you’re in a corner and it’s how you communicate back to the driver. Another 10th of a degree of roll tells you you’re now closer to the limit of the suspension or your adhesions.

It’s a way you communicate to the driver. Now, a race driver doesn’t need that level of communication is trying to get more and more traction and acceleration in the corners. But ultimate GForce is not what the street goes for. And I, and I think mature enthusiasts know that what’s good for the racetrack is completely wrong for the street.

Emil Miata is designed and delivered as a street car, as are most nine elevens and nine 14 s and nine 40 fours. And all the sports cars that we love all come designed to be driven on the street. Cuz otherwise you can’t sell 40,000 of ’em a year. Case in point, the S 2000 Honda was over Dan and over sprung.

I think if you’d done a statistical study, very few male owners would have kidney stones of S two thousands because they were so rough. Everything was shaken out of you. It was not a pleasant [00:40:00] car to live with, but it was very fast. Great, beautiful engine, one of the best engines ever made, and great performance on the track for the journalists to print really good articles about.

And that’s fine. They placed it above the Miata in that respect, but not a great car to live with. So that’s a fair statement. Unfair statements would probably be all the memes and jokes and things that go along with Miata ownership, but we’re gonna skip all those and answer a very important question that a lot of people don’t seem to know the answer to.

A, is it miada B, is it MX five? And if it is Miata, what does Miata even mean? Well, if no one knows the story, it could be Enos Road Star. So in Japan is the Enos MX five in Europe? Uh, it’ll always be Miata to me. Yeah. So Miata is a Ride by master is a great product planner. And bless him, he was three beers into reading the German dictionary one night and found old high German for reward.

Prize is the word Miata. M i a t a. And he said there, that’s a good name. And it, and we tested it. Uh, we Mazda tested it. It sounded Italian to the focus groups should sold. [00:41:00] Call it a Miata. There you go. We, we had on the clay models, if you see pictures, One of the early clay models had 1600 s as the name, it was the models of 1600 s, which is an ancient name to put on a car, but that’s what we wanted to call it.

But that’s why we were engineers and our product planners. Uh, yeah, like Nissan and the Fair Lady, 2000 and all right. Yes. Stuff like that. Right. Well, Bluebird, how would you like your bluebird today? On the racetrack? Yeah, so what does the MX stand for for those that don’t now? Well, MX is Mazdas, the X is like RX and MX is just a, it’s a moniker.

There may actually be a, a whole dossier somewhere. There’s a big report on what MX stands for and it’s in Japanese, so I didn’t read it, but it’s said, I’m sure something like more, better, best, and X for excellence. But there’s the RX and the mx, that’s kind of the sports car series for mosque. I read somewhere that the X stood for experimental, going back to some of the early cars, but whatever.

Who knows, right? And then could be, yeah, I, so to me, P 7 29 is what the car is to me. And my license plate actually on my B R G is P [00:42:00] 7 29. And that’s what the car, that’s our project number. That was our secret project number. So to me, the car will always be a P seven 20. The na anyway, the n e if there is one, what do you think, what’s the fifth generation of the Miata look like in your imagination?

Is it gonna be an ev, is it even gonna exist? Is it gonna be slightly larger than the nd Uh, it’ll never be an ev so let’s throw that away. Ev is like listening to your favorite song on mute. That’s, that’s what, that’s a great way to put it. That’s what I think of vvs, and I’ve driven Tesla. Model S is a lot of times Tesla, it’s great, but you kinda get bored with them after the fifth time you’ve done a zero to 16 and four seconds.

Okay, that’s fun. But there’s no communication whatsoever. So the Miata being a communicative device needs a four stroke engine. So let’s keep it it that way. I’m not in charge of this. Let’s say, um, knowing the models of people, I think that they learned the lesson with the NC and the nd that lighters better and at some point it, it, it’s kind of like this thing is.

You look at the Corvette, the C5 chassis was perfected. The C6 is [00:43:00] the C5 of the new bodies and the C4 actually set the stage for the C5 s at some point. You’ve got this excellent chassis. The ND is so good, you don’t need to spend a hundred million retooling yet. Another suspension design. And so the question is how long do you go before you reembody it?

And that’s always the question. You watch sales and you think what It needs to be refreshed and you refresh it a little bit and then you do a major, everybody at some point, again, I’m not in charge, but I think you see it more on the lines of let’s take this great chassis. That’s excellent, even in the modern world.

Cause it’s six seconds, zero to 60 car, so what more do you need than all that? And it does the crash protection, it does all the things you have to have. It’s still a 200,000 mile car. My son’s blue car out here has 310,000 miles on it. I mean, the car already has evolved to be a phenomenal device for transportation.

So I think now it comes down to design and styling. And so how do you keep modern with that? I mean, there’s some beautiful cars out here in that category. The the current BMW Z four, particularly the the hard top version is a. Gorgeous proportions. And the ND is also gorgeous in his own right. And that was so difficult to do.

The team that did that, [00:44:00] Derek and the team are to be commended because that it’s like, let’s freeway gone with the wind or something. It’s, it’s how do you come to that? And I think they did a phenomenal job. Again, a car without a bad angle on it. So I’m a little bit more partial to the Miatas close cousin.

The Fiat as I like to call it. The Fiat. The Fiat 1 24 of Barth. Yeah. What do you think of that? Re-skinned? Re imagine? You know, it offended me a lot less than I thought it would. I’d say I drove it. I didn’t like, I don’t like turbo engines because they’re non-linear power delivery devices, and with a manual transmission you get a lot of non-linear power.

It’s hard to apex a corner at full song with non-linear power. So I wasn’t really pleased with the, the visceral nature of driving. One. The way it looked was, you know what? That’s actually not an ugly car. It, it actually is a pleasant looking vehicle. It’s not a Miata. And I think it’s fine. The whole point of this, we’ll go back to a sidebar here.

When the first NTA got the automatic transmission, all the purists cried and we said, guys, if it keeps five speed cars on the road, [00:45:00] because now Mazda sells 5,000 x extra 10,000 or 20,000 extra cars, you’ve gotta keep the product alive. When this 9 64 next to me was sold, PIA only sold 4,000 cars. That year of nine elevens, 4,000 cars will kill a company.

The NSX died, the FDR seven died out of low volume. You have to keep volume up. At the end of the day, it’s a business. If the fiat. Keeps that platform going and makes it profitable for all concern, then it keeps that platform going and that’s good for everybody. And unfortunately they’ve put a pin in the 1 24 at the moment.

Although I hear rumor that they might be reintroducing it as the Alpha Romeo Duetto version of known that many of us is just the spider. I’ve seen some concept pictures of it. It’s pretty cool. Yeah. There also lingers that question of why. Yeah. Well, So for the purist, that’s a problem. It’s like my, my son is an intern with Apple and he knows way too much about iPhones and A, and computers.

The purists are close to this that we can’t suspend disbelief long enough to think that a fiat is something other than Akin, and that would happen with [00:46:00] any alpha version of it Again. We go like the 1900 when people bought chassis and re-skin them with some beautiful, you know, bergs and things like that.

Later on came from coach makers knowing how to re-skin chassis. Maybe there’s a version of that in the modern world for these niche cars. Ford Machi is selling, you know, I think gonna sell hundreds of thousands of these things. So that’s what they want. The firo died when it got under a hundred thousand units a year.

You have to keep volumes up and the odd is profitable at 20 to 40,000 units a year, and so that’s a nice niche. But that comes from Mazda knowing how to build cars really well and do it on a shared assembly line, which GM and others don’t do. I also think it’s helpful that Mazda invested so much in their motor sports program, especially with, you know, help from people like Dean and Jim and others who were involved in those programs and getting them off the ground.

Because when you talk about the Fierro, you’re right, it was a great car in its last two years. Right? You always kind of go, when they finally got it right, they stopped selling it, which is always the case with any sports car. Look at the 9 44 with the non turbo S two s. Everybody goes, it was [00:47:00] amazing, right?

But then they got rid of it. You know, things like that. Mazda invested a lot in the motor sports side of it, and grassroots motor sports has kept in Miata. The, and Amata is around now for 32 years, right? Right. I mean, they keep going strong. I wonder if some of those cars, not just by volume, would’ve perpetuated.

If they had had the backing of motorsport behind them, they might have, but then, then the engineer me wants to say, but you could, you really make a fi of race because you look at the solstice, they tried to make a Solstice series and the solstice was not a sports car. It was a very nice shape with no soul, with a bunch of cavalier parts underneath.

So it didn’t work. But the question is, did it work in Europe? Because it was the Voxel Vxr as well as the Opal gt. Right? So here’s GM selling against itself. That was also a big problem with gm. It’s like we’re gonna introduce the same. With five different badges, it looks five different ways. And everybody goes, oh, the Saturn sky and the Solstice and the Opal and the Boxall are all the same car.

And now their volume numbers are down artificially, if you cumulatively looked at all of it, it actually sold pretty well on the global market. [00:48:00] Right, right. You know, but that makes the accountants and the actuarials happy because they got volumes and they had to amortize that tooling somehow. True. But the problem is, in Mazda’s case, they went, we have one Miata and we sell the same Miata everywhere.

Right. It’s like Catholic church. You know, where you’re getting everywhere you go. I like that. Yeah, you’re right. It’s, it’s funny. One menu, but, but yeah. Order McDonald’s, uh, you know, big Mac is the same world round. Exactly. And, but you know, when you’re small like Mazda and have to amortize the tooling. We did the, the story for the N Amata, the whole program was development cost was 123 million.

So multiply that by, Two and a half, three. Yeah. To get that number, that’s really a cheap program, but you’ve gotta amortize it over. Small volumes, maybe 50, 62,000 cars a year. That’s a difficult thing. And the end of the day, you know, Ferera builds 200 cars and charges back in the day, back in the sixties and seventies.

They build 200 of something and and maybe they have 4,000 of aino or something. So very low volumes. And that just doesn’t fly in the modern world. So back to the alpha. [00:49:00] If Alpha could take an indie chassis or an IND chassis, whatever it comes to be, and make a car of it in low volumes, better for the market.

A friend of mine has a Fiat, as you will loves it. And because it’s different, it’s a matter of what you’re looking for. In my case, for me personally, I’m 0.01 percenter of the market. Nobody’s gonna build a car for me cuz I’m driving all these old. With no computers or whatever, but the mass market, the, the 90th percentile customer is maybe coming out of a civic or a W R X or something, a different kind of car.

And they aren’t gonna be that specialized for a two seat sports car with a small trunk. They are compromises. With the Miata having been such a high volume vehicle, if you look at its entire lifespan, it keeps it out of the realm and out of the reach of ever being a collector car. So when you compare it to the old Fiats and the Alpha Romeos and the Ferrari and, and the triumphs and mgs, it’ll never attain that status cause there’s just too many of them.

And unlike nine elevens where people converted them into race cars and there’s fabulous nine 11 race [00:50:00] cars out there that are collectible, some people are converting them back to street cars now and things like. I don’t ever see that happening with the Miata. Prices are starting to go up. Haggerty’s index is rising for the nas.

Not that I think that needs to happen again. I like it that everybody gets to have a cheap one. Most of my kids have had a Miata and we got ’em all pretty cheap. I like that they’re low priced. I don’t know, will they ever be collectible? That’s a hard thing. I’m the wrong guy to talk about collectibility because some of the auction houses and cars that artificially jacked up in their prices, just cuz somebody says it’s worth that.

I’ve seen $500,000 69 GTOs that, you know, we used to throw away for 500 bucks. So it’s, it’s kinda like, uh, why? Yeah, but, but if you turn that over car produced at the same time, the FDR X seven is definitely a collector vehicle. Right. And maybe due to its rarity. So your comment is that damned by its popularity?

That’s fine. The metric of, is it collectible or not really? Doesn’t matter to me. In fact, it is often been said, the five or six of us that developed an original Miata from product planning, Bob Hall and Design, Tom and Mark Jordan, shin and Yagi son, [00:51:00] Howan and myself and the engineering and Dean case. We just wanted a dozen cars to be built.

It could have failed the next year. We really didn’t care. We just wanted one for ourselves. So the fact that there’s over a million them on the road is great. It means we get parts real easy for the ones we have and I feel you there, and I, I bring this up only because in recent times, coming from a VW Porsche, Audi family, I see the same thing with Mark one and Mark two GTIs, and people are like, oh, $27,000 for my Mark one gti.

I’m like, get outta here. They made a million of ’em. Yeah, they’re still junk, right? They’re only jacking up the value for nostalgia purposes. It’s not a nine 11. Right? Same as true. A 9 44. Right? It was the commodity Porsche, just like the 3 0 8 Ferrari. There was a million of them. You’re like, all right, fine.

That’s great for the enthusiasts because there will always be an enthusiast base for cars like that, and you’ll continue to see them at the track alongside of C4 and c5, cor Vet and E. That’s right, E 30 and E 36 BMWs and everything that we love. Going to those types of events. So the [00:52:00] has its home and it, I think it always will.

And then that makes me happy as one of the original team members, cuz it means that it’ll be the proletariats car, it’ll be a car people can enjoy and keep trading and keep passing along. Hit the math one night, there’s been over a million to say million 1.2 million built, but they’ve all been traded, so there’s probably like 3 million.

Enthusiasts in the world that have enjoyed amata. That’s a great footprint. I dunno, this is an amazing thing. That’s what we wanted. We wanted everybody to enjoy this great little concept of a car. And in our world it was a distillation. Back to the original design team. One day we sat down and said, what kind of cars have you had?

And everybody talked and somebody had a kota, somebody had vagos, you know, some phenomenal cars. Set it before, it’s like we all brought our cigar box full of favorite marbles to the table and dumped all the marbles on the table. And then we picked the best marbles out of the batch. And it was, oh, I would, the weight distribution of the lawn, the, you know, the low belt line of the spitfire, sheer gorgeousness of the X K E, the val along dis proportion for a small car, all of these things.

Let’s put this into one car. And Mazda Japan was 10,000 miles away and we didn’t have [00:53:00] internet, we had faxes. So we kind of were just left. It’s like the teacher was out of the room and the kids got to play in the classroom. Uh, we just got on the chalkboard and just made up this thing, turned it over to Japan and they caught the fever and said, wow, this actually could work.

And then it took off and they engineered, you know, the final bits and put the thing together and tuned it. And to that point, Mazda gets so much credit because like the last generation m MR two, I guess that would’ve been the third gen. MR two was a phenomena. It was like a little 3 48 Ferrari. It was a beautiful little car.

Well evolved, no soul whatsoever. The first one was a transformer car. It was a very period car full of Corolla. Parts had no soul. You could drift it on a entrance ramp, but it just didn’t have, it wasn’t connected to itself and we wanted to avoid that Stepford wife, literally we used that term, the Stepford wife nature of the Japanese cars that had no soul and we wanted to put a soul into the Miata and we described it best we could from our experiences from our 65 sports cars and Japan in perfect Japanese style, dissected those words and and got their own metrics and their own 160 different exhaust systems and [00:54:00] whatever, just went through the process to make a car fit that target and have a soul.

Funny you bring up the original MR two because you know that goes in line with what we’re talking about earlier about Japanese do have a propensity to copy and enhance and they’re very good at that. And when you look at that first gen MR two, you go Fiat X 19, except they didn’t really know how to do it.

The second MR two we’re not really sure. And the third one was the poor man’s release. Right? We all know that. That whole chassis was shared with Lotus or whatever, right? But there’s a lot of that going on. But again, to your point, the Miata stood alone. It took its inspiration from those great British Roadsters that we talked about earlier.

I wanna kind of talk about a couple other things that are important to you, which is restoring old cars. You’re maintaining a fleet of older vehicles. You’ve done the, uh, revolving door of cars over the years, along with keeping up with old cars is also engine tuning and performance. And there’s a lot of hocus pocus and a lot of, he said, she said, when it comes to building cars, I mean, I talk about this a lot in my student sessions that I give, you know, at HPDs and time [00:55:00] trials where it’s like you don’t have a wind tunnel at your disposal.

Are you sure that that’s spoiler or air dam that you’re adding, that a designer like Norman put on actually is benefiting the car? You know, that sort of thing. Right? Right. So I’m sure those are pet peeves of yours as well. So I just wanted to touch on that as we progress the conversation. I, I agree. I, I’m into patina now in my older years because I’ve seen so many over restored cars.

I remember I was at Rick Freeman’s Restoration Shepherd comes to Mesa back when I was with Malda, and he was using Emron paint, the two-part urethane paint on the drive shaft of an M G tc. And I said, nobody needs a high gloss drive shaft on M ctc. Some guy brushed it on at the factory out of a tar bucket.

Now you’re overdoing it. Don’t over restore a car. That’s actually why I love the imperial that I bought cuz it had original paint and it was, and my old nine 14 that I wrote about in Haggerty dusty chalky paint. And when I drive it pick, oh, that’s an old nine 14. That’s right. It’s an all nine 14. It should be old.

It’s a 40 year old car. It should look that way. Or it’s just me. If you’re 20 and 30 you can think what you want. But [00:56:00] when you’re my age, you’ve seen so many restored cars that don’t really look like what they did in the showroom. It doesn’t bring it back. When I see them faded with a little dust on the pearl and a little bit of pock marks and the taillights, that’s how the cars look.

And that takes me back. That takes me more back than overdrawn cars. Rescue muds are kind of cool. Kind of fun to have a car that performs better than the stock ones. Cuz the dirty little secret that’s now pretty much exposed is that all these muscle cars in the sixties were horrible to drive. They didn’t turn corners, they didn’t stop or the darn, and they really went that fast.

Cxs, I would smoke any of them in, in a modern market, rest of modding them into, you know, better tires, better breaks, better suspensions, um, and still getting the look. It, it comes down to this in my perspective now, there’s a point of idolatry with automotive shapes is that you can just idolize the way the shape looks.

The way I do is C2 Corvette split witnessing. Right? Or the tornado. I love. And for me, having one fifth scale model of these cars, it would be 90% of the enjoyment of ever having it. Because driving some of these [00:57:00] cars is not driving at suit two Corvette is not a lovely experience. They’re l just lovely to look at.

So there’s a golden calf Moses moment of they’re great to look at. They’re not that great to own. I’m right there with you. I mean, if I had to choose, you know, if you told me, oh, a C2 Corvette, especially a split window, I, I would respond and say, gimme a bow tail Riviera. I. It’s a bigger car. Yeah, it’s a cool car.

Right. You know, and you can have a lot of fun with that and not have the whole stigma that goes along with owning a Corvette. You know, you’re not there. The old chains in the open shirt you mean? And the new balances, right? That’s right. That’s right. Let’s talk a little bit about tuning engines for performance.

There’s a lot of black magic there too. I mean, in the old days with the carburetor, you know, put your screwdriver to your ears right And listen to the valves, you know, things like that. It was a lot different than with a fuel injected engine like is in the Miata. Some of these Boltons that people advertise.

I mean, you see all the time guys like Mighty Car mods. The Aussies are always proving how some of this stuff, right, people are just wasting their money. The stock air box [00:58:00] flows better air right than you know, your cone filter. Because Norman designed it that way, right? So, yeah. Yeah. And I think that switch flipped around 1990, right when the Miata came out.

The aftermarket started to decline in its ability to make cars better. And that comes from, as I said, Mazda engineers when they went through the B series engine, but the twin can engine on it. Cross flow had tender and half to one compression ratio. The cams are perfect. When the cars came out, everybody tried to make cams.

Everybody tried to make things to make it faster, and it just didn’t work. There was nothing to do with we Dino, an engine, found out that it was running 11 and a half to one air fuel ratio and 7,000 rpm. You can’t do any better than that. Why chip it in the realm where the emissions were being tested? It ran store geometric and ran perfect air fuel ratio and made perfect emissions.

Had part bottle at 3,500 rpm, but you floor it at 5,000 RPM and you had a perfect map, perfect ignition timing, perfect fuel. There was nothing to improve. There has never been a successful chip made for N a Nmb Miata, et cetera, cuz Maza knew what they were doing by 1990. Everybody figured it out. Even the factory header can [00:59:00] be improved upon, but it’s a three to four horsepower change.

It’s not a, in the sixties you could get 50 horsepower out of a nova by just changing a manifold and putting on some mufflers. Those days are long behind us, but the aftermarket keeps churning the activity and people are, are very optimistic about what will make their car faster. But it really moved outward from the core of the engine to where when OD two came out in 96, it was a cat back system and an air filter, and that was really all you could do to a car to make any better and that might give you 10% company.

I started in 94 receiving supercharges that later became Jackson Racing Superchargers and was picked up by Moss Motors. It became, from that frustration was the only way to make. Any more power was to actually force, induce the engine. And I was not a fan of turbos because their non-linear response and, and my, what I said previously about on a track day, but when you put in 10% more fla, you should get 10% more power and a turbo will give you 20% more power.

And it’s really hard to hit your apexes when you can’t control the linearity of your power delivery. So Eden was making the roots lower for Gmn Ford and I went to their [01:00:00] factory in Athens, Georgia. I was living in Atlanta at the time, went to Athens, Georgia, and I said, the Miata needs a supercharger. We actually had, I packaged one in one of my drawings for the original Miata, right where the Paris sharing pump, we were gonna put a supercharger, there’s room for it, et cetera, et cetera.

People slammed the Miata for not having any power. Let me explain that for a moment. The n A Miata came out with 116 hundred 20 horsepower for insurance reasons. In 1986, the C R X SI in Southern California was a hundred dollars a month. Toure for a 16 year old. And that was more than the car payment bills were being affected by it.

So Mazda said we can’t make the cargo crazy. And Mazda, we actually met with Nationwide and State Farm and said, how do we keep the insurance low on this car? And it used to be the headlamp Lito was $18, the front bumper was 50 bucks or whatever. It was all made to be cheap to fix. So the insurance rating would be low.

And the cars are cheap to ensure, which is actually an interesting show in the Miata. Um, the n a Miata got dinged on a zero to 60 because you have to shift out of second to get to 60. It’s zero to 50. 8.5 is really fast. It’s like, I think [01:01:00] high sevens. But that shift takes you to the 9.2 range. And for the one eight, the n na eight.

They made it so that it would go over 60 in second, so you’d have to do that shift and that got it down to the seven eight range. I think it’s a little bit of trivia there, right? Yeah. If it had been 150 horsepower car, it would’ve had the C R Xs SI category, and it couldn’t have been sold. It would not have sold at the est.

People couldn’t afford it. Our only older, wealthy people, you know, it wouldn’t have gotten into the group we wanted, which was a smaller crowd with younger people. What we said was, let’s let the aftermarket make it more. So back to Eden, I went to them and they said, we don’t make a blower small enough for you.

You need a 45 Gibb inch blower supercharger. We only make a 62 for gm. And I said, well, what if I paid for the tooling to make a 45 Gibb inch unit? And they said, okay, well we can take the Buick unit and cast a new housing and cut the rotors down. You’ll pay the tooling and guarantee that you’ll buy 50 a month or we’ll do it.

And I went, well, okay, 50 a month is kind of a lot, but let’s do it. So I threw my head across the river and signed up for that contract and we created seating [01:02:00] superchargers, uh, with Jim Downing the Mazda racer, and it took off a gangbusters. People went crazy cuz they were getting 40% more power and something they could bolt on in 90 minutes for a couple hours in an afternoon without drilling up their car.

And it was totally reversible. We got a carb. And it was a beautiful system that Eaton helped us engineer and that was 40% more power. You could get 160 horse outta your N amn and it became a wonderful part of Drive N 88 cars with a 1.8 liter and a torson in the supercharge. A friend of mine has one, he drives it more than he drives at nine 11.

It’s actually almost this perfect car, and that’s where the IND has become. The IND is 160, 180 horsepower, 1000 telegram range car. And that’s a really great formula. Short wheel based lightweight car with high power aftermarket ran just into a log jam when OD two came out. And aside from throwing the malfunction light in the dash also just there was nothing to do on the inside of the engine.

Make more power. So I have a pit stop question to ask you before we move on to our sort of last segment. You being the engineer, you’re in the design room and two drawings are slid to you as the decision maker, [01:03:00] and one of them is the Porsche 9 59, and the other is the Ferrari F 40. Which do you choose to move forward with?

Hmm, the 9 59 because it can be made into a road car. And that’s what my 9 64 is. I have a C4 9 64, so it’s a 9 59. Underneath the 9 59 is a lot more difficult to make than an F 40. F 40 is a race car and it’s styling is is in my case, not as beautiful as into my eye that the, even though the 9 59 is very too tonic, if you’re asking which one would I want to develop, then I would be a bigger challenge.

The F 40 is a Lamont prototype of the body on it. That was a very, very well put answer. And I wanna tell you that you are in an exclusive club of people that have chosen the 9 59 over the F 40. So that number is not very big. Uh, the 9 59 could have air conditioning and wipers. The F 40 barely had, I mean it’s, it was a red car, but that’s the beauty of the F 40 is it doesn’t have all that stuff.

I mean, granted, I, I mean the argument is always the same. The 9 59 is [01:04:00] technologically superior. Yeah. But as I’ve said before, when the F 40 was introduced, it was like, when. Fire was presented to the cave people. Yes. Right. It’s, it just lights up inside. Right. I agree. I agree. And I’ve never driven an F 40, but I believe I would be faster around Nu Green in a 9 59 than an F 40.

More than likely. I have a Ducati motorcycle that’s way over my head in Abilities as a street rider. I know that sometimes too much is just too much. And then I 59 was Space age technology. I mean the all-wheel drive, I mean, it was based on the Audi Quatro system and a bunch of other things. And it’s there to save you.

Yes. You know, in that respect, compared to the F 40, which is just completely barbaric in comparison. Right. Well, no, and that’s right. It was a race car. It’s like you, you can’t hurt yourself in this car. Please try not to, but you will. It’s funny though, my 9 64 C4 Cargo has that system in it. It has the four aft and lateral G sensors and the whole PDAs system that luckily you can defeat because it, it is really irritating to.

Drift, the car, not drift, but to even get the yaw angle [01:05:00] out to three degrees, you can’t do it. It will not let you get the yaw out. And that’s 1991. And now the driver stuff drives me absolutely bonkers. I just have to shut it off. The difference between your 9 64 and 9 59 is this 9 64 uses the synchro system from the Volkswagen, so it’s a viscous haul.

That’s right. The 9 59 was a Audi Quatro backwards, which is why I always think, I joke that the nine 11 is nothing more than a front wheel drive with five reverse gears. Eric, I love that. That’s excellent. Well, my daily driver is a, um, 3.2 liter Audi Quattro wagon. Avant. Oh, nice. I I have it turned around the other way in that car.

I’m old. Well, we’ve had seven coops, two of which were You are Quatros. Oh, no. I owned an 80, I owned an 83. That was my car in college. Oh, you’re telling me what? A car. Oh, we had one of those at miles and we just, we all fought for it. We all, every weekend. As, as you know, if you drove one, the anemic 165 horsepower, that the 10 ve [01:06:00] five cylinder turbo made.

Yeah, yeah. Was not enough for this weight of that car. 2,800 pound car, 3000 car at the time, which was heavy. Oh, but what a car. So you mentioned earlier you’re not a big fan of EVs and you know, we’re talking about tasteful retro mods and things like that and people are now starting to put EV power plants into some of the old cars.

You hear about it all the time. The latest Aston Martin abomination that’s gonna have a Tesla power plant, you know, things like that. I’ve noted that you’ve said before, the ridiculousness of autonomous driving and ev so I wanna get your take on what we call the evolution here at Break Fix. Yes, I like it.

You know, I have to relax, I have to make room for everybody and be all inclusive for maybe, let’s say a number, 70% of the people that treat a car like an appliance, no different than their microwave. Let ’em have their autonomous driving, but don’t make every car have it because a decker could start making cars soon.

You know, it’s all good. Yeah, let’s just all have taxis and Ubers. We don’t even need cars. I actually rented a car in Key West outta Miami. I rented a Hyundai with AU [01:07:00] autonomous driving and it was actually okay in traffic. So if I lived in LA I could see the entertainment value of not reading a book, but just watching the car do its thing as it got me to work.

But I don’t drive a car for community. I drive a car for entertainment. All my cars. I try to drive a different car every day to work so that I can keep the fleet going. And the challenge of, and you know, or the motorcycle or something. And the motorcycle, you have four actions of freedom and a car, you have two or three axes of freedom.

That’s the involvement. It’s, it is like, do you wanna go dancing or you gonna watch people dance on tv? And the point is, I’d rather go dancing. And that’s what car driving is for me. It’s dancing. The more we numb it down. I think autonomous driving is for people who don’t like to drive and don’t want to drive and see it as a necessary evil.

And this is rather. Be on public transportation cause that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re making a car into a public transfer device, dislodged from a railroad track. Total recall foreshadowed this, they called it Johnny Cab. So you see, you see Hollywood is always thinking ahead. We should get Sydney to come back from the grave and help us with the future.

EVs are are interesting. You know, we’ve talked to a bunch of people. I’ve been [01:08:00] able to coach in a few myself, and it has that rollercoaster factor. It’s like we get to the top and then we crass and woo, and then the ride’s over because they just flatten out. They completely plateau, right? It doesn’t have the same experience that an ice car would have.

But there has been some progress made in alternative and synthetic fuels. We hear about it coming from Porsche and other brands. I got really excited about hybrid. Now I know it means that we can’t have manuals anymore if we go down the hybrid route. And I’m still a dinosaur. I love driving manual cars, but I saw the potential when they said hybrid and I went, oh great.

This is an opportunity for us to capitalize on some legacy technology that comes from the train world, like diesel, electric, hybrid. Right. But unfortunately Diesel gate ruined that for all of us. Yeah. And which surprises me that it killed it that much, but yeah, that did kill it. Yeah. So no 200 mile to the gallon diesel electric hybrids.

Cause that would’ve been ideal. Right? Right. How far could you go with that little generator humming at 600 RPM delivering two 40 volts? Oh [01:09:00] gosh. To that you electric power plant. Right? It’d be perfect, but you’re, you’re right, Eric Hybrid’s all the way to go. A few comments on that. I teach automotive power plant design at the local university and it always comes up.

Will the IC engine survive? And it certainly will in many applications. Airplanes for one and tractors out on the farm. Some guy who owns 5,000 acres is not going to drive 20 minutes back to get a charging system for instructor. And there’s certain applications where it’s has to stay, but it’s like the Prius equation.

People by Prius, Prius pre, what do they. Sort all that is, that takes care of that market and leaves gasoline to the rest of us. Fine. Buy your Teslas, buy your EVs, buy your hybrids. That leaves gas to the rest of us. As long as there’s a market, we’re doing 300 million gallons of gasoline a day, that river of commerce isn’t gonna change easily.

But the hybrid gives you no range anxiety. It gives you way to limp home. Even it’s not limping. You’re getting home. I have nine children. I would never have an EV because if somebody calls at three in the morning and I’ve gotta go to the hospital and my EV’s half charged and the hospital’s too far away, I mean, what?

I’m not gonna go [01:10:00] camping in an F-150 electric lightning because I can’t recharge yet at the top of the mountain. But for a segment of the market, the million and a half people that bought Prius is that, just use them as tools and commuters. That’s fine. I think we’re gonna have the coexist bumper restrictor.

It’s only meant for the, the effectiveness of this automotive market. Let’s all coexist. Some people want their hybrids, some people want their eds. Let us keep our IC engines, those of us with ice engines, ics, are we gonna be like the Amish off to the shoulder? Yeah. Doing our thing as thes go by. Uh, put all jokes aside, I feel that the ice power plants will become very equestrian for those that can afford the gasoline, because gasoline prices will go up as demand goes down, therefore will be like having horses in a stable.

And you’ll go out riding on the weekend at your country club, which will be the racetrack possibly. But the one thing that, so here’s a model of this. Look at leaded gasoline in the seventies. Cadillac converters came in in 74. You could still buy leaded gasoline up to 1985 or later. I heard it was a couple years ago.

Actually. You [01:11:00] could still, well, you actually, you can buy it now at racetracks. Yeah, but the point was, it was very socialist wise because poor people can’t afford the new technology. They’re driving old cars now. Old cars last actually much longer. Can’t wait now last 300,000 miles. So a poor person can’t be ostracized from society by having to pay too much for gasoline.

So I put some faith in the powers that be, that will keep gasoline affordable, to be frank about it, the lower class that’s gonna have these IC engines for 20 more years, there’s a little bit of hope in that. The other hope is that $5 a gallon or $4 a gallon gasoline has reached a, I think, a very high rate when it should be about half of that if we were to stabilize the world economy.

But there’s synthetic fuels eels coming that now don’t look that unaffordable when you’re paying $120 a barrel. There’s a shifting moment for it. What I teach my students is hydrogen is the dream. IC engines love hydrogen hydrogen’s a perfect fuel. It’s just extremely dangerous in some categories, but it’s a beautiful solution to keep our piston engines.

And right now, everything we have with piston engines work [01:12:00] because factors are tools for V8 S or W six s or whatever you’re gonna make. The factors are tools for pistons and bores, pistons. Boards work really well. Sidebar, rotary engines work phenomenal and hydrogen, but all these things we make and what we package and what work, even hybrids, all work with pistons and internal combustion engines and the power density can’t be denied unless there’s some breakthrough technology right now, a gallon of gasoline, it takes three times as much battery space to do what one gallon of gasoline does.

I believe the equation is 33.6 kilowatt hours to one gallon of gasoline. Something like that. You could, you could tell me. You do the math on that one. I don’t have that number memorized then. I’m sorry. But yeah, it’s just, it’s huge. And so the other problem with hybrid, I love hybrids, but the problem is you take a gasoline car and then you.

Find a way to package electric motor in a battery system and a battery management system and cut out a couple cylinders. So it’s not an easy thing to do because you had to first design an IC engine vehicle and then find room for more things. So for sports cars and small cars, it doesn’t really work. An suv, A a, a Yukon or a [01:13:00] Tahoe could be a hybrid all day long and that they’ll know, and it does get them into be a 30 mile per gallon range kind of a vehicle.

If you do the math, a Chrysler Town and Country minivan, 70 miles an hour in Nevada Desert with no headwind takes 40 horsepower. And so all you need is a 40 horse engine. So you can take a hybrid vehicle, take a Prius engine, which is a 60 horse engine, and put it in that and you’re fine. And you use the battery backup for climbing hills and passing.

And so that equation works really well. It’s 1950 Train guys, uh, general Electric and GM’s division. Everybody figured this efficiency equation out real easily and maybe Diesel will make a comeback when, um, the news cycle gets off of Volkswagen’s case. But, but you’re right. I mean, but Sky Active Mazda has.

Skyactive is at 42% efficient. Diesels are 45% efficient, but the skyactive gasoline engine can reach 42% efficiency in its sweet spot. So we’re getting with nine speed transmissions to a point where we can get gas engines to be, um, quite efficient. So you brought up something [01:14:00] really cool actually, and we don’t get to talk about technical things like this too often on this show, but I wanna bring up the sky active.

Most people that do know what it really is, the Atkinson cycle engine or what I call the wobble crank. Yeah. Right. Uh, I would, I would love for you to explain in layman’s terms to our audience, What the Skyactive is all about and how it works and how it differs from the standard piston engine. There’s a couple different versions of it, but basically let’s touch on what you’re saying first by Atkinson.

So Atkinson was a guy motivated by greed in the late 18 hundreds because he wanted to get around Otto’s patents, and Otto had the force cycle engine all locked in. And so Atkinson realized that if he did a monkey motion crank shaft mechanism, he could have a longer expansion stroke. That is when the gasoline explodes and pushes on the piston.

That stroke can be made longer if you decoupled yourself from the crank shaft. In an imaginary world, it could be longer than the compression stroke was, and every engine in the world, the compression stroke pushes the air up. You have the explosion and the [01:15:00] explosion pushes the piston right back down on bottom of that center and they are equal distance.

The stroke is always the same. Atkinson got his patent by making a monkey motion crankshaft that made the expansion stroke longer. Right now the exhaust valve opens when there’s about 70 or so PSI in the cylinder and he was, uh, purporting that, capturing that 70 PSI would give you more power. Wait until there’s 10 PSI in the cylinder and capture those 60 psi.

The area under that curve could give you some extra power, and that is a great theory and it works. Um, what doesn’t work is the monkey motion crank shaft. So now, What we have is fake atkinson’s and fake millers. Well, Miller actually is real. Miller is a Atkinson cycle with a supercharger. So let’s walk through the progression.

You take an Atkinson cycle with a longer expansion stroke and you fake it by just having a shorter compression stroke by not closing the intake valve at the right moment. If you leave the intake valve open too long, they always close off the bottom dead center. But if you, if you leave it open way too long, then your compression stroke doesn’t start till the piston’s much further up.

Its stroke. Now by comparison, the expansion [01:16:00] stroke is much longer, so it’s a fake Atkinson, but that’s what the EPA is allowing people to call Atkinson’s. The problem with that is it doesn’t really breathe really well, but that is more efficient, but you kind of wasted the first part of your compression stroke, so it’s not that efficient.

Motorcycle comes in. Which is where you put a turbocharger, a supercharger on the system and force more air in. So that very short intake strike you had now is compensated for, it’s being handicapped and you catch back up like shoving in enough molds of oxygen to make it pretend like it had the full stroke.

That’s a miller. Now Mazda took that and kept going. When they built the motorcycle engine in the millennia, they proved that a motorcycle could be made more efficient and the millennia for a V6 got 32 miles per gallon or some phenomenal efficiency and they were in the high 30% efficiency in their sweet spot.

And this is in the nineties. So the sky active takes that even further. And the ultimate iteration is to have an engine that doesn’t use a spark plug. I believe that’s called a diesel Diesel engine. Exactly. So back to the Bele, we’ll get one past the media, we’ll have a diesel, but on run on gasoline, what it is, is we have a [01:17:00] homogenous charge in the chamber and you let it blow.

Like a diesel by sheer pressure and temperature, the pressure and temperature are made by a turbocharger or supercharger and you let it go up just cause you’ve agitated it so much that the gasoline’s gonna go off. Now gasoline’s very volatile, so it’s very hard to time that perfectly. In one version of the sky active, they’re using a spark assisted compression ignition.

So it’s like a diesel with a spark to force the timing to be at the right moment. So like an anti lag where you would put the spark plug somewhere. And backfire into the system in a way. Yes, exactly. So you’re just, you’re forcing the issue. You can’t trust the compression to time it exactly right. You have to have your timing in the modern world within, you know, one or two degrees to get the efficiency you’re looking for.

There’s so much heat getting running outta the cylinder and things going on in the intake track. You can’t always time compression ignition. You can’t in a certain zone, but you can’t do it over the whole driving cycle. I think it’s so funny that we come up with these really creative ways to do things that could be solved very simply.

And part of the problem we’ve [01:18:00] had with the efficiency of engines, I have to give the Americans credit where credit is due. It’s all about gearing, right? Yeah. Big lazy V8 s making 160 horsepower and can’t get outta their own way. But they’re strapped to some super long gears, right? But then you get in a Volkswagen and the German mentality is, I don’t want to downshift path, so we’re gonna put four 10 gears in it.

It doesn’t make sense, right? If you put a double overdrive on a four cylinder, you’re gonna get 40 miles to the gallon even 30 years ago, right? I mean, there are some engines that will surprise you that are quite old. The five cylinder normally aspirated Audi motor was getting over 30 miles to the gallon in the early eighties, right?

It had long gears in it instead of these like wind them up toy gear, right? So there’s a big compromise there, and I think we’re making up for the feeling of torque. With all sorts of Right. Really cool, you know, inventions because that’s inevitably what we feel. And I hate to say you get an A Miata and you’re like, it’s kind of torque, right?

Yeah. It’s, it’s, and for the reason we mentioned earlier about [01:19:00] the insurance issues, when you do have that very, very tall yield, it’s like the nine 14. You’re nine 14, the thing’s still in 3000 payment, 75 and it’s gutless, so it’s fine. You lose performance, but you get efficiency. I was able to get 40 miles per gallon outta my Dotson five 10 in 1979 by 60 psi in the tires, disconnecting the secondary carburetor, dancing the timing to like 60 degrees before top dead center, doing all kinds of crazy things that you shouldn’t be doing.

And yeah, the engine would’ve blown up had I taken it out of that zone, but I got 40 miles per gallon on a car that made 30. Otherwise, there’s ways to. We go back to the 40 horsepower that a minivan takes to get down the highway. That’s where the hybrid does solve that issue for saving all the fuel and saving the planet for the people that think that’s gonna do it.

Electric vehicles aren’t really the answer cause all they do is relocate pollution from city centers. You’re just now moving the pollution out to the power plant, which may be coal in the United States if you’re in Canada where it’s all nuclear or whatever. In a country with nuclear power, there’s a different argument.

For our country, EV is not really the answer. People think it is, but it’s not a zero emission vehicle. It all comes down to how [01:20:00] do you make the family traveling in the Disney world from Atlanta on that eight hour drive? How do they get that mini manor Yukon XL full of kids to Disney World at an affordable price in a way that the driver’s not just gonna hate what he is driving?

And maybe that’s the insidious slot behind autonomous driving because if you don’t accelerate the past, cuz your little computer doesn’t let you, maybe you’ll be very happy with 40 horse. Maybe that’s it. They’re gonna neuter all our cars and make them autonomous cuz they don’t want horsepower. There you go.

Oh my gosh, what was that old song? I like to drive 55. You’re gonna enjoy, you’re gonna enjoy it. Well, I was around when the 55 was implemented. That was, that was sad. So until they bring that back, I know things aren’t really that bad because Nixon put that in place due to the, you know, the oil crisis and we were all sitting in line trying to get fuel Until we see at that bad again, then I’m not that.

Because we’ve done it once. Well, Norman, I have to say this has been a lot of fun, but I wanna give you the opportunity, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover thus [01:21:00] far? Two things. Um, fascinating project I’m working on now is a replacement and an evolution of the IC engine where we’re replacing the pop valve with a rotary valve, which has been tried for a hundred years, but has been perfected by a engine development team up here in, uh, Ray City, uh, North Carolina.

Mooresville and some engine developers hired me a couple of years ago, and we actually are able to make much more power through higher volumetric efficiency than the pop valve can allow because the pop valve gets in the way. Now we’re running high compression ratios, super high volumetric efficiencies, great power densities.

So the commod is that the icy engine’s not dead. There’s a lot between Skyactive, what Mazda’s doing, we’re seeing 30, 40% more power density in the engine with this valve we’re working on. It’s pretty interesting to see what can be done as we continue to apply ourselves to it. It, it’s kinda like saying the telephone in 1970 was fully evolved and never gonna get any better and look where we are now with our iPhones.

So I think as we continue to work on IC engines, we can continue to make them more and more and more efficient. And shout out for certainly to Dean Case who, aside from being a great friend and an old work cohort, introduced the two of us. And [01:22:00] Dean’s just got a great career. He’s had a dream. Uh, we’ve all, uh, a lot of us have a dream.

Jobs you have a dream job. We’re all very blessed. But Dean’s just a great guy and he loves to put interesting people together. He’s like a collector or filter for interesting people. I’m glad he put us together. Not that I’m so interesting, but I found you fascinating. Well, thank you. I appreciate.

Professor Garrett known to many of us around the paddock as just Norman is a native of North Carolina with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, where he has also served as an adjunct faculty member. He is currently professor in the Motorsports Engineering School at U n Charlotte and the director of engineering at Vasst Tech and Engine Development Company.

And if you want to learn more about Norman, you can check him out online by reading some of his most interesting articles on Haggerty. I’m sure there’s more coming or reaching out to us for more information on how to get ahold of him. And that said, Norman, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show.

This has been an education. It’s been an absolute blast, and thanks for taking the time to share some stories with us and with our audience. Oh, it’s been fun and it’s always fun to talk cars with smart people like you and your audience. All right, take [01:23:00] care. Bye now.

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