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MEAN GREEN MACHINE: With a Porsche 911 turbo-rivalling power-to-weight ratio, the MX-5 GT is hardly your garden variety Mazda roadster.
What is the simplest way of making a performance car even quicker? Well, you simply affix GT to its name and the rest takes care of itself.
A case in point is Mazda’s new MX-5 GT.
Built to compete in the British endurance racing championship, the MX-5 GT also serves as a rolling laboratory for Mazda engineers to see how light (and powerful) they can make the best selling roadster of all time.
DOUBLE POWER, HALF WEIGHT
Although the delicately proportioned styling has been industrialised to an extent by a regulation roll-cage, the MX-5 GT features a raft of clever parts exchanges to reduce weight. Its doors are composite, windows polycarbonate and even the body was dipped in acid; the resulting chemical reaction eating away an additional 15kg.
In racing trim, the GT weighs only 850kg, an impressive 245kg less than its series production sibling.
Powering the lightweight MX-5 GT is a heavily modified (though still naturally aspirated) version of its two-litre, four-cylinder engine, driving the rear wheels via a six-speed sequential transmission.
With peak power of 200kW on call, the MX-5 GT should weigh a neat one ton, fuelled and with a driver on board. Performance, unsurprisingly, promises to be epic.
Sporting circuit calibrated shock-absorbers, a revised front splitter and competition brakes, the MX-5 GT would make a phenomenal road car homologation project - if anybody at Mazda is listening...
A case in point is Mazda’s new MX-5 GT.
Built to compete in the British endurance racing championship, the MX-5 GT also serves as a rolling laboratory for Mazda engineers to see how light (and powerful) they can make the best selling roadster of all time.
DOUBLE POWER, HALF WEIGHT
Although the delicately proportioned styling has been industrialised to an extent by a regulation roll-cage, the MX-5 GT features a raft of clever parts exchanges to reduce weight. Its doors are composite, windows polycarbonate and even the body was dipped in acid; the resulting chemical reaction eating away an additional 15kg.
In racing trim, the GT weighs only 850kg, an impressive 245kg less than its series production sibling.
Powering the lightweight MX-5 GT is a heavily modified (though still naturally aspirated) version of its two-litre, four-cylinder engine, driving the rear wheels via a six-speed sequential transmission.
With peak power of 200kW on call, the MX-5 GT should weigh a neat one ton, fuelled and with a driver on board. Performance, unsurprisingly, promises to be epic.
Sporting circuit calibrated shock-absorbers, a revised front splitter and competition brakes, the MX-5 GT would make a phenomenal road car homologation project - if anybody at Mazda is listening...
