Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Norman Garrett: The Man Behind the Miata & the Soul of Sports Car Engineering

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Norman Garrett: The Man Behind the Miata & the Soul of Sports Car Engineering · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from
• 0:04
  all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors,
• 0:09
  designers, and everything in between.
• 0:11
  Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they
• 0:17
  get that job or become that person?
• 0:19
  The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.
• 0:27
  If you're a fan of the Mazda Miata's amazing balance and handling
• 0:31
  characteristics, then tonight's break fix guest is 100 percent to blame.
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  He is best known as the concept engineer for the original Miata, and
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  he developed the original suspension as well as the packaging layout,
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  achieving the group's goal of the ultimate lightweight sports car.
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  Norman H.
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  Garrett III is an accomplished automotive engineer, having
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  worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru, and Volvo.
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  His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena, with notable
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  success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials.
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  He has supported Georgia Tech, as well as Oak Ridge National Lab, and
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  if that wasn't enough, you might recognize him from some of his most
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  recent articles on Hagerty, like, A Few Things You Should Know Before You
• 1:19
  Steal My 914, and Right Seat Confessions of an On Track Driving Instructor.
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  And with that, we'd like to welcome Norman to BrakeFix to share some of his stories.
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  So welcome.
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  Good evening, Eric.
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  Thanks for having me.
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  It's great to be here.
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  Your petrolheadness, if that's a word, it goes way, way back.
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  So why don't we rewind the clock and talk about your origin story?
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  The who, the what, the where, and the when that got you into cars.
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  Was this a childhood passion?
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  Did you come from a racing family?
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  What led you to become an automotive engineer?
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  Uh, I'd have to say the good Lord just kind of put the gene in me,
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  motor oil in the blood and all that.
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  My father was a physician.
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  My grandfather who lived near us was a businessman from New
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  York, but I got the bug early.
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  I was taking everything apart in the house at the age of four.
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  It would be decades before I could put it all back together again, but it was one of
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  those hellion kids that I read every label in the cabinet when I was three years,
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  four years old, just started reading every jar in the grocery store and thirsty for
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  anything to get my hands on and then found the public library had books on cars.
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  And from second grade, third grade on those bicycling to all the libraries
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  and Guilford County and getting advised with my parents to check
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  out every book I could check out 12 books at a time and memorize them.
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  If it had cars on the cover, I got the book.
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  Back then.
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  What was the car that got your attention the most?
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  Boy, you know, you get imprinted as a kid and as a gosling, I guess I got
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  imprinted on big American cars and then very cool European sports cars.
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  In the hometown I was in, in Greensboro, North Carolina, it was a
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  pretty good center for sports cars.
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  A lot of Aussie, Hilly 3000s, Jaguar XKEs.
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  But at the same time, 66 Tornadoes, Spaceship cars, just things that
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  the executives would drive that would just knock your stocks off.
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  I mean, it was an amazing time to be a kid growing up in the 60s.
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  The arrogance of Detroit as they moved away from the gaudy chrome age to the
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  space age, it was fascinating to me.
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  It really didn't matter if it had gasoline in the tank from a
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  lawnmower to a jet engine airplane.
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  And it was fascinating to me.
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  Anything that was motive.
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  I loved coming up through the sixties.
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  I mean, what an amazing time for bespoke cars too, where automotive design was
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  all over the place compared to now where things are extremely cookie cutter.
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  To your point, to use the phrase, the arrogance of Detroit, they went from
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  that to the muscle car era, thanks to Pontiac and John DeLorean and others.
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  Right.
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  But then we headed into the Malays era and it all seemed to go
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  downhill very quickly from there.
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  It got pretty sad.
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  Yeah.
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  When I graduated engineering school in the early eighties, it was like not
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  the best time to be slowly recovering from the mugging that the seventies
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  had done to the automotive industry.
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  It was a pretty sad time, but the sixties were just amazing.
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  We call them designers now, but I call them stylists where the
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  stylists were just ruling the day.
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  And the engineers took a back seat.
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  Cars were made to look a certain way in the, in the U S made to
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  look like an object of desire.
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  Whether they drove that way or not would be another issue, whereas the European
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  cars were, you know, more sporty and more set up for racing or you at least
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  spirited driving so early on you you could choose a path in the North Carolina
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  South it being stock car country.
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  Even in the sixties, you would choose your path.
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  Either you were gonna be a Detroit Musclehead or you were gonna be
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  one of those Tweed Cap wearing guys that like the European cars.
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  I fell into that cap pretty early.
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  I had my Hot Rod Magazine subscription at age seven, but I had my road
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  and track and car and driver and MotorTrend at age seven as well.
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  Love them all, but aggregated toward spirited driving, drag
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  racing, and all that was fun.
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  Turning left around an oval for a hundred laps just didn't interest me.
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  We needed left and right turns.
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  You're talking about European sports cars is predominantly during that
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  time, British roadsters, right?
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  Because Porsche hadn't quite established itself yet as a
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  juggernaut in the United States.
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  The Italians have been floundering forever stateside.
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  So it was really the Brits that were leading that charge.
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  It was, and there was dirt cheap.
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  I mean, I was mowing grass, you know, $3 a yard in my early teens.
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  My first car we can talk about, but my first sports car was a
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  spitfire that I got for 150 bucks in today's dollars, you know, $800.
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  It was something you could buy by mowing yards.
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  I got it when I was 14 years old and fixed it up to drive when I got my license.
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  But they were cheap.
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  They were everywhere, and they were all broken, and so they were all cheap.
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  So you mentioned your first car.
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  So that Spitfire, that Triumph was not your first.
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  So what was your first car?
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  Well, it becomes a long legacy.
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  Before I was born, my grandfather retired from his company in New
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  York, sold the company and came down about 150 acres of raw land and
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  started playing basically Sim City.
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  With 150 acres, but a pond in a barns and all that.
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  Of course he bought what everybody did in the early sixties, an old world war two
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  Jeep, a leftover Jeep first year after the war, CJ two way at the age of six, I
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  was driving it, sitting on a phone book and driving that around the farm and
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  learning how to double clutch and drift in two wheel drive and had a lot of fun
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  and we still have that in the family.
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  So that was my very first car, even though it was not titled per
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  se in my name, my first car car.
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  Was when I was 12, my dad had a patient that owned the Chrysler dealership and
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  someone had traded in Ford Galaxy with a thrown rod, which was worth nothing at
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  this point in 1962 Galaxy in 1969 would have been through four owners already
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  and fully depreciated such for the 60.
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  If you didn't change a car every year, you looked like you were poor.
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  It'd be like having a flip phone today or whatever is the faux pas
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  you have for carrying something in public that you shouldn't be having.
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  And this car, even though it was only six or seven years old, had
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  been fully depreciated through all its owners and it's on a rod.
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  So we got it for free.
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  He towed it into the backyard, much to my mother's chagrin,
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  and I started playing with it.
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  So that was my first official car.
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  It traveled all of 100 feet or 50 feet to the end of the driveway one day,
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  and then we blew it up just for fun.
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  Not a functional car, but I learned a lot.
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  Changed the rod bearings in it.
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  Painted the valve covers, aluminum, silver, because that's what you do.
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  Have a lot of fun.
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  I think when I was 13, we got rid of it and I got into motorcycles and started
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  racing motocross and that consumed my interest until a great turning
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  event came with my father through some great wisdom and sheer luck.
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  I had another patient who owned the Datsun dealership and lo and behold, he
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  bought a Datsun 510, 1970 Datsun 510.
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  That became my autocross car.
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  When I was 15.
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  I was autocrossing lying about having a license and would go to SSA events
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  and autocross that car and modified it with a Peter Brock's, A BRE suspension,
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  and got into suspension design and theory curiosity with that car.
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  That kind lined me up along the way.
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  It had a lot of TR threes after the Spitfire.
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  TR fours.
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  Europas Jag X Ks.
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  Got into 914s.
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  I've had like a dozen 914s.
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  Got into 911s.
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  I've tried to have more cars than my age.
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  I've had 73 cars and I'm probably, I don't know, 40 motorcycles.
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  So I could be on Lifetime as a hoarder.
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  I do flush them out.
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  Right now I only have a few in the driveway, so.
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  And not all of them run.
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  My excuse is they don't all run, so it's okay.
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  You know, sometimes we ask this question of our guests.
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  What's the most gorgeous car of all time?
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  The sexiest car all the time?
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  Prettiest car?
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  Things like that.
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  I want to ask you this question because it goes so far back into your history.
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  The cars you thought were awesome when you were a kid, are they
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  still the most awesome cars now that you're an adult looking back?
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  Is Still that prettiest car, is that that one that imprinted on
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  you or is it something different when you kind of compare A to B
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  66 to still knocks my socks off.
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  Uh, and I actually had a weird experience uh, three years ago.
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  I was at a race shop in Concord, North Carolina and a guy had a 64 Imperial,
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  which is not a car you see often.
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  It's the Green Hornet car.
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  Yep.
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  And you see Cadillacs in that air and you see Lincolns all the
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  time and you never see Imperials.
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  'cause most of them were ruined in demolition derbies.
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  'cause they were impossible.
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  They actually got outlawed for demolition derby because they didn't break.
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  I ended up buying the darn thing.
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  It was a 60, 000 mile car out of Oklahoma.
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  I named it Edna and fell in love.
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  And that era, again, just that audacity of this thing was huge.
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  It was like having a porch, you know, attached to your house that
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  you could drive around the block.
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  It was an amazing vehicle.
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  So I'd have to say the imprinting lasts still with me.
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  An engineer, I'm still a very visual person.
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  So the sleep things that were happening in the seventies.
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  If you're going to lead to the question of what is the most beautiful car ever?
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  I'd have to say the very few ugly cars in the sports car world.
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  The day where it may be the worst looking one, the Jag, a E type coupe,
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  that, and the, and the Ferrari 275 GTB and the Miura, you can't say any one.
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  It's like asking which of my children was best looking.
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  I mean, the commendatore always said, you know, Enzo, yes,
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  that the E type was the most.
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  Beautiful car that he had ever seen.
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  And look at all the cars that he had penned over the years.
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  Right, exactly.
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  So we can jump ahead.
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  When I was working in the design studio at Mazda, I was a studio engineer and I
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  was able to work in the studio and watch the process of someone building a car from
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  scratch out of thin air, literally out of clay and trying to make it beautiful.
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  And.
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  It's very difficult to do.
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  I'm not a sketch artist.
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  Barely make something that looks like what it should look like.
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  I have a daughter who's a Rembrandt level artist, and she can do
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  amazing things with pen and ink.
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  And the clay modelers who interpreted what the stylist
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  designers were saying at Mazda, to watch that process was remarkable.
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  And I really came out of that saying, It's really hard to make a pretty car.
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  It is very hard to make a three dimensional object gorgeous.
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  God does it very well with people.
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  And horses and giraffes, but for us to make something and then with
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  the Miata, the RX 7, third gen RX 7 was a great exercise in that.
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  How beautiful can a shape be?
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  And I think that was a penultimate exercise by, um,
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  Chinson when he did that work.
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  Watching that come together, I'd walk up to them at night and I'd say, guys, You
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  know, it won't cost me any more money to tool up a very beautiful fender.
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  So why don't you stay late tonight and make this fender beautiful?
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  Cause you're not there yet.
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  And we all would be critical of the shapes.
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  And that's also very difficult for a stylist slash designer to do the
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  work because everyone's a critic.
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  They come in and say, that's just not right.
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  But then they think it's beautiful.
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  And the person may have bad taste.
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  The executives may not get where they're going, et cetera, et cetera.
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  I really came to appreciate how difficult it is to make a shape beautiful.
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  And that makes me appreciate all the more an E type.
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  The covered headlight E types don't have a bad angle.
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  But on the same effect, we're all used to seeing C4 Corvettes and we're
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  tired of seeing C4 Corvettes, maybe, but that shows the skill level of GM's
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  design studio, that there is really not a bad angle on a C4 Corvette.
• 11:12
  You're so used to it that you may not appreciate it, but if you were
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  to drop that car in the 1940s into a car show, people would go crazy.
• 11:18
  It takes a lot of skill to have a car that looks beautiful from all angles.
• 11:22
  I was working at Subaru prior to Mazda when the first Subaru XT.
• 11:26
  I remember this is like it was yesterday.
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  We walked into the warehouse and the XT was facing a sideways.
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  We saw the profile view of the XT and we went crazy.
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  Cause a Subaru XT in 1985 model, 1986 model in side
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  view, profile view is not ugly.
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  It's actually pretty interesting looking car for 1985.
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  The minute you walk to the front three quarter, the whole thing.
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  Drops like a house of cards again, it's very difficult to make a
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  three dimensional object gorgeous.
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  And you have to appreciate the skill of what it takes.
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  And there's very few people know what they can do.
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  There's not a, there's probably not a hundred guys in the world and women
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  that can do three dimensional shapes that are gorgeous that has nothing
• 12:04
  to do with engineering or how cars drive, but just on their sheer look
• 12:07
  in some ways, the automotive industry is like the women's shoe business.
• 12:10
  It has to look great to sell and cars don't look great.
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  Don't sell.
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  I haven't thought about the XT in a long time.
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  And it reminds me that visually it's a precursor to the
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  SVX similar sort of design.
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  It might not have been thought of that way, but I kind of put
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  those links in the chain together.
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  Sometimes when I see a car and go, it has heritage right there.
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  So it's kind of funny and you don't see XTs ever on the road.
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  I mean, if they even exist anymore, for that matter.
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  You said you started at Subaru and then went to Mazda.
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  How did you go from growing up in the Carolinas to suddenly finding
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  yourself in design studios in California and things like that?
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  What was that transition like?
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  How did you get your way in?
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  I'll leave with a statement.
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  It's very difficult to get into the automotive industry.
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  Or at least it was in the eighties and it still kind of is, but once you're
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  in, it's pretty easy to move around.
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  I went to Georgia tech to learn how to design race cars or to
• 13:01
  continue my education in chassis and suspension and race car designing
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  to punctuate that statement.
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  Now the Miata is the most raced car in the world because there's a great
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  satisfaction to that circle of life.
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  Not just due to my credit, but what Mazda did with that design.
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  When I graduated in early 81, I had offers.
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  It was a great time to be an engineer, had a lot of job offers.
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  I did not really want to go to Detroit.
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  And no offense to Detroit.
• 13:20
  I did not want to be the right rear door Cadillac ashtray engineer.
• 13:25
  And there is one, and I didn't want to be that guy due to my father's not influence.
• 13:29
  He never asked me to be a doctor, do anything else, but I wanted to use my
• 13:32
  skills to help humanity in a moment of a 22 year old empathy for the world.
• 13:36
  So I went to the West coast to do cardiovascular implant research, and I was
• 13:40
  hired by, Heart valve company in Southern California in Irvine and design artificial
• 13:45
  heart valves and annual pesky rings.
• 13:47
  Other cardiovascular implants for about a year and a half.
• 13:50
  And ironically, my window in my office in that building looked out
• 13:55
  across to the Mazda design studio, but realized my heart wouldn't.
• 13:59
  That's a bad pun.
• 14:00
  My heart was not in that job, so to speak.
• 14:02
  And so left and went to Subaru when they were looking for a design engineer
• 14:06
  and did that job for a couple of years.
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  And then Mazda had an opening.
• 14:09
  Just as they were getting the studio going for a studio engineer jumped
• 14:12
  at that chance and it was amazing because the first day on the job,
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  they said, we're thinking about doing a lightweight sports car.
• 14:19
  What do you know about race cars?
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  And I said, well, I have, that's, you know, my number one fan.
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  That's what I've been my whole life is trying to do the race cars or sports cars.
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  So at that point I'd had.
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  Probably 30 European sports cars.
• 14:29
  So it was a perfect melding of opportunity and preparation for me.
• 14:34
  So did you also come up through an SAE type of program?
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  I was, I joined SAE as a student.
• 14:39
  I've actually a 40 year, 42 years now, I've been an SAE joined as a student.
• 14:44
  We didn't have formula SAE then we had mini Baja and we had student competition
• 14:49
  on relevant engineering at Georgia Tech, which was where all the schools did this.
• 14:52
  Georgia Tech, we built a hydrogen car, hydrogen powered vehicle
• 14:54
  based on a Fiat 128, which is.
• 14:57
  That's a whole nother story.
• 14:59
  Sort of like your Datsun 510, but I wasn't going to go there.
• 15:01
  Well, that's a, that's damning by harsh praise to say that they're the same.
• 15:06
  They both have a boxy shape and there's no more similarity than that.
• 15:09
  I was very heavily involved in SAE and it was a pretty strong program at tech.
• 15:15
  Although Michigan would have been better or, you know, where there
• 15:18
  was an automotive engineering, you know, master's and PhD programs.
• 15:21
  But it was a very interesting time.
• 15:23
  We were reeling off the seventies where EPA and crash protection and the insurance
• 15:27
  lobby had just crushed the industry.
• 15:29
  All the research dollars had gone into a mission certification.
• 15:32
  We had 455 cubic inch Oldsmobiles making 160 horsepower.
• 15:36
  Just a horrible time, horrible time.
• 15:38
  We had a 55 mile an hour speed limit that was clamped on the
• 15:41
  year I got my driver's license.
• 15:42
  It was not a great time, but at the same time.
• 15:44
  We have all these great British first cars that dentists and doctors had
• 15:48
  bought and then couldn't keep running.
• 15:49
  So we could buy them for nothing for a few hundred dollars.
• 15:51
  You could buy a TR six, my Jag about for 600 bucks.
• 15:55
  And I got it because it was just sitting at a repair shop and a
• 15:57
  guy couldn't afford to fix it.
• 15:58
  But it was a different world and a sidebar.
• 16:01
  So if you knew how to do your own work, restoring a car in the seventies,
• 16:04
  there was no internet, there were no manuals, there were no parts.
• 16:08
  It was a lot of blacksmithing.
• 16:09
  Luckily, English cars are blacksmith together.
• 16:11
  So you get blacksmith one back together.
• 16:13
  The NGTD that's behind me is largely built with a hammer and some pig iron.
• 16:17
  So you can fix it.
• 16:18
  pretty readily with a crescent wrench and a hammer.
• 16:20
  But you get into more sophisticated things.
• 16:21
  There wasn't a microchip or a computer in anything except my early 914s and
• 16:25
  we immediately put carburetors on them.
• 16:27
  But the 70s was a very difficult time.
• 16:29
  Now you can be very bold and buy a complicated, the car next to me here,
• 16:33
  the 964, a car with 30 year old German processors that are dying as we speak.
• 16:37
  You can listen carefully and hear them crinkling themselves to death.
• 16:40
  Yet on the internet, There's not a problem yet I've had with it that you don't
• 16:43
  find 20 guys that have already fixed it.
• 16:44
  And they're telling you how to fix it, where to get the part or where to get the
• 16:47
  will fit part from advanced auto instead of the one that Porsche wants you to buy.
• 16:51
  So it's a great time now to restore these old cars.
• 16:53
  You decided that there wasn't anything exciting as Subaru anymore and
• 16:57
  you get this opportunity at Mazda.
• 16:59
  How did that play out?
• 17:00
  Well, it was funny.
• 17:00
  I wasn't really looking for a job.
• 17:02
  Someone just told me, Hey, Mazda is looking for an engineer just for yucks.
• 17:06
  I sent the resume over, but I was very happy.
• 17:08
  Phenomenal company, 40 workweek company car.
• 17:11
  Everything was perfect about Subaru of America at Subaru Technical
• 17:13
  Center, but just sent the resume out.
• 17:15
  At Georgia Tech, they had told us that you should change jobs every two years
• 17:19
  for your first 10 years so that you experience different companies and grow.
• 17:22
  A lot of people have 20 years experience in the job.
• 17:25
  It's really one year, 19 times.
• 17:27
  They really said be aggressive until you're 30 or 32 and try to get as much
• 17:32
  experience as you can in any engineering, and they'll make you a better engineer.
• 17:35
  And so I'd been a Subaru, not quite two years, but the Mazda thing, they built the
• 17:40
  arc seven and I love the rotary engine.
• 17:42
  I was very fascinated by it and people were racing them and all that.
• 17:46
  So it was just seemed like, well, let's go see what they had to say.
• 17:48
  And I'd kind of learned the Subaru world had kind of caught
• 17:51
  up to what they were doing.
• 17:52
  And we had just done the design work for cars that were coming
• 17:55
  out in a couple of years.
• 17:56
  And it wasn't going to be, it'd be five more years.
• 17:58
  We didn't need more new cars.
• 17:59
  So it's just kind of a perfect storm.
• 18:01
  But once I got there, it was perfect opportunity.
• 18:03
  It was kind of a perfect match for the, the audience, the arc seven programs.
• 18:06
  It fit with my interest.
• 18:07
  I worked, you know, 60, 70 hours a week for free, basically.
• 18:10
  Um, after the 40 hours a week, I worked because I just loved it.
• 18:13
  I had a great appetite for the work they were asking me to do.
• 18:16
  All of us felt that way.
• 18:17
  Everybody was just working their tail off because it was a dream job to be
• 18:20
  able to design, whether it was a Miata or the third gen RX 7 or the second
• 18:24
  gen RX 7, to be able to work on these cars and get paid for it was kind
• 18:27
  of a dream for all of us gearheads.
• 18:28
  So if we align the stories of some previous guests, Also from the world
• 18:34
  of SRO, you were rubbing elbows with folks like Dean case and Jim Jordan and
• 18:38
  others who have been on road fix as well.
• 18:40
  So, I mean, talk about a long history there too, at all roads lead to Mazda.
• 18:44
  It seems like, yeah, well, I mean, I think it was an attractive company
• 18:49
  from an employee standpoint, engineer.
• 18:51
  Anyway, you'd be like, I'd like to work with this company and it'd be like, where
• 18:54
  I applied to Porsche when I was a junior at Georgia tech and I got her at this.
• 18:57
  Flush letter from them saying, no, thank you.
• 18:59
  But it's, it's very, yeah, there's certain companies you'd like to work for.
• 19:03
  I was the first engineer hired by Mazda and, uh, a couple of years
• 19:06
  in, I said, okay, we need to expand.
• 19:08
  And so we, we posted the job in Detroit and in Southern California.
• 19:11
  We got like 200 resumes, all of a lot of guys from Ford and GM and
• 19:15
  Chrysler wanted to move to Detroit.
• 19:16
  You know, Newport Beach Irvine in Southern California.
• 19:19
  And I had this stack of hundreds and hundreds of resumes and I'm going
• 19:21
  through them and there's this one from this guy from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
• 19:25
  And he had an essay paper that he had written, stapled to his resume.
• 19:28
  And I go on, this guy's got enough moxie to write an essay paper on his own.
• 19:32
  He's 21, 22 years old.
• 19:34
  And he drives a Mini Cooper like the original Mini Cooper.
• 19:37
  And I'm like.
• 19:38
  Okay.
• 19:38
  We've got to interview this guy.
• 19:39
  Dean walked in the door and I said, okay, that's it.
• 19:41
  You're done.
• 19:42
  You're, you're, you're hired.
• 19:42
  There's no question.
• 19:43
  We need you.
• 19:44
  If you have a mini Cooper, you can keep it running and have a engineering degree.
• 19:47
  Where's that?
• 19:48
  So did he have long hair then?
• 19:49
  Like he does now.
• 19:51
  Now, if you Google Jack Nicholson, 1960 is what, that's what he looked like.
• 19:54
  He looked like a young Jack Nicholson.
• 19:56
  Dean told us the story of.
• 19:59
  the Miata from his perspective, but I want to get it from your perspective when I
• 20:02
  ask you some poignant questions as well.
• 20:04
  So how early or late in the Miata's birth process did you get engaged?
• 20:11
  I came in just as the first clay model.
• 20:14
  was finished.
• 20:15
  And so the first clay model was just a flyer.
• 20:18
  Let's just do a two seater.
• 20:20
  The package development underneath it was a Mazda GLC front engine
• 20:24
  rear wheel drive car, live axle, very tall engine, very tall package.
• 20:27
  When you look at the image of the first clay model and the first
• 20:30
  running prototype, very, very tall.
• 20:32
  So they needed a packaging engineer to bring that down to sports car world.
• 20:35
  But that was just more.
• 20:36
  It was really good at making a clay model and or making a running
• 20:40
  prototype of a concept to their credit.
• 20:42
  They really were brilliant in many ways about design.
• 20:44
  They would build in many cases, a running clay model fiberglass
• 20:47
  version and put it out in traffic.
• 20:49
  And I remember many times we would take the cars down to Laguna Beach
• 20:51
  and drive these rickety prototypes.
• 20:54
  Almost a kit car, but with a shell on it up and down Laguna beach.
• 20:57
  While our executives would sit at a cafe, a sidewalk and watch it in traffic.
• 21:02
  And it was really excellent because you can look at a car in a curtain viewing
• 21:06
  yard, and you get a real world view of what it looks like seeing it in traffic.
• 21:09
  You really get to see what a beautiful car looks like.
• 21:11
  So I came in just as we started building a running prototype of
• 21:15
  that first play a model, and it was commissioned by ID international
• 21:18
  automotive design owned and run by the late John shoots in out of England.
• 21:22
  And they built them on in prototype and shipped it over right hand drive.
• 21:26
  And I remember the night we unpacked it and I haven't told the story before.
• 21:29
  I actually snuck it out and drove it around Newport beat for about a half
• 21:32
  an hour at night, knowing no one can get a picture of it, realizing you're
• 21:35
  going to have British electronics and they'd never been driven before.
• 21:38
  It was a great risk.
• 21:39
  I didn't have a wreck or break the car, brought it back.
• 21:42
  And then later we took it to Santa Barbara and there's, there's a trip
• 21:44
  that's been talked about a lot where we showed that car up in Santa Barbara.
• 21:47
  So from there, the program got go ahead to go to the next phase, which
• 21:50
  would be to do a serious package.
• 21:52
  of a sports car.
• 21:53
  And that's where my work began, uh, put the engineering under the shape.
• 21:56
  And that's where the push and pull the tug of war began of Hayashi san and
• 22:01
  Yagi san, Mark Jordan, Kamatano and Shinzon all wanted a very low cowl point.
• 22:06
  The windshield wiper area wanted a very low hood line.
• 22:08
  I wanted a low belt line because the spit fire that I had, you
• 22:11
  could put your arm out the window and it would just fit your armpit.
• 22:13
  And if, and that's really important so that you don't look
• 22:16
  like you stole your dad's car.
• 22:17
  I think it's the Lexus SC 300 that even a six foot tall guy
• 22:21
  looks like he's 12 year old kid.
• 22:22
  Not flattering, nor is it fun.
• 22:24
  Low belt line, things like that.
• 22:25
  We all talked about how to get this package correct from the
• 22:28
  first clay to the second clay.
• 22:29
  And if you look at pictures of the second clay model, you'll see
• 22:31
  that It's actually really tight.
• 22:33
  It's not that glamorous of a shape.
• 22:35
  That's a tremendous accomplishment, if I may say so, for the engineering
• 22:38
  team in Japan and the work I was doing to get that tight and get it small.
• 22:42
  Along the way of getting it small, I was working on making it raceable.
• 22:45
  And that is double wishbone suspension, weight distribution
• 22:48
  inside the wheel center lines.
• 22:50
  Weight distribution, left to right, correct.
• 22:52
  All of the things that make a car tunable for racing.
• 22:55
  If you have the weight distribution and the suspension geometry is wrong
• 22:59
  in the layout stage, and you get locked into that, you can never tune that out.
• 23:03
  You can't take a live axle Camaro and make it, you can't make it a fantastic
• 23:07
  race car, you can make it competent with great tires and sway bars and
• 23:11
  lock down the springs and dampers.
• 23:12
  So the thing doesn't move, make it into a go kart and then it handles, but it's not
• 23:16
  what we were shooting for with the Miata.
• 23:17
  We were really looking for a car.
• 23:19
  That communicated lightness and nimbleness to the owner.
• 23:22
  And that starts at the design stage of the initial layout, where do the components
• 23:26
  go and what kind of space do you leave for the suspension that you need to
• 23:29
  give you the camber patterns that you want so that you can let the body roll.
• 23:32
  So you touch on something really important, the lightness and the
• 23:35
  speed, and that's the mantra of Lotus.
• 23:37
  And it's often said, you know, when you ask people, the answer is always Miata.
• 23:41
  And then the joke is the original answer was always Lotus.
• 23:44
  And when you look at the NA Miata, you see a lot of inspiration from the Elan.
• 23:49
  There's always been rumors and things like that, that Mazda bought cars and
• 23:52
  took them apart or this and that, or they were copying this and the other thing.
• 23:55
  But it sounds like you guys were starting from scratch, but did
• 23:58
  you take inspiration from Lotus?
• 24:00
  No, not, I mean, you can say that from a styling standpoint, only because
• 24:04
  there's a long hood short deck car, as is a C4 Corvette, as is a lot of cars.
• 24:08
  So proportions are there.
• 24:09
  And a lot is actually about.
• 24:11
  70 percent or 75 percent the size of a Miata.
• 24:13
  It's actually a very small, fragile car.
• 24:15
  I don't know how many thousands they sold, but it was not that greatly accepted
• 24:19
  of a car as good a design as it was.
• 24:21
  And I'm not dissing the design at all.
• 24:23
  Being a former Europa owner, I loved everything Colin
• 24:26
  Chapman did with Lotus cars.
• 24:27
  From an engineering standpoint, there's not one iota from it.
• 24:29
  So it's kind of a naive ninth grader, kind of a mentality to say
• 24:33
  that it's designed after the alarm.
• 24:34
  Did you look under the skin immediately?
• 24:36
  The Lotus Elan had the backbone chassis, uh, actually has Colin
• 24:40
  Chapman's version of McPherson struts.
• 24:42
  He had Chapman struts in the rear and just not, not anywhere near the same car.
• 24:46
  We actually, IAD.
• 24:48
  After they did the first model, we commissioned them because Mazda
• 24:51
  had no manpower to do this work.
• 24:53
  We're all working, looting hand to mouth, so to speak, with time.
• 24:55
  They asked ID to do a chassis proposal and they proposed a backbone chassis.
• 24:58
  It looked just like a Lotus Elan, and it was heavy and wrong and wouldn't
• 25:01
  have passed side impact crash testing.
• 25:03
  Didn't have the torsional rigidity that we needed for the convertible.
• 25:06
  And Elan worked because it didn't have very much of a heavy chassis.
• 25:09
  The chassis was fine because the body didn't weigh anything.
• 25:11
  The whole car is 1, 500, 1, 600 pounds.
• 25:13
  And it's hard for people to understand this, but the real feat of the NA Miata.
• 25:17
  is a thousand kilogram car that can take a 30 mile an hour crash in the front.
• 25:21
  There's not an M.
• 25:22
  G.
• 25:22
  B.
• 25:22
  R.
• 25:22
  Spitfire that close to that, particularly when they were frame on body cars,
• 25:26
  unibody car like the two 40 Z.
• 25:29
  All of those have to change as they got into the eighties and the insurance
• 25:32
  companies require that crash test.
• 25:33
  We were locked into that from day one.
• 25:35
  We had to have Third, about our crash protection.
• 25:37
  And this is a side story.
• 25:38
  We are worried about rollover protection because in 76, Cadillac said the
• 25:44
  last convertible that'll ever be made is the Cadillac El Condor Auto.
• 25:47
  You better buy this.
• 25:47
  There'll never be another convertible period.
• 25:49
  And so the Japanese had taken that to heart.
• 25:51
  And I remember they came to me and they said, can you look this up?
• 25:53
  Because I don't think we can build a convertible anymore.
• 25:56
  Literally had to read the federal motor vehicle safety standard, which is.
• 25:59
  The reams and reams of boring, boring regulations.
• 26:02
  And I got to the section on rollover protection and I fell in love with
• 26:05
  the GM lawyers for this one moment because they had petitioned subparagraph
• 26:12
  5996b that said all the things that had to happen and then there's one
• 26:14
  little clause said convertibles colon.
• 26:16
  Exempt.
• 26:17
  I copied that and faxed it to Japan and everybody was like,
• 26:19
  Oh, we can make a convertible.
• 26:21
  Funny you bring that up because I remember reading in Lee Iacocca's first
• 26:24
  autobiography where he mentions that when he gets to Chrysler and he said
• 26:27
  there hasn't been a convertible for sale for so long in the United States.
• 26:31
  And the story goes, as he writes it, then he waltzes down to the production
• 26:35
  area where they're building the LeBarons and he goes, cut the roof off.
• 26:39
  And they're like, excuse me, why do you guys just saws all the roof off?
• 26:42
  I want to see it as a convertible.
• 26:45
  And they're like, you're crazy.
• 26:46
  And then the next year there's a LeBaron convertible.
• 26:49
  It's the first reintroduced convertible in the United States since that El Dorado.
• 26:53
  And that was in the early, early eighties, right?
• 26:55
  There was a 20 year blackout period.
• 26:57
  Yeah.
• 26:58
  Although, you know, the LeBaron wasn't really, the K car was improved
• 27:02
  by having a stop that got off.
• 27:04
  No, no, no, it was not.
• 27:06
  To go back to what we were talking about before the Miata, if it isn't
• 27:09
  a copy of the Elan, which we know it isn't, it does derive its inspiration
• 27:15
  from classic British roadsters.
• 27:16
  When you look at it, you think Lotus Elan or MGB or Spitfire or whatever.
• 27:21
  It just has that appeal to it.
• 27:23
  It's I'd hate to say one of the last true roadsters, if you look at,
• 27:27
  especially when it came out, right.
• 27:29
  And we joke about this all the time, in some cases, certain cars, they're designed
• 27:34
  early and come out in the next decade.
• 27:36
  So the Miata is like the best nineties car designed in the eighties.
• 27:40
  If you think about it, how long it takes these vehicles to come to market.
• 27:43
  But if you look at everything that came before, even the Italian
• 27:46
  roadsters, like the Fiat 124 Spyder and the Alfa Duetto and things like
• 27:50
  that, they were all gone by that point where they had been sunsetted.
• 27:53
  It's the last hope for anybody that wanted a true roadster until obviously
• 27:58
  the Boxster came along many, many years later and things like that.
• 28:01
  Yeah.
• 28:01
  That's a really good point.
• 28:02
  So that being said, why flip up headlights?
• 28:05
  You're building this revolutionary car and you hang on to something that is so 80s.
• 28:11
  Well, you have to go back to the FMVSS, the headlamp height requirement, 19
• 28:16
  inches to the center or whatever it is.
• 28:18
  I can't remember the exact number.
• 28:19
  You would have to have a bug eye Sprite or a 240Z, or you had to put
• 28:23
  the headlights up where a 911 has them.
• 28:24
  And we wanted a low hood.
• 28:26
  And the RX 7 first gen had already done it.
• 28:28
  So it was just a, it was really a part spin kind of a decision.
• 28:31
  The mechanism was off the shelf, so to speak.
• 28:33
  It made the front end look great.
• 28:34
  So back to your point about making it look old when it was new, we wanted it
• 28:37
  to look five years old when it came out.
• 28:39
  That it looked classic, and that it would look the same 20 years from now.
• 28:42
  That it would still be a proper looking car, be in its own
• 28:45
  right, an attractive feature.
• 28:46
  And the same thing happened for the FD RX 7, the last generation
• 28:48
  RX 7 was Let's make a gorgeous car, just as gorgeous as it can be.
• 28:52
  Cause Ferrari never worried about what era they were making these great cars.
• 28:55
  And this, and look at the mirror.
• 28:56
  It didn't matter what year that came out.
• 28:58
  It was going to be gorgeous.
• 28:59
  So we tried to disengage ourselves from the trends.
• 29:02
  Now you look at a modern Prius and this crazy back end they've got on them.
• 29:05
  That car's going to look horrible in five years or 10 or in five minutes.
• 29:09
  However, it didn't look good to begin with.
• 29:10
  So yeah, so it's not going to age well.
• 29:12
  So we purposely, the stylists and the designers and the team were like,
• 29:16
  well, let's make this thing look.
• 29:17
  Classic when it comes out, but age well.
• 29:20
  And that comes from the classic proportions you're talking about.
• 29:22
  And the Lucy lawn, I'll say, uh, praise for the engineers that was done
• 29:26
  by an engineer as was the nine 11.
• 29:27
  And, you know, certain shapes are just naturally almost mathematically correct.
• 29:31
  And even the Jaguar E type coupe is combination of three
• 29:34
  ellipses, if you could draw it.
• 29:35
  That's the only car I can draw.
• 29:36
  Cause it's three ellipses.
• 29:37
  You can put certain standard rules of proportion into play and come
• 29:41
  up with some pretty good shapes.
• 29:42
  And that's.
• 29:43
  But the NA and the NC and of course the ND all have that same kind of proportion,
• 29:47
  short deck, long hood, low belt line.
• 29:49
  The NC put on the freshman 15 though, I mean we all know that right?
• 29:53
  Ford got their hands in that, so it's all another story.
• 29:55
  Yes, the NCs are actually great driving cars.
• 29:57
  They're amazing to drive, they're absolutely fantastic.
• 30:00
  Yeah, I've been around Laguna Seca for a bunch of hot laps in a spec
• 30:04
  Miata NC version, and it's a blast.
• 30:06
  It got heavy because Ford got involved and asked for off the shelf
• 30:09
  items, and that makes things heavy.
• 30:10
  That was the beauty of the NA, it was a thousand kilogram car.
• 30:13
  So we're going to make a thousand kilogram sports car.
• 30:15
  And it was beautiful because the RX 7 was already there.
• 30:18
  FC RX 7 existed as the 944 competitor.
• 30:21
  Like it or not, it was a great car, a lot of technology in it, drove like a dream.
• 30:25
  And for its period was attractive when it came out.
• 30:28
  And to me, you know, it had its moment in time.
• 30:30
  Bob Hall will tell you this, every product planner will tell you this,
• 30:32
  every car moves up in its price and weight as it ages, and the Miata was
• 30:37
  not exempt from that, neither was the RX 7, neither was the RAV4, everything
• 30:41
  gets bigger kind of as it grows.
• 30:43
  And that was the beauty of what happened with the ND was I said, wait a minute.
• 30:47
  This is not what needs to happen is you need to get back to the formula.
• 30:50
  And they did, you know, we were under a thousand kilograms for
• 30:53
  the NA in the non airbag spec.
• 30:55
  Well, they actually, even the airbag spec, the U.
• 30:57
  S.
• 30:57
  spec was 2168 or something.
• 30:59
  So right under 2, 200 pounds, which is a thousand kilograms.
• 31:02
  And the ninth grade physics doesn't go away.
• 31:04
  If you have a tennis ball on a fishing line, you can swing it all you want.
• 31:06
  You put a brick on that fishing line.
• 31:08
  You can't turn the corner.
• 31:09
  It doesn't matter how much you love your GTR.
• 31:12
  It is a very heavy car to ask to go around corners.
• 31:15
  I teach driving schools at the tracks in the Southeast.
• 31:18
  We love the GTRs, but it's a whole lot different action around the track than a
• 31:22
  Miata or an MR2 or, you know, some of the lightweight car at that time at Mazda.
• 31:26
  Like you said, there was a lot of rotary action going on, right?
• 31:29
  You still had the FC and you had the FD coming out and other vehicles.
• 31:33
  So why put A British like, Qazi inspired, twin cam four cylinder
• 31:39
  in the Miata and not a rotary.
• 31:41
  Who made that decision?
• 31:42
  That's an excellent question.
• 31:43
  The team in California, we've fought for three or four main features.
• 31:46
  Had to be front engine rear wheel drive.
• 31:48
  Had to be convertible.
• 31:49
  It had to be a four cylinder engine.
• 31:51
  The rotary is great.
• 31:53
  Did not have the character we were looking for.
• 31:55
  We wanted the noisy communicative vibration of a twin cam Porsche
• 32:00
  like an Alfa Romeo would have.
• 32:01
  And we had Alfa 2000s that had great engines.
• 32:03
  We all loved their five speeds.
• 32:04
  All of that was great.
• 32:05
  So we really wanted that character of a classic sports car.
• 32:08
  From an engineering standpoint, the centerline of a rotary engine
• 32:12
  is much higher than the crankshaft centerline of a four cylinder.
• 32:15
  So it intrudes in the bell housing and the firewall area such that the HVAC
• 32:19
  system is very difficult to package.
• 32:20
  I made a drawing, I packaged a 12A, And one of my layouts for the
• 32:24
  Miata, and it fit, it's all fine.
• 32:26
  But you pick up three or four inches in the center under the bell housing.
• 32:29
  And now the clutch and flywheel are where now the radio is in the Miata.
• 32:33
  It also messes with the center of gravity.
• 32:35
  Couple of things happened.
• 32:36
  The RX 7 FD had this phenomenal low hood line, and that's
• 32:40
  what the rotary can give you.
• 32:41
  And that was where we were going with the NA Miata.
• 32:43
  Great.
• 32:43
  Let's do a low hood line.
• 32:45
  But we did it with a four cylinder, which was actually, it was a lot of
• 32:48
  work to try to get that to happen with a low cowl point windshield wiper area
• 32:52
  and a low hood line with a four cylinder was very difficult, but the rotary
• 32:55
  character to the summarize of the team, Bob Hall, Tom Montana, myself, Mark
• 32:59
  Jordan, all of us, uh, Jim Kilburn.
• 33:01
  We all were like, this has to be a four cylinder Raspi note car.
• 33:05
  Another point is naturally aspirated rotary engines have really good power,
• 33:08
  but the torque curve is dead flat.
• 33:10
  And you don't feel even the, uh, normally naturally aspirated FC arc sevens are
• 33:16
  very, very fast, but it didn't feel fast.
• 33:18
  It's like going down an elevator.
• 33:19
  Once you accelerated, you kind of didn't feel.
• 33:21
  And in the Miata, it was purposely tuned so that the torque curve
• 33:25
  has an ever increasing slope.
• 33:26
  Your inner ear is constantly getting pulled to another degree of acceleration.
• 33:31
  And it makes you think you're a lot faster than you are.
• 33:33
  But it's very entertaining and very rewarding.
• 33:35
  An 8 second or 9 second 0 60 feels a lot faster than it is because your
• 33:39
  inner ear is getting the satisfaction of every increasing acceleration,
• 33:43
  millisecond by millisecond.
• 33:44
  Rotary engine really doesn't deliver that in a naturally aspirated sense.
• 33:48
  You said earlier you're not an artist, maybe akin to styling of the Volvo 850.
• 33:53
  Not to talk about Volvo, but we can go there.
• 33:55
  Straight edge.
• 33:56
  Right.
• 33:58
  My daughter could draw a 50, but that's okay.
• 34:01
  That aside, and you are an artist, right?
• 34:03
  If you look at the Miata, it is a gorgeous design.
• 34:06
  It's timeless.
• 34:07
  The FDR seven, even more.
• 34:08
  So you can take that car today, show up at a car show.
• 34:11
  And people go, I don't know what year this is from, even though it's
• 34:13
  from 1993, the same is true of the Mark four Supra and the Audi R8.
• 34:16
  There's a lot of designs that are just timeless.
• 34:19
  But when you look at the original Miata and maybe the NB, you would see the flaws.
• 34:24
  What are some things about the Miata that just irritate you that
• 34:27
  maybe you had to compromise on that you had wished were different or
• 34:30
  you had planned to be different?
• 34:31
  I'll have to say, Eric, this sounds like I've drank the Kool
• 34:34
  Aid many times over, but there's not a thing about it I don't love.
• 34:37
  I drive a BRG every day and I look back at it every time I walk away from it.
• 34:41
  And there's not an angle to my C4 Corvette Comet.
• 34:44
  There's not an angle about it I don't like.
• 34:46
  And the MB actually, in its own right, was excellent.
• 34:48
  If you're going to do fixed headlights and move a car forward,
• 34:51
  it's actually a better car.
• 34:52
  Not necessarily a better Miata, but it's a better car.
• 34:54
  It's the same car underneath, essentially.
• 34:56
  Those two are very satisfying shapes to me.
• 34:59
  Drove the first, uh, it was a service prototype in, uh, gosh, this would
• 35:03
  have been April of 89, three months before the official introduction.
• 35:06
  I got my hands, I was at a SCCA event and I was invited to speak and Mazda
• 35:11
  had delivered one of the service cars because they put those out to the
• 35:13
  service training centers early and they trailered it to this autocross event and
• 35:17
  they let me take it around the track.
• 35:19
  And I'll never forget, I had a passenger, Vince Tittle was with me, we get in
• 35:22
  the car and we go up to this J turn, uh, you know, like I'm Probably a 30
• 35:27
  mile an hour entry and then whatever you want to do on the outside.
• 35:30
  I'd never driven the car before.
• 35:31
  I'd never driven any production Miata.
• 35:33
  This is the first one anyone had seen in the U S I was this sweeping
• 35:36
  left turn with a real sharp apex.
• 35:39
  And I went into it full throttle and probably 50 miles an hour in second
• 35:43
  lifted the back end, stepped out three degrees, like you expect it to nail the
• 35:47
  apex, stop on the gas and the thing took a set and shot corner out was perfect.
• 35:52
  And it was like, this car is perfect.
• 35:54
  It was unbelievable.
• 35:55
  Well, it was.
• 35:55
  The weird science movie kind of moment of wow, they took
• 35:58
  this two dimensional object.
• 35:59
  We all drew this three dimensional clay model and with the brilliance
• 36:02
  of Mazda engineers turned it into the dream because we made a laundry
• 36:05
  list of what it should be like.
• 36:06
  It's one thing to say, here's the beachfront property.
• 36:08
  I want a three level modern house along the lines of falling
• 36:11
  water by Frank Lloyd Wright.
• 36:12
  There's another thing to actually get that to actually make that
• 36:15
  happen and Mazda made it happen to your point of what would I change?
• 36:18
  The only thing I didn't like about it was the ship knob.
• 36:20
  Because the Mazda guys were so good at NVH and they could have made that
• 36:23
  car very Lexus quiet as Toyota does.
• 36:26
  They were very much a stickler, had been dinged in the past about
• 36:29
  vibrations to the shift handle.
• 36:30
  So they put this half a pound shift knob on it and it, that was the only thing
• 36:34
  I could find a fault with, is that it would, that was just a little heavy.
• 36:37
  The rest of the car is perfect.
• 36:38
  You say yourself, it puts a smile on your face.
• 36:41
  That you see the success of the Miata, especially in amateur racing
• 36:45
  and all the, you know, Miata cups and MX5 cups and things like that,
• 36:48
  that have existed over the years.
• 36:50
  But when you walk through the paddock and you see a Miata that's been converted,
• 36:54
  has been modified, has all these things that they've come up with, do you
• 36:57
  kind of scratch your head and go, why?
• 36:59
  Or does it upset you?
• 37:01
  You just kind of like let it roll.
• 37:03
  I mean, that's your baby, right?
• 37:04
  It's the Miata.
• 37:04
  And then you just said the suspension's perfect.
• 37:07
  And here they are throwing it away, going, ah, that stuff is junk.
• 37:10
  This is what you really need.
• 37:11
  Well, there are a lot of people that are messing up the suspension with that.
• 37:14
  And in my, my book, uh, I wrote about how not to mess the car up.
• 37:18
  As far as the customizing and all that, when we, when we designed the car, we
• 37:21
  literally, Eric said, we're designing this car for the guy cutting grass.
• 37:25
  500 bucks to buy me out of the blue car behind me is my son's car.
• 37:29
  We got for 500 bucks.
• 37:30
  He got it when he was 12 and he fixed it up and drove it when he, since he was 16.
• 37:33
  And that's that fifth owner is who we wanted the car to have
• 37:36
  because we got cars that way.
• 37:37
  So we said, we need this car to be that fourth, fifth owner guy or girl.
• 37:41
  They get this thing for working at McDonald's for X dollars an hour
• 37:45
  can afford to buy this entry level car when they're a teenager in high
• 37:47
  school, whatever they do with it.
• 37:48
  I think it's fantastic.
• 37:49
  Some of the creative stuff's amazing.
• 37:50
  I'm not really that much a fan of 10 degrees, negative camber, but
• 37:53
  other than some of the things.
• 37:55
  And it's fine.
• 37:56
  It's expression.
• 37:57
  When we had our British cars in the 70s and 60s, we were
• 38:01
  just trying to keep them alive.
• 38:02
  We did not have any time to be creative.
• 38:04
  Um, now, here we have a car that, to be honest, don't break.
• 38:07
  So what are you going to do with it?
• 38:07
  Well, let's modify it.
• 38:08
  I'm all for it.
• 38:09
  Everyone has different tastes.
• 38:11
  If I was 30, I might have a lot more to say about it.
• 38:13
  But being twice that, I'm kind of like, I see what everybody's
• 38:16
  expressing themselves.
• 38:17
  I think it's great.
• 38:17
  I meant even in the spec series, right?
• 38:19
  Where it's like, thou shalt use this suspension.
• 38:21
  And it feels like sacrilege, right?
• 38:23
  Oh, well, no, I get that for spec.
• 38:25
  So for racing, I'm more of the 60s Grand Prix, where you
• 38:28
  just do the best you can do.
• 38:29
  And the rules are very loose.
• 38:30
  And it's a very short rule book.
• 38:32
  Spec series, though, you have to either cheat really well or
• 38:38
  drive really much like an idiot.
• 38:40
  And be really aggressive or just be really talented, but the spec series is there.
• 38:44
  I mean, we saw that with the Dotsons and all that stuff as it began,
• 38:47
  where you have a spec series.
• 38:49
  And I understand the spirit of what a spec series is trying to do.
• 38:51
  So your question was more of clamping down the creativity of
• 38:55
  how this design could be changed.
• 38:56
  Or maybe changing it in such a way that goes against what you initially designed.
• 39:01
  Like the car actually handles worse than you intended it to.
• 39:04
  A lot of people have an egregious reaction.
• 39:06
  They've got a really stiff springs and really high sway bars because
• 39:09
  they have terrible camber patterns.
• 39:10
  And when you have a BMW three series that has semi trailing arms and comparison
• 39:14
  struts, yeah, you need to clamp that down.
• 39:16
  Don't let the darn thing roll because the camber patterns are terrible.
• 39:18
  And then the oddest case is we designed it to have.
• 39:20
  Very good camber patterns.
• 39:21
  And the journalists always talk about how much body roll, even the Indy
• 39:24
  has body roll communicates to the driver that tells your inner ear.
• 39:27
  You're in a corner and it's how you communicate back to the driver.
• 39:30
  Another 10th of a degree of role tells you you're now closer to the limit
• 39:34
  of the suspension or your adhesions.
• 39:36
  It's a way you communicate to the driver.
• 39:38
  Now a race driver doesn't need that level of communication is trying to get
• 39:41
  more and more traction and acceleration and the corners, but ultimate G force
• 39:45
  is not what the Street goes for and I think mature enthusiasts know that
• 39:49
  what's good for the racetrack is completely wrong for the street and
• 39:52
  the Miata is designed and delivered as a street car as are most 9 11's and 9
• 39:57
  14's and 9 44's and all the sports cars that we love all come designed to be
• 40:01
  driven on the street because otherwise you can't sell 40, 000 of the year.
• 40:04
  Case in point, the S 2000 Honda.
• 40:06
  was over damped and over sprung.
• 40:08
  I think if you did a statistical study, very few male owners
• 40:11
  would have kidney stones of s two thousands because they were so rough.
• 40:15
  Everything was shaken out of you.
• 40:16
  It was not a pleasant car to live with, but it was very fast, great,
• 40:19
  beautiful engine, one of the best engines ever made and great performance
• 40:23
  on the track for the journalists to print really good articles about.
• 40:26
  And that's fine.
• 40:27
  They placed it above the Miata in that respect, but not a great car to live with.
• 40:30
  That's a fair statement.
• 40:31
  Unfair statements would probably be all the memes and jokes and things that go
• 40:34
  along with Miata ownership, but we're going to skip all those and answer a
• 40:39
  very important question that a lot of people don't seem to know the answer to.
• 40:43
  A, is it Miata?
• 40:45
  B, is it MX 5?
• 40:46
  And if it is Miata, what does Miata even mean?
• 40:50
  Well, if no one knows the story, it could be Unos Roadstar.
• 40:52
  So in Japan, it's the Unos, MX 5 in Europe.
• 40:56
  Uh, it'll always be a Miata to me.
• 40:57
  Yeah.
• 40:58
  So Miata is a ride by master is a great product planner and bless him.
• 41:02
  He was three beers into reading the German dictionary one night and
• 41:05
  found old high German for reward prize is the word Miata, M I A T A.
• 41:11
  And he said, yeah, that's a good name.
• 41:12
  And we tested it.
• 41:13
  Uh, we Mazda tested it.
• 41:14
  It sounded Italian to the focus groups should sold.
• 41:17
  Call it a Miata.
• 41:18
  There you go.
• 41:19
  We had on the clay models.
• 41:20
  If you see pictures.
• 41:21
  One of the early clay models had 1600s as the name.
• 41:24
  It was the Mazda 1600s, which is an ancient name to put on a car, but
• 41:29
  that's what we wanted to call it.
• 41:30
  But that's why we were engineers and not product planners.
• 41:33
  Yeah.
• 41:33
  Like Nissan and the fair lady, 2000 and stuff like that.
• 41:37
  Like Bluebird.
• 41:37
  How would you like your Bluebird to the other racetrack?
• 41:39
  Yeah, so what does the MX stand for for those that don't know?
• 41:43
  Well, MX is Mazdas.
• 41:44
  The X is like rx, and MX is just a, it's a moniker.
• 41:48
  There may actually be a whole dossier somewhere.
• 41:51
  There's a big report on what MX stands for, and I, it's in Japanese,
• 41:54
  so I didn't read it, but it's set.
• 41:57
  I'm sure something like more, better, best, and X for excellence.
• 42:01
  But there's MX, that's kind of the sports car series for Mazda.
• 42:05
  I read somewhere that the X stood for experimental, going
• 42:07
  back to some of the early cars, but whatever, who knows, right?
• 42:11
  Could be, yeah, I, so to me, P729 is what the car is to me, and my license plate
• 42:16
  actually on my BRG is P729, and that's what the car, that's our project number,
• 42:20
  that was our secret project number, so to me, the car will always be a P729.
• 42:24
  The N A anyway.
• 42:25
  The N E, if there is one, what do you think?
• 42:28
  What's the fifth generation of the Miata look like in your imagination?
• 42:33
  Is it going to be an E V?
• 42:34
  Is it even going to exist?
• 42:35
  Is it going to be slightly larger than the N D?
• 42:38
  It'll never be an E V, so let's throw that away.
• 42:40
  E V is like listening to your favorite song on mute.
• 42:45
  That's a great way to put it.
• 42:47
  That's what I think of VVs and I've driven Tesla Model S's a lot of times.
• 42:51
  The Tesla's, it's great, but you kind of get bored with them after the fifth time
• 42:53
  you've done a zero to 60 in four seconds.
• 42:55
  Like, okay, that's fun, but there's no communication whatsoever.
• 42:57
  So the Miata being a communicative device needs a four stroke engine.
• 43:01
  So let's keep it at that way.
• 43:03
  I've gotten in charge of this.
• 43:04
  Let's say, um, knowing the Mazda people, I think they learned the lesson with the
• 43:08
  NC and the ND that lighter is better.
• 43:10
  And at some point it's kind of like this thing is perfected.
• 43:14
  You look at the Corvette, the C5 chassis.
• 43:16
  was perfected.
• 43:16
  The C six is the C five of the new bodies and the C four actually
• 43:19
  set the stage for the C fives.
• 43:20
  At some point you've got this excellent chassis.
• 43:22
  The N D is so good.
• 43:24
  You don't need to spend 100 million retooling yet another suspension design.
• 43:29
  And so the question is, how long do you go before you rebody it?
• 43:32
  And that's always the question.
• 43:33
  You watch sales.
• 43:34
  And you think when it needs to be refreshed and you refresh it a little
• 43:37
  bit, and then you do a major rebody at some point again, I'm not in charge,
• 43:41
  but I think you see it more on the lines of let's take this great chassis.
• 43:44
  That's excellent.
• 43:45
  Even in the modern world.
• 43:46
  This is a 6 seconds, 0 to 60 car.
• 43:47
  So what more do you need than all that?
• 43:49
  And it does the crash protection.
• 43:50
  It does all the things you have to have.
• 43:52
  It's still a 200, 000.
• 43:53
  My son's blue car out here is 310, 000 miles on the car.
• 43:57
  Already it's evolved to be a phenomenal device for transportation.
• 44:01
  So I think now it comes down to design and styling.
• 44:03
  And so how do you keep modern with that?
• 44:05
  I mean, there's some beautiful cars out here in that category.
• 44:07
  The, the current BMW Z4, particularly the hardtop version is a gorgeous
• 44:12
  proportions and the ND is also gorgeous.
• 44:14
  And that was so difficult to do.
• 44:16
  The team that did that, Derek and the team are to be commended because that.
• 44:19
  It's like let's freeway gone with the wind or something is how you come to that.
• 44:24
  And I think they did a phenomenal job again, a car without a bad angle on it.
• 44:27
  So I'm a little bit more partial to the Miata's close cousin, the Fiat, as I
• 44:33
  like to call it, the Fiat 124 Abarth.
• 44:36
  What do you think of that re skinned, re imagined You know, it offended me
• 44:41
  a lot less than I thought it would.
• 44:43
  I'd say I drove it.
• 44:44
  I didn't like, I don't like turbo engines because they're non
• 44:47
  linear power delivery devices.
• 44:48
  And with a manual transmission, you get a lot of non linear power.
• 44:51
  It's hard to apex a corner at full song with non linear power.
• 44:54
  So I wasn't really pleased with the visceral nature of driving one.
• 44:58
  The way it looked, I was like, you know what?
• 45:00
  That's actually not an ugly car.
• 45:01
  It actually is a pleasant looking vehicle.
• 45:04
  It's not a Miata, and I think it's fine.
• 45:06
  The whole point of this, we'll go back to a sidebar here.
• 45:09
  When the first NA Miata got the automatic transmission, all the purists cried.
• 45:13
  And we said, Guys, if it keeps the five speed cars on the road, because
• 45:17
  now Mazda sells 5, 000 extra 10, 000 or 20, 000 extra cars, you've
• 45:21
  got to keep the product alive.
• 45:22
  When this nine 64 next to me was sold, Porsche only sold 4, 000 cars that year of
• 45:27
  nine 11s, 4, 000 cars will kill a company.
• 45:29
  The NSX died there.
• 45:30
  FDR seven died out of low volume.
• 45:32
  You have to keep volume up at the end of the day.
• 45:34
  It's a business.
• 45:35
  If the Fiat.
• 45:37
  Keeps that platform going and makes it profitable for all concerned.
• 45:41
  Then it keeps that platform going and that's good for everybody.
• 45:44
  And unfortunately they put a pin in the one 24 at the moment.
• 45:47
  Although I hear rumor that they might be reintroducing it as the Alfa Romeo
• 45:51
  duetto version, many of us is just.
• 45:53
  The spider, I've seen some concept pictures of it.
• 45:56
  It's pretty cool.
• 45:57
  There also lingers that question of why.
• 46:00
  Yeah, well, yeah.
• 46:01
  So for the purist, that's the problem.
• 46:03
  It's like my, my son is an intern with Apple and he knows way too
• 46:07
  much about iPhones and computers.
• 46:09
  The purist is so close to this, that we can't suspend disbelief long enough
• 46:12
  to think that a fiat is something other than a reskinned endemiata.
• 46:16
  And that would happen with any alpha version of it.
• 46:19
  Again, We'll go back to 1900 when people bought chassis and re skinned them with
• 46:22
  some beautiful, you know, Duesenbergs and things like that later on came from coach
• 46:26
  makers, knowing how to re skin chassis.
• 46:28
  Maybe there's a version of that in the modern world for these niche cars.
• 46:31
  Ford Mach E is selling, you know, I think I saw hundreds
• 46:34
  of thousands of these things.
• 46:35
  So that's what they want.
• 46:36
  The Fiero died when it got under a hundred thousand units a year.
• 46:40
  You have to keep volumes up.
• 46:41
  The Miata is profitable at 20 to 40, 000 units a year.
• 46:44
  And so that's a nice niche, but that comes from Mazda knowing
• 46:47
  how to build cars really well.
• 46:48
  And do it on a shared assembly line, which GM and others don't do.
• 46:52
  I also think it's helpful that Mazda invested so much in their
• 46:55
  motor sports program, right.
• 46:57
  Especially with, you know, help from people like Dean and Jim and others
• 47:00
  who were involved in those programs and getting them off the ground.
• 47:02
  Because when you talk about the Fiero, you're right.
• 47:04
  It was a great car in its last two years, right?
• 47:07
  You always kind of go, when they finally got it right, they stopped
• 47:10
  selling it, which is always the case with any sports car.
• 47:13
  Look at the 9 44 with the non turbo S twos, everybody goes, it was amazing.
• 47:17
  Right.
• 47:18
  But then they got rid of it.
• 47:18
  You know, things like that.
• 47:19
  Mazda invested a lot in the motorsport side of it and grassroots
• 47:23
  motorsports has kept the Miata.
• 47:24
  The NA Miata is around now for 32 years.
• 47:27
  Right.
• 47:27
  I mean, they keep going strong.
• 47:29
  I wonder if some of those cars, not just by volume would have
• 47:32
  perpetuated if they had had the backing of motorsport behind them.
• 47:36
  They might have.
• 47:36
  And then, then the engineering wants to say, but you, could
• 47:39
  you really make a Fiero race?
• 47:40
  Cause you look at the solstice, they tried to make a solstice series.
• 47:43
  And the Solstice was not a sports car, it was a very nice shape with no soul with
• 47:47
  a bunch of Cavalier parts underneath.
• 47:48
  So it didn't work.
• 47:50
  But the question is, did it work in Europe?
• 47:51
  Because it was the Vauxhall VXR as well as the Opel GT.
• 47:55
  So here's GM selling against itself.
• 47:58
  That was a big problem with GM.
• 48:00
  It's like, we're going to introduce the same car with five different
• 48:03
  badges that looks five different ways.
• 48:04
  And everybody goes, Oh, the Saturn Sky and the Solstice and the Opel and
• 48:08
  the Vauxhall are all the same car.
• 48:09
  And now their volume numbers are down artificially If you cumulatively looked
• 48:14
  at all of it, it actually sold pretty well on the global market, right?
• 48:18
  You know, but that makes the accountants and the actuarials happy
• 48:20
  because they got volumes and they had to amortize that tooling somehow.
• 48:24
  True.
• 48:24
  But the problem is in Mazda's case, they went, we have one Miata and
• 48:28
  we sell the same Miata everywhere.
• 48:30
  It's like Catholic church.
• 48:31
  You know what you're getting every year.
• 48:34
  I like that.
• 48:35
  Yeah, you're right.
• 48:36
  It's all, it's fine.
• 48:37
  One menu, but, but, Yeah, Order McDonald's, uh, you know, Big
• 48:41
  Mac is the same world round.
• 48:43
  But, you know, when we were small, like Mazda, and have to amortize the
• 48:47
  tooling, we did the, the story for the Inaneata, the whole program was,
• 48:51
  development cost was 123 million.
• 48:53
  So multiply that by Two and a half, three, you know, to get that number.
• 48:56
  That's really a cheap program, but you've got to amortize it over small
• 48:59
  volumes, maybe 50, 60, 000 cars a year.
• 49:02
  That's a difficult thing.
• 49:03
  And the end of the day, you know, Ferrari builds 200 cars and charges back in the
• 49:07
  day, back in the sixties and seventies, they built 200 of something, and maybe
• 49:10
  they'd have 4, 000 of a Dino or something.
• 49:12
  So very low volumes.
• 49:14
  And that just doesn't fly in the modern world.
• 49:16
  So back to the alpha, if alpha could take an Indy chassis or an
• 49:20
  Indy chassis, wherever it comes.
• 49:21
  To be and make a car of it in low volumes better for the market.
• 49:24
  A friend of mine has a fiat, as you will loves it, and because it's different,
• 49:28
  it's a matter of what you're looking for.
• 49:29
  In my case, for me personally, I'm 0.01 percenter of the market.
• 49:34
  Nobody's gonna build a car for me 'cause I'm driving all these old
• 49:36
  things with no computers or whatever.
• 49:38
  But the mass market, the 90th percentile customer is maybe coming out of
• 49:43
  a Civic or a WRX or something, a different kind of car, and they aren't
• 49:47
  gonna be that specialized for a two seat sports car with a small trunk.
• 49:51
  There are compromises with the Miata having been such a high volume vehicle.
• 49:55
  If you look at its entire lifespan, it keeps it out of the realm and out of
• 50:00
  the reach of ever being a collector car.
• 50:02
  So when you compare it to the old Fiats and the Alfa Romeos and the
• 50:05
  Ferraris and the Triumphs and MGs, it'll never attain that status
• 50:09
  because there's just too many of them.
• 50:11
  And unlike 911s where people converted them into race cars and
• 50:15
  there's fabulous 911 race cars out there that are collectible.
• 50:18
  Some people are converting them back to street cars now and things like that.
• 50:22
  I don't ever see that happening with the Miata.
• 50:25
  Prices are starting to go up.
• 50:26
  Hagerty's index is rising for the NAs.
• 50:29
  Not that I think that needs to happen.
• 50:31
  Again, I like it that everybody used to have a cheap one.
• 50:33
  Most of my kids have had a Miata and we got them all pretty cheap.
• 50:36
  I like that they're low priced.
• 50:37
  I don't know, will they ever be collectible?
• 50:39
  That's a hard thing.
• 50:40
  I'm the wrong guy to talk about collectibility because some of the
• 50:43
  auction houses and cars that are artificially jacked up in their prices,
• 50:46
  just cause somebody says it's worth that.
• 50:47
  I've seen 500, that, you know, we used to throw away for 500 bucks.
• 50:52
  So it's kind of like.
• 50:53
  But if you turn that over, car produced at the same time, the FDR X7 is
• 50:58
  definitely a collector vehicle, right?
• 51:00
  And maybe due to its rarity.
• 51:01
  So your comment is that damned by its popularity, that's fine.
• 51:05
  The metric of, is it collectible or not really doesn't matter to me.
• 51:08
  And in fact, as often been said, the five or six of us that developed the
• 51:12
  original Miata from product planning, Bob Hall in design, Tom and Mark Jordan,
• 51:15
  Chin and Yagi san, Hashi san, and myself in the engineering and Dean Cates, we
• 51:19
  just wanted a dozen cars to be built.
• 51:21
  It could have failed the next year.
• 51:22
  We really didn't care.
• 51:23
  We just wanted one for ourselves.
• 51:25
  So the fact that there's over a million of them on the road is great.
• 51:28
  It means we get parts really easy for the ones we have.
• 51:30
  And I feel you there.
• 51:31
  And I bring this up only because in recent times coming from a BW
• 51:35
  Porsche Audi family, I see the same thing with Mark 1 and Mark 2 GTIs.
• 51:39
  And people are like, Oh, 27, 000 for my Mark 1 GTI.
• 51:43
  I'm like, get out of here.
• 51:44
  They made a million of them.
• 51:45
  Yeah.
• 51:46
  Still junk.
• 51:47
  Right.
• 51:48
  Only jacking up the value for nostalgia purposes.
• 51:50
  It's not a 911.
• 51:52
  Same is true of a 945.
• 51:54
  It was the commodity Porsche, just like the 308 Ferrari,
• 51:58
  there was a million of them.
• 51:59
  You're like, all right, fine.
• 52:00
  That's great for the enthusiast because there will always be an
• 52:04
  enthusiast base for cars like that.
• 52:05
  And you'll continue to see them at the track alongside of C4 E30 and E36 BMWs
• 52:13
  and everything that we love about.
• 52:15
  Going to those types of events.
• 52:17
  So the Biana has its home and it, I think it always will.
• 52:19
  And then that makes me happy as one of the original team members, because it
• 52:22
  means that it'll be the proletariat's car.
• 52:25
  It'll be a car people can enjoy and keep trading and keep passing along.
• 52:29
  Did the math one night.
• 52:30
  There's been over a million, say a million, 1.
• 52:32
  2 million built, but they've all been traded.
• 52:34
  So there's probably like 3 million.
• 52:36
  Enthusiasts in the world that have enjoyed a Miata.
• 52:39
  That's a great footprint.
• 52:39
  I don't know.
• 52:40
  This is an amazing thing That's what we wanted We wanted everybody to enjoy
• 52:43
  this great little concept of a car and in our world It was a distillation back
• 52:47
  to the original design team one day We sat down and said what kind of cars
• 52:49
  have you had and everybody talked and so we had a coon tie So I had a Val
• 52:53
  Alunga's You know, some phenomenal cars.
• 52:55
  I said it before, it's like we all brought our cigar box full of
• 52:57
  favorite marbles to the table and dumped all the marbles on the table.
• 53:00
  And then we picked the best marbles out of the batch.
• 53:02
  And it was, Oh, I would have the weight distribution of the on the,
• 53:05
  you know, the low belt line of the Spitfire, sheer gorgeousness of the
• 53:09
  XKE, the Vallelunga's proportion for a small car, all of these things.
• 53:13
  Let's put this into one car in Mazda.
• 53:15
  Japan was 10, 000 miles away and we didn't have internet.
• 53:17
  We had faxes.
• 53:18
  So we were kind of, we were just left.
• 53:19
  It was like the teacher was out of the room in the sky.
• 53:21
  Kids got to play in the classroom.
• 53:23
  Uh, we just got on the chalkboard and just made up this thing.
• 53:24
  Sent it over to Japan and they caught the fever and said,
• 53:26
  Wow, this actually could work.
• 53:27
  And then it took off.
• 53:29
  And they engineered, you know, the final bits and put the
• 53:31
  thing together and tuned it.
• 53:32
  And to that point, Mazda gets so much credit because it's
• 53:35
  like the last generation MR2.
• 53:37
  I guess that would have been the third gen MR2.
• 53:39
  It was a phenomena.
• 53:39
  It was like a little 348 Ferrari.
• 53:41
  It was a beautiful little car, well evolved, no soul whatsoever.
• 53:44
  The first one was a transformer car.
• 53:46
  It was a very period car, full of Corolla parts, had no soul.
• 53:49
  You could drift it on an entrance ramp, but it just didn't have,
• 53:53
  it wasn't connected to itself.
• 53:55
  And we wanted to avoid that Stepford wife.
• 53:57
  Literally, we use that term the Stanford wife nature of the Japanese cars that
• 54:02
  had no soul and we wanted to put a soul into the Miata and we described the
• 54:06
  best we could from our experiences from our 65 sports cars and Japan in perfect
• 54:10
  Japanese style dissected those words and got their own metrics and their own 160
• 54:16
  different exhaust systems and whatever just went through the process to make
• 54:19
  a car fit that target and have a soul.
• 54:22
  Funny you bring up the original MR2 because, you know, that goes in line with
• 54:25
  what we were talking about earlier about Japanese do have a propensity to copy and
• 54:29
  enhance, and they're very good at that.
• 54:31
  And when you look at that first gen MR2, you go fiat X one nine, except
• 54:35
  they didn't really know how to do it.
• 54:37
  The second MR2, we're not really sure.
• 54:39
  And the third one was the poor man's Elise, right?
• 54:41
  We all know that.
• 54:42
  That whole chassis was shared with Lotus or whatever, but
• 54:45
  there's a lot of that going on.
• 54:46
  But again, to your point, the Miata stood alone.
• 54:48
  It took its inspiration from those great British roadsters
• 54:51
  that we talked about earlier.
• 54:52
  I want to kind of talk about a couple other things that are important to
• 54:55
  you, which is restoring old cars.
• 54:57
  You're maintaining a fleet of older vehicles.
• 54:59
  You've.
• 54:59
  Done the revolving door of cars over the years, along with keeping up with old cars
• 55:04
  is also engine tuning and performance.
• 55:06
  And there's a lot of hocus pocus and a lot of, he said, she said, when it
• 55:10
  comes to building cars, I mean, I talk about this a lot in my student sessions
• 55:15
  that I give, you know, at HPDs and time trials, where it's like, you don't
• 55:18
  have a wind tunnel at your disposal.
• 55:20
  Are you sure that that's spoiler or air dam that you're adding that a
• 55:23
  designer like Norman put on actually is.
• 55:27
  Benefiting the car, you know, that sort of thing.
• 55:30
  So I'm sure those are pet peeves of yours as well.
• 55:32
  So I just wanted to touch on that as we progress the conversation.
• 55:35
  I agree.
• 55:36
  I just, I'm into patina now in my older years, because I've
• 55:40
  seen so many over restored cars.
• 55:42
  I remember I was at Rick Strayman's restoration shop in coastal Mesa
• 55:45
  back when I was with Milesda.
• 55:46
  And he was using Emron paint, the two part urethane paint
• 55:49
  on the drive shaft of an MGTC.
• 55:51
  And I said, nobody needs a high gloss drive shaft on an MCTC.
• 55:56
  Some guy brushed it on at the factory out of a tar bucket.
• 55:59
  Now you're overdoing it.
• 56:00
  Don't over restore a car.
• 56:01
  Actually, I love the Imperial that I bought because it had original
• 56:04
  paint, and it was in my old 914 that I wrote about in Hagerty.
• 56:07
  Dusty, chalky paint.
• 56:08
  And when I drive it, people go, Oh, that's an old 914.
• 56:10
  That's right.
• 56:10
  It's an old 914.
• 56:11
  It should be old.
• 56:12
  It's a 40 year old car.
• 56:13
  It should look that way or just me.
• 56:15
  If you're 20 and 30, you can think what you want, but when you're my
• 56:18
  age, you've seen so many restored cars that don't really look like
• 56:21
  what they did in the showroom.
• 56:22
  It doesn't bring it back.
• 56:23
  When I see them faded, With a little dust on the chrome and
• 56:26
  a little bit of taillights.
• 56:28
  That's how the cars look.
• 56:29
  And that takes me back.
• 56:31
  That takes me more back than over short cars.
• 56:33
  Rest two months are kind of cool, kind of fun to have a car that performs better
• 56:36
  than the Stockman's because the dirty little secret that's now pretty much
• 56:40
  exposed is that all these muscle cars in the sixties were horrible to drive.
• 56:43
  They didn't turn corners.
• 56:44
  They didn't stop where the darn, and they really weren't that fast.
• 56:47
  TRX SI would smoke any of them in, in a modern market.
• 56:50
  Restore modding them into, you know, better tires, better
• 56:52
  brakes, better suspensions, um, it's still getting the look.
• 56:56
  It comes down to this in my perspective.
• 56:58
  Now there's a point of idolatry with automotive shapes is that you can
• 57:03
  just idolize the way the shape looks.
• 57:04
  The way I do a C2 Corvette, split window singray or the Tornado.
• 57:09
  I love the shape.
• 57:10
  And for me having one fifth scale model of these cars, it would be 90 percent of
• 57:15
  the enjoyment of ever having it because driving some of these cars is not, driving
• 57:18
  a C2 Corvette is not a lovely experience.
• 57:20
  They're just lovely to look at.
• 57:22
  So there's a golden calf Moses moment of they're great to look at.
• 57:26
  They're not that great to own.
• 57:27
  I'm right there with you.
• 57:28
  I mean, if I had to choose, you know, if you told me, Oh, a C2 Corvette, especially
• 57:32
  a split window, I would respond and say, give me a Bowtail Riviera instead.
• 57:36
  It's a bigger car.
• 57:37
  Yeah.
• 57:37
  Yeah.
• 57:37
  It's a cool car, right?
• 57:39
  You know, and you can have a lot of fun with that and not have the whole stigma
• 57:42
  that goes along with owning a Corvette, you know, You don't have to have the
• 57:46
  old chains and the open shirt, you mean?
• 57:48
  And the new balances, right?
• 57:50
  That's right.
• 57:51
  That's right.
• 57:52
  Let's talk a little bit about tuning engines for performance.
• 57:56
  There's a lot of black magic there too.
• 57:58
  I mean, in the old days, Yeah.
• 57:59
  With a carburetor, you know, put your screwdriver to your
• 58:01
  ear, you know, things like that.
• 58:04
  It was a lot different than with a fuel injected engine.
• 58:06
  Like is in the Miata, some of these bolt ons that people advertise, I
• 58:10
  mean, you see all the time, guys like mighty car mods, the Aussies are
• 58:13
  always proving how some of this stuff, people are just wasting their money.
• 58:16
  The stock air box flows better air than, you know, your filter.
• 58:20
  Because Norman designed it that way.
• 58:22
  Yeah.
• 58:24
  And I think that switch flipped around 1990, Miata came out, the
• 58:28
  aftermarket started to decline in its ability to make cars better.
• 58:32
  And that comes from, as I said, Mazda engineers, when they went through
• 58:35
  the B series engine, put the twin cam engine on it, cross flow head, 10
• 58:38
  to a half to one compression ratio.
• 58:39
  The cams are perfect.
• 58:41
  When the cars came out, everybody tried to make cams.
• 58:43
  Everybody tried to make.
• 58:43
  Things to make it faster.
• 58:45
  It just didn't work.
• 58:45
  There was nothing to do it.
• 58:46
  We dynoed an engine and found out that it was running 11 and a half to
• 58:49
  one air fuel ratio and 7, 000 RPM.
• 58:51
  You can't do any better than that.
• 58:52
  Why chip it in the realm where the emissions were being tested.
• 58:56
  It ran stoichiometric and ran perfect air fuel ratio and made perfect
• 58:59
  emissions at part throttle at 3, 500 RPM, but you floor it at 5,
• 59:03
  000 RPM and you had a perfect map.
• 59:05
  Perfect ignition timing, perfect fuel.
• 59:07
  There was nothing to improve.
• 59:08
  There has never been a successful chip made for an A and B Miata, et cetera.
• 59:12
  Cause Mazda knew what they were doing by 1990.
• 59:15
  Everybody figured it out.
• 59:16
  Even the factory header can be improved upon, but it's a
• 59:18
  three to four horsepower change.
• 59:19
  It's not a, in the sixties, you could get 50 horsepower out of a Nova by just.
• 59:24
  Change in a manifold and put them on some mufflers.
• 59:26
  Those days are long behind us, but the aftermarket keeps churning the
• 59:30
  activity and people are very optimistic about what will make their car faster.
• 59:33
  But it really moved outward from the core of the engine to where when
• 59:38
  only two came out in 96, it was a cat back system and an air filter.
• 59:42
  And that was really all you could do to a car to make any better.
• 59:44
  And that might give you 10 percent company.
• 59:45
  I started in 94 receiving superchargers that later became
• 59:49
  Jackson racing superchargers and was picked up by Moss motors.
• 59:52
  It became from that frustration.
• 59:54
  Was the only way to make any more power was to actually force induce the engine.
• 59:58
  And I was not a fan of turbos because they're nonlinear response.
• 1:00:02
  And my, what I said previously about on a track day, when you put in 10
• 1:00:05
  percent more throttle, you should get 10 percent more power and a turbo
• 1:00:07
  will give you 20 percent more power.
• 1:00:08
  And it's really hard to hit your apexes when you can't control the
• 1:00:11
  linearity of your power delivery.
• 1:00:13
  So Eaton was making the roots for GM and Ford.
• 1:00:16
  And I went to their factory and.
• 1:00:18
  A Georgia, I was living in Atlanta at the time, went to Athens, Georgia, and
• 1:00:21
  I said, the Miata needs a supercharger.
• 1:00:23
  We actually had, I packaged one in one of my drawings for the original Miata,
• 1:00:27
  right where the power sharing pump, we were gonna put a supercharger, there's
• 1:00:30
  room for it, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:00:31
  People slammed the Miata for not having any power.
• 1:00:33
  Only explain that for a moment.
• 1:00:35
  The in a Miata came out with 116 hundred 20 horsepower.
• 1:00:38
  For insurance reasons.
• 1:00:39
  In 1986, the C-R-X-S-I in Southern California was a hundred dollars a
• 1:00:44
  month to insure for a 16-year-old.
• 1:00:46
  And that was more than the car payment bills were being affected by it.
• 1:00:48
  So Mazda said, we can't make this car go crazy.
• 1:00:51
  And Mazda, we actually met with Nationwide and State Farm and said, how do we
• 1:00:55
  keep the insurance low on this car?
• 1:00:57
  And it used to be the headlamp lid on the Miata was 18.
• 1:00:59
  The front bumper was 50 bucks or whatever.
• 1:01:01
  It was all the Made to be cheap to fix.
• 1:01:03
  So the insurance rating would be low and the cars are cheap
• 1:01:06
  to insure, which is actually an interesting story in the Miata.
• 1:01:08
  Um, the NA Miata got dinged on a zero to 60 because you have to
• 1:01:11
  shift out of second to get to 60.
• 1:01:14
  It's zero to 58.
• 1:01:15
  5 is really fast.
• 1:01:16
  It's like, I think high sevens, but that shift takes you to the 9.
• 1:01:19
  2 range.
• 1:01:20
  And for the 1.
• 1:01:21
  8, the NA8.
• 1:01:22
  They made it so that it would go over 60 in seconds.
• 1:01:25
  So you'd have to do that shift.
• 1:01:26
  And that got it down to the seven, eight range.
• 1:01:27
  I think a little bit of trivia there, right?
• 1:01:29
  Yeah.
• 1:01:30
  If it had been 150 horsepower car, it would have had to see our XSI category
• 1:01:35
  and it couldn't have been sold.
• 1:01:36
  It would not have sold at the rate because people couldn't afford it or
• 1:01:39
  only older, wealthy people, you know, it wouldn't have gotten into the group.
• 1:01:42
  We want it, which was a smaller crowd with younger people.
• 1:01:45
  What we said was let's let the aftermarket make it more powerful.
• 1:01:48
  So back to Eden, I went to them and they said, we don't make a blower small enough.
• 1:01:52
  You need a 45 cubic inch blower supercharger.
• 1:01:55
  We only make a 62 for GM.
• 1:01:58
  And I said, well, what if I paid for the tooling to make a 45 cubic inch unit?
• 1:02:01
  And they said, okay, we could take the Buick unit and cast a new housing.
• 1:02:04
  It's got the rotors down.
• 1:02:05
  You'll pay the tooling and guarantee that you'll buy 50 a month.
• 1:02:08
  We'll do it.
• 1:02:09
  And I went, well, okay.
• 1:02:10
  50 months is kind of a lot, but let's do it.
• 1:02:12
  So I threw my hat across the river and signed up for that contract.
• 1:02:16
  And we created Sieben superchargers with Jim Downing, the Mazda racer.
• 1:02:19
  And it took off with gangbusters.
• 1:02:21
  People went crazy because they were getting 40 percent more power and
• 1:02:23
  something they could bolt on in 90 minutes or a couple hours in an
• 1:02:26
  afternoon without drilling up their car.
• 1:02:27
  And it was totally reversible.
• 1:02:29
  We got a carb approved and it was a beautiful system that
• 1:02:31
  Eaton helped us engineer.
• 1:02:33
  And that was 40 percent more power.
• 1:02:35
  You get 160 horse out of your NA Miata and it became a wonderful car to drive.
• 1:02:38
  In a eight cars with a 1.
• 1:02:40
  8 liter and a Torsen and a supercharger.
• 1:02:42
  Fenneman has one.
• 1:02:42
  He drives it more than he drives a 911.
• 1:02:44
  It's actually almost as perfect car.
• 1:02:45
  And that's where the Indy has become.
• 1:02:47
  The Indy is 160, 180 horsepower, 1000 telegram range car.
• 1:02:52
  That's a really great formula.
• 1:02:53
  Short wheelbase, lightweight car with high power.
• 1:02:56
  Aftermarket ran just into a log jam when OBD2 came out.
• 1:02:59
  And aside from throwing the malfunction alive in the dash, also just, there
• 1:03:03
  was nothing to do on the inside of the engine to make more power.
• 1:03:06
  So, I have a pit stop question to ask you before we move on
• 1:03:09
  to our sort of last segment.
• 1:03:11
  You being the engineer, you're in the design room, and two drawings are
• 1:03:15
  slid to you as the decision maker.
• 1:03:17
  And one of them is the Porsche 959, and the other is the Ferrari F40.
• 1:03:22
  Which do you choose to move forward with?
• 1:03:24
  Hmm, the 959, because it can be made into a road car.
• 1:03:27
  And that's what my 964 is.
• 1:03:28
  I have a C4 964, so it's a 959 underneath.
• 1:03:32
  The 959 is a lot more difficult to make than the F40.
• 1:03:36
  The F40 is a race car, and its styling is, in my case, not as beautiful into my eye.
• 1:03:42
  Even though the 959 is very Teutonic.
• 1:03:44
  If you're asking which one would I want to develop, the
• 1:03:47
  959 would be a bigger challenge.
• 1:03:48
  The F40 is a Le Mans prototype with a body on it.
• 1:03:51
  That was a very, very well put answer.
• 1:03:54
  And I want to tell you that you are in an exclusive club of people that
• 1:03:57
  have chosen the 959 over the F40.
• 1:04:00
  So that number is not very big.
• 1:04:03
  Uh, the 959 could have air conditioning and wipers.
• 1:04:07
  The F40 barely had, I mean, it, it was.
• 1:04:10
  But that's the beauty of the F40 is it doesn't have all that stuff.
• 1:04:13
  I mean, granted, I mean, the argument is always, Same.
• 1:04:16
  The 9 59 is technologically superior.
• 1:04:19
  Yeah.
• 1:04:19
  But as I've said before, when the F 40 was introduced, it was like when
• 1:04:23
  fire was presented to the cave people.
• 1:04:25
  Right?
• 1:04:25
  Yes.
• 1:04:26
  Right.
• 1:04:26
  It's, it just lights you up inside.
• 1:04:28
  Right.
• 1:04:28
  I agree.
• 1:04:29
  I agree.
• 1:04:29
  And I've never driven an F 40, but I believe I would be faster
• 1:04:32
  around Reen in a 9 59 than an F 40.
• 1:04:35
  More than likely.
• 1:04:36
  I have a Ducati motorcycle that's way over my head and abilities
• 1:04:39
  as a street rider, I know that sometimes too much is just too much.
• 1:04:43
  And then I 59 was space age technology.
• 1:04:45
  I mean, the all wheel drive, it was based on the Audi Quattro system and a
• 1:04:49
  bunch of other things, and it's there to save you, you know, in that respect,
• 1:04:52
  compared to the F 40, which is just completely barbaric in comparison, right?
• 1:04:55
  Well, no, and that's right.
• 1:04:56
  It was, it's a race car.
• 1:04:57
  It's like, you, you can't hurt yourself in this car.
• 1:04:59
  Please try not to, but you will.
• 1:05:01
  It's funny that my, my nine 64 C4 cargo has that system in it.
• 1:05:05
  It has the four aft and lateral G sensors and the whole PDAS system
• 1:05:10
  that luckily you can defeat.
• 1:05:12
  Because it's really irritating to try to drift the car, not drift, but to even
• 1:05:16
  get the yaw angle out to three degrees.
• 1:05:18
  You can't do it.
• 1:05:18
  It will not let you get the yaw out.
• 1:05:20
  And that's 1991.
• 1:05:21
  And now the driver assist stuff drives me absolutely bonkers.
• 1:05:25
  I'd have to shut it off.
• 1:05:26
  The difference between your 964 and 959 is the 964 uses the
• 1:05:30
  synchro system from the Volkswagen.
• 1:05:32
  So it's a viscous, hauled back seat.
• 1:05:34
  Right.
• 1:05:34
  That's right.
• 1:05:35
  The 959 was the Audi Quattro.
• 1:05:36
  Quattro backwards, which is why I always joke that the 9 11 is nothing more than a
• 1:05:42
  front wheel drive with five reverse gears.
• 1:05:46
  Eric.
• 1:05:46
  I love that.
• 1:05:47
  That's excellent.
• 1:05:48
  Well, my daily driver is a 3.
• 1:05:49
  2 liter Audi Quattro wagon.
• 1:05:51
  Oh, nice.
• 1:05:52
  I haven't turned around the other way in that car.
• 1:05:54
  I'm old school.
• 1:05:55
  We've had seven coops, two of which were U are Quatros.
• 1:06:00
  Oh no.
• 1:06:00
  I owned an 80.
• 1:06:00
  I owned an 83.
• 1:06:01
  That was my car in college.
• 1:06:03
  Oh, Quatro, you're killing me.
• 1:06:05
  What a car.
• 1:06:07
  . Oh.
• 1:06:08
  We had one of those at Mazda and we just, we all fought for it.
• 1:06:10
  We all, every weekend.
• 1:06:11
  Wow.
• 1:06:11
  Anyhow, as, as you know.
• 1:06:13
  one, the anemic 165 horsepower that the 10 valve five cylinder turbo made.
• 1:06:19
  Yeah.
• 1:06:19
  It's not enough for this weight of that car.
• 1:06:21
  2, 800 pound car, 3000 pound car at the time, which is heavy.
• 1:06:24
  Oh, but what a car.
• 1:06:26
  So you mentioned earlier, you're not a big fan of EVs.
• 1:06:30
  And you know, we're talking about tasteful retro mods and things like that.
• 1:06:33
  And people are now starting to put EV power plants into some of the old cars.
• 1:06:36
  You hear about it all the time.
• 1:06:37
  The latest.
• 1:06:38
  Aston Martin abomination that's going to have a Tesla power
• 1:06:41
  plant, you know, things like that.
• 1:06:42
  I've noted that you've said before the ridiculousness of
• 1:06:45
  autonomous driving and EVs.
• 1:06:47
  I want to get your take on what we call the evolution here at Brake Fix.
• 1:06:52
  Yes.
• 1:06:53
  I like it.
• 1:06:54
  You know, I have to relax.
• 1:06:55
  I have to make room for everybody and be all inclusive for maybe, let's say
• 1:06:59
  a number, 70 percent of the people that treat a car like an appliance,
• 1:07:03
  no different than their microwave.
• 1:07:04
  Let them have their autonomous driving, but don't make every car have it.
• 1:07:07
  Because Decker can start making cars soon, you know, it's all good.
• 1:07:10
  Yeah, let's just all have taxis and Ubers.
• 1:07:12
  We don't even need cars.
• 1:07:14
  I actually rented a car in Key West out of Miami.
• 1:07:16
  I rented a Hyundai with autonomous driving and it was actually okay in traffic.
• 1:07:20
  So if I lived in L.
• 1:07:21
  A.
• 1:07:22
  I could see the entertainment value of not reading a book, but just watching the
• 1:07:25
  car do its thing as it got me to work, but I don't drive a car for community.
• 1:07:30
  I drive a car for entertainment.
• 1:07:32
  All my cars.
• 1:07:32
  I try to drive a different car every day to work so that I can keep the
• 1:07:34
  fleet going and the challenge of and you know, or the motorcycle or something.
• 1:07:39
  The motorcycle you have.
• 1:07:40
  Four axes of freedom in a car.
• 1:07:41
  You have two or three axes of freedom.
• 1:07:43
  That's the involvement.
• 1:07:44
  It's like, do you want to go dancing?
• 1:07:46
  You don't want to watch people dance on TV.
• 1:07:47
  And the point is I'd rather go dancing and that's what car
• 1:07:49
  driving is for me, it's dancing.
• 1:07:51
  The more we numb it down, I think autonomous driving is for people who
• 1:07:54
  don't like to drive and don't want to drive and see it as a necessary evil.
• 1:07:58
  And this is rather the unpublic transportation.
• 1:08:00
  Cause that's what they're trying to do.
• 1:08:01
  They're making a car into a public transport device.
• 1:08:03
  It's dislodged from a railroad track.
• 1:08:05
  Total recall foreshadowed this.
• 1:08:06
  They called it Johnny cab.
• 1:08:07
  You see, Hollywood is always thinking ahead.
• 1:08:10
  We should get Sidney to come back from the grave and help us with the future.
• 1:08:13
  EVs are interesting.
• 1:08:15
  You know, we've talked to a bunch of people.
• 1:08:16
  I've been able to coach in a few myself and it has that roller coaster factor.
• 1:08:20
  It's like we get to the top and then we crest and woo, and then the ride's
• 1:08:24
  over because they just flatten out.
• 1:08:26
  They completely plateau.
• 1:08:27
  So it doesn't have the same experience.
• 1:08:29
  Ice car would have, but there has been some progress made in
• 1:08:33
  alternative and synthetic fuels.
• 1:08:34
  We hear about it coming from Porsche and other brands.
• 1:08:37
  I got really excited about hype.
• 1:08:38
  Now.
• 1:08:39
  I know it means that we can't have manuals anymore.
• 1:08:42
  If we go down the hybrid route and I'm still a dinosaur, I love driving manual
• 1:08:45
  cars, but I saw the potential when they said hybrid and I went, Oh, great.
• 1:08:50
  This is an opportunity for us to capitalize on some legacy technology
• 1:08:55
  that comes from the train world, like diesel electric hybrid.
• 1:08:58
  But unfortunately, diesel gate ruined that for all of us.
• 1:09:02
  Yeah.
• 1:09:03
  It surprises me that it killed it that much, but yeah, that did kill it.
• 1:09:06
  So no 200 miles to the gallon diesel electric hybrids, because
• 1:09:09
  that would have been ideal, right?
• 1:09:11
  How far could you go with that little generator humming at 600
• 1:09:15
  RPM delivering 240 volts to that electric power plant, right?
• 1:09:19
  It'd be perfect.
• 1:09:20
  But you're, you're right, Eric, hybrids all the way to
• 1:09:21
  goes a few comments on that.
• 1:09:23
  I teach automotive power plant design at the local university, and it always
• 1:09:26
  comes up, will the IC engine survive?
• 1:09:28
  And it certainly will.
• 1:09:29
  And many applications, airplanes for one and tractors on the farm.
• 1:09:33
  Some guy who owns 5, 000 acres is not going to drive 20 minutes back to get
• 1:09:38
  a charging system for his tractor.
• 1:09:40
  And there's certain applications where it has to stay, but it's
• 1:09:43
  like the Prius equation, people buy Prius, Prius, Prii, what do they say?
• 1:09:47
  The.
• 1:09:47
  That takes care of that market and leaves gasoline to the rest of us.
• 1:09:52
  Fine.
• 1:09:52
  Buy your Teslas, buy your EVs, buy your hybrids.
• 1:09:54
  That leaves gas for the rest of us, as long as there's a market.
• 1:09:57
  We're doing 300 million gallons of gasoline a day.
• 1:09:59
  That river of commerce isn't going to change easily, but the
• 1:10:02
  hybrid gives you no range anxiety.
• 1:10:05
  It gives you a way to limp home, even if it's not limping, you're getting home.
• 1:10:08
  I have nine children.
• 1:10:09
  I would never have an EV because if somebody calls at three in the morning
• 1:10:12
  and I've got to go to the hospital and my EV is half charged and the
• 1:10:15
  hospital's too far away, I mean, what?
• 1:10:16
  I'm not going to go camping in an F 150 electric lightning because I can't
• 1:10:20
  recharge it at the top of the mountain, but for a segment of the market.
• 1:10:23
  The million and a half people that bought Priuses that just use them
• 1:10:26
  as tools and commuters is fine.
• 1:10:28
  I think we're going to have the co exist bumper sticker only meant for the, the
• 1:10:31
  effectiveness of this automotive market.
• 1:10:33
  Let's all co exist.
• 1:10:34
  Some people want their hybrids.
• 1:10:35
  Some people want their EVs.
• 1:10:36
  Let us keep our ICE engines.
• 1:10:37
  Those of us with ICE engines, ICEs, are we going to be like the Amish
• 1:10:41
  off to the shoulder, you know, doing our thing as the EVs go by?
• 1:10:47
  But all jokes aside, I feel that the ice power plants will become very
• 1:10:52
  equestrian for those that can afford the gasoline because gasoline prices
• 1:10:56
  will go up as demand goes down.
• 1:10:59
  Therefore, it will be like having horses in a stable and you'll go out
• 1:11:02
  riding on the weekend at your country club, which will be the racetrack.
• 1:11:05
  Possibly, but the one thing that, so here's a model of this.
• 1:11:08
  Look at leaded gasoline in the 70s.
• 1:11:10
  Catalytic converters came in in 74.
• 1:11:12
  You can still buy leaded gasoline up to 1985 or later.
• 1:11:15
  So I heard it was a couple of years ago, actually.
• 1:11:17
  You could actually buy it now at racetracks.
• 1:11:20
  Yeah.
• 1:11:20
  But the point was it was very socialist wise because poor people
• 1:11:24
  can't afford the new technology.
• 1:11:25
  They're driving old cars now, old cars last.
• 1:11:28
  actually much longer.
• 1:11:29
  A Camry now has 300, 000 miles.
• 1:11:30
  So a poor person can't be ostracized from society by having
• 1:11:33
  to pay too much for gasoline.
• 1:11:35
  So I put some faith in the powers that be that will keep gasoline affordable.
• 1:11:38
  To be frank about it, the lower class is going to have these
• 1:11:40
  IIC engines for 20 more years.
• 1:11:43
  There's a little bit of hope in that.
• 1:11:44
  The other hope is that 5 a gallon or 4 a gallon gasoline has reached
• 1:11:49
  a, I think a very high rate when it should be about half of that if we
• 1:11:53
  were to stabilize the world economy.
• 1:11:54
  But there's synthetic fuels, e fuels coming that now don't
• 1:11:58
  look that unaffordable when you're paying 120 a barrel.
• 1:12:01
  There's a shifting moment for it.
• 1:12:03
  What I teach my students is hydrogen is the dream.
• 1:12:05
  IC engines love hydrogen.
• 1:12:07
  Hydrogen is a perfect fuel.
• 1:12:08
  It's just extremely dangerous in some categories.
• 1:12:11
  But it's a beautiful solution to keep our piston engines.
• 1:12:13
  And right now, everything we have with piston engines work because
• 1:12:17
  factors are tooled for V8s or W6s or whatever you're going to make.
• 1:12:21
  The factors are tooled for pistons and bores.
• 1:12:22
  Pistons and bores work really well.
• 1:12:24
  Sidebar rotary engines work phenomenal at hydrogen, but all these things we
• 1:12:27
  make and what we package or what work, even hybrids all work with pistons
• 1:12:30
  and internal combustion engines.
• 1:12:32
  And the power density can't be denied unless there's some breakthrough
• 1:12:35
  technology right now, a gallon of gasoline, it takes three times
• 1:12:40
  as much battery space to do what one gallon of gasoline does.
• 1:12:43
  I believe 6 kilowatt hours to one gallon of gasoline.
• 1:12:47
  Something like that.
• 1:12:48
  You could, you could tell me you did the math on that one.
• 1:12:52
  I don't have that number memorized, but I'm sorry, but yeah, it's just, it's huge.
• 1:12:55
  And so the other problem with hybrid, I love hybrids, but the problem is you
• 1:12:58
  take a gasoline car and then you find a way to package electric motor and a
• 1:13:01
  battery system and a battery management system and cut out a couple of cylinders.
• 1:13:05
  So it's not an easy thing to do because you had to first
• 1:13:08
  design an IC engine vehicle and then find room for more things.
• 1:13:12
  So for sports cars and small cars, it doesn't really work.
• 1:13:15
  An SUV, a Yukon or a Tahoe could be a hybrid all day long and nobody will know.
• 1:13:20
  And it does get them in to be a 30 mile per gallon range kind of a vehicle.
• 1:13:24
  If you do the math, uh, Chrysler town and country minivan, 70 miles
• 1:13:27
  an hour in Nevada desert with no headwind takes 40 horsepower.
• 1:13:30
  And so all you need is a 40 horse engine.
• 1:13:32
  So you can take a hybrid vehicle, take a Prius engine, which is a 60
• 1:13:36
  horse engine and put it in that.
• 1:13:38
  And you're fine.
• 1:13:38
  And you use the battery backup for climbing hills and passing.
• 1:13:41
  And so that equation works really well.
• 1:13:43
  It's 1950 train guys, General Electric and GM's division.
• 1:13:47
  Everybody figured this efficiency equation out real easily.
• 1:13:50
  And maybe diesel will make a comeback when the new cycle
• 1:13:53
  gets off of Volkswagen's case.
• 1:13:55
  But, but you're right.
• 1:13:57
  I mean, but Skyactiv Mazda has.
• 1:14:00
  Skyactiv is at 42 percent efficient, diesels are 45 percent efficient, but
• 1:14:03
  the Skyactiv gasoline engine can reach 42 percent efficiency in its sweet spot.
• 1:14:08
  So we're getting with nine speed transmissions to a point where we can
• 1:14:13
  get gas engines to be quite efficient.
• 1:14:15
  So you brought up something really cool actually.
• 1:14:18
  And we don't get to talk about technical things like this too often on this show,
• 1:14:22
  but I want to bring up the sky active.
• 1:14:24
  Most people that do know what it really is, the Atkinson cycle engine
• 1:14:30
  or what I call the wobble crank.
• 1:14:33
  I would.
• 1:14:34
  I would love for you to explain in layman's terms to our audience
• 1:14:37
  what the Skyactiv is all about and how it works and how it differs
• 1:14:40
  from the standard piston engine.
• 1:14:42
  There's a couple different versions of it, but basically let's touch on
• 1:14:45
  what you're saying first by Atkinson.
• 1:14:46
  So Atkinson was a guy motivated by greed in the late 1800s because he
• 1:14:51
  wanted to get around auto's patents.
• 1:14:53
  And auto had the force cycle engine all locked in.
• 1:14:55
  And so Atkinson realized that if he did a monkey motion crank shaft mechanism,
• 1:14:59
  he could have a longer expansion stroke.
• 1:15:01
  That is when the gasoline explodes and pushes on the piston, that stroke can be
• 1:15:06
  made longer if you decoupled yourself from the crankshaft in an imaginary world, it
• 1:15:10
  can be longer than the compression stroke was and every engine in the world, the
• 1:15:14
  compression stroke pushes the air up.
• 1:15:16
  You have the explosion and the explosion pushes the piston right
• 1:15:18
  back down on bottom dead center and they are equal distance.
• 1:15:21
  The stroke is always the same.
• 1:15:22
  Atkinson got his patent by making a monkey motion crankshaft that
• 1:15:26
  made the expansion stroke longer.
• 1:15:27
  Right now, the exhaust valve opens when there's about 70 or so PSI in
• 1:15:32
  the cylinder, and he was purporting that capturing that 70 PSI.
• 1:15:37
  would give you more power.
• 1:15:38
  Wait until there's 10 PSI in the cylinder and capture those 60
• 1:15:41
  PSI, the area under that curve could give you some extra power.
• 1:15:44
  And that is a great theory and it works.
• 1:15:46
  Um, what doesn't work is the monkey motion crankshaft.
• 1:15:48
  So now what we have is fake Atkinson's and fake Miller's.
• 1:15:51
  Well, Miller actually is real.
• 1:15:52
  Miller is an Atkinson cycle with a supercharger.
• 1:15:54
  So let's walk through the progression.
• 1:15:56
  You're taking an Atkinson cycle with a longer expansion stroke and you fake it.
• 1:16:00
  By just having a shorter compression stroke by not closing the intake
• 1:16:04
  valve at the right moment.
• 1:16:05
  If you leave the intake valve open too long, they always
• 1:16:08
  close after bottom does center.
• 1:16:09
  But if you leave it open way too long, then your compression stroke
• 1:16:12
  doesn't start till the pistons much further up its stroke.
• 1:16:15
  Now, by comparison, the expansion stroke is much longer.
• 1:16:18
  So it's a fake Atkinson, but that's what the EPA is allowing
• 1:16:21
  people to call Atkinsons.
• 1:16:22
  The problem with that is it doesn't really breathe really
• 1:16:24
  well, but that is more efficient.
• 1:16:26
  But you kind of wasted the first part of your compression strobe.
• 1:16:29
  So it's not that efficient.
• 1:16:30
  Motorcycle comes in, which is where you put a turbocharger or supercharger
• 1:16:34
  on the system and force more air in.
• 1:16:36
  So that very short intake circuit you had now is compensated for its being
• 1:16:40
  handicapped and you catch back up.
• 1:16:41
  Like shoving in enough moles of oxygen to make it pretend
• 1:16:44
  like it had the full stroke.
• 1:16:45
  That's a Miller.
• 1:16:46
  Now Mazda took that and kept going when they built the Miller cycle engine in
• 1:16:50
  the millennia, they proved that a Miller cycle could be made more efficient.
• 1:16:53
  And the millennia for V6 got 32 miles per gallon or some phenomenal efficiency.
• 1:16:57
  And they were in the high thirties.
• 1:16:58
  percent efficiency in their sweet spot.
• 1:17:00
  And this is in the nineties.
• 1:17:01
  So the sky active takes that even further.
• 1:17:04
  And the ultimate iteration is to have an engine that doesn't use a spark plug.
• 1:17:08
  I believe that's called a diesel diesel engine.
• 1:17:10
  Exactly.
• 1:17:11
  So back to the diesel, we'll get one past the media.
• 1:17:13
  We'll have a diesel, but on gasoline, what it is, is we have a homogenous charge
• 1:17:18
  in the chamber and you let it blow up.
• 1:17:21
  like a diesel by sheer pressure and temperature.
• 1:17:24
  The pressure and temperature are made by a turbocharger or supercharger
• 1:17:27
  and you let it blow up just because you've agitated it so much that
• 1:17:31
  the gasoline is going to go off.
• 1:17:32
  Now gasoline is very volatile so it's very hard to time that perfectly.
• 1:17:35
  Where in one version of the Skyactiv, they're using a spark
• 1:17:38
  assisted compression ignition.
• 1:17:40
  So it's like a diesel with a spark to force the timing
• 1:17:42
  to be at the right moment.
• 1:17:43
  So like an anti lag where you would put the spark plug somewhere else.
• 1:17:47
  And backfire into the system in a way.
• 1:17:49
  Yes, exactly.
• 1:17:50
  So you're just, you're forcing the issue.
• 1:17:52
  You can't trust the compression to time it exactly.
• 1:17:55
  Right.
• 1:17:56
  You have to have your timing in modern world within, you know, one or two degrees
• 1:17:59
  to get the efficiency you're looking for.
• 1:18:01
  There's so much heat getting running out of the cylinder and things
• 1:18:04
  going on in the intake track.
• 1:18:05
  You can't always time compression ignition.
• 1:18:07
  You can in a certain zone, but you can't do it over the whole driving cycle.
• 1:18:10
  I think it's so funny that we come up with these really creative ways to do
• 1:18:14
  things that could be solved very simply.
• 1:18:16
  And part of the problem we've had with the efficiency of engines, I have to give
• 1:18:20
  the Americans credit where credit is due.
• 1:18:22
  It's all about gearing, right?
• 1:18:23
  Big, lazy V8s making 160 horsepower and can't get out of their own way.
• 1:18:28
  But they're strapped to some super long gears.
• 1:18:30
  But then you get in a Volkswagen and the German mentality is, I
• 1:18:33
  don't want to downshift to pass, so we're gonna put four 10 gears in it.
• 1:18:36
  It doesn't make sense, right?
• 1:18:37
  If you put a double overdrive on a four cylinder, you're gonna get 40
• 1:18:41
  miles to the gallon even 30 years ago.
• 1:18:44
  Right?
• 1:18:44
  I mean, there are some engines that will surprise you that are quite old.
• 1:18:49
  The five cylinder normally aspirated Audi motor was getting over 30 miles
• 1:18:52
  to the gallon in the early eighties.
• 1:18:54
  It had long gears in it instead of these like wind them up toy gear.
• 1:18:58
  So there's a big compromise there.
• 1:19:00
  And I think we're making up for the feeling of torque with all sorts of
• 1:19:05
  really cool, you know, inventions, because that's inevitably what we feel.
• 1:19:09
  And I hate to say you get in a Miata and you're like, it's kind of torqueless.
• 1:19:13
  It is.
• 1:19:15
  And for the reason we mentioned earlier about the insurance issues,
• 1:19:18
  when you do have that very, very tall, you know, it's like the nine
• 1:19:20
  14, you're nine 14, the thing's doing 3000 RPM at 75 and it's gutless.
• 1:19:25
  So it's fine.
• 1:19:25
  You lose performance, but you get efficiency.
• 1:19:27
  I was able to get 40 miles per gallon out of my Datsun five, 10.
• 1:19:31
  In 1979, by 60 PSI on the tires, disconnecting the secondary carburetor,
• 1:19:37
  advancing the timing to like 60 degrees before top dead center, doing all kinds of
• 1:19:41
  crazy things that you shouldn't be doing.
• 1:19:42
  And yeah, the engine would have blown up had I taken it out of that
• 1:19:44
  zone, but I got 40 miles per gallon.
• 1:19:46
  I don't have a car that made 30.
• 1:19:47
  Otherwise there's ways to do it.
• 1:19:49
  So we go back to the 40 horsepower that a minivan takes to get down the highway.
• 1:19:52
  That's where the hybrid does solve that issue for saving all the fuel
• 1:19:55
  and saving the planet, for the people that think that's going to do it.
• 1:19:58
  Electric vehicles aren't really the answer because all they do is
• 1:20:01
  relocate pollution from city centers.
• 1:20:02
  You're just now moving the pollution out to the power plant, which
• 1:20:05
  may be coal in the United States.
• 1:20:06
  If you're in Canada where it's all nuclear or whatever, in a country
• 1:20:10
  with nuclear power, There's a different argument for our country.
• 1:20:12
  EV is not really the answer.
• 1:20:14
  People think it is, but it's not a zero emission vehicle.
• 1:20:16
  It all comes down to how do you make the family traveling to Disney world
• 1:20:19
  from Atlanta on that eight hour drive?
• 1:20:21
  How did they get that minivan or Yukon XL full of kids to Disney
• 1:20:25
  world at an affordable price in a way that the driver's not just
• 1:20:28
  going to hate what he's driving.
• 1:20:29
  And maybe that's the insidious plot behind autonomous driving.
• 1:20:33
  Because if you don't accelerate the past, because your little computer
• 1:20:36
  doesn't let you, maybe you'll be very happy with 40 horsepower.
• 1:20:39
  Maybe that's it.
• 1:20:40
  They're going to neuter all our cars and make them autonomous
• 1:20:43
  because they don't want horsepower.
• 1:20:44
  There you go.
• 1:20:45
  Oh my gosh.
• 1:20:46
  What was that old song?
• 1:20:47
  I like to drive 55.
• 1:20:48
  You're going to enjoy it.
• 1:20:51
  Well, I was around when the 55 was implemented.
• 1:20:54
  That was, that was fat.
• 1:20:57
  So until they bring that back, I know things aren't really that bad.
• 1:20:59
  Because Nixon put that in place due to the, you know, the oil crisis.
• 1:21:02
  And we were all sitting in line trying to get fuel.
• 1:21:04
  Until we see it that bad again, then I'm not that worried.
• 1:21:07
  Yeah.
• 1:21:07
  Well, Norman, I have to say this has been a lot of fun, but I
• 1:21:12
  want to give you the opportunity.
• 1:21:13
  Any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you'd like to share
• 1:21:16
  that we didn't cover thus far?
• 1:21:17
  Two things.
• 1:21:18
  A fascinating project I'm working on now is a replacement, an evolution of the IC
• 1:21:22
  engine, where we're replacing the poppet valve with a rotary valve, which has
• 1:21:25
  been tried for a hundred years, but has been perfected by, uh, Engine development
• 1:21:29
  team up here in race city, uh, North Carolina, Morrisville, and some engine
• 1:21:32
  developers hired me a couple of years ago.
• 1:21:34
  And we actually are able to make much more power through higher volumetric
• 1:21:38
  efficiency than the poppet valve can allow because the poppet valve gets in the way.
• 1:21:41
  Now we're running high compression ratios, super high volumetric
• 1:21:45
  efficiencies, great power densities.
• 1:21:46
  So the comment is that the IC engine is not dead.
• 1:21:48
  There's a lot between Skyactiv, what Mazda is doing.
• 1:21:51
  We're seeing 30, 40 percent more power density in the engine with
• 1:21:54
  this valve we're working on.
• 1:21:55
  It's pretty interesting to see what can be done as we continue
• 1:21:58
  to apply ourselves to it.
• 1:22:00
  It's kind of like saying the telephone in 1970 was fully evolved
• 1:22:03
  and never going to get any better.
• 1:22:04
  And look where we are now with our iPhones.
• 1:22:06
  So I think as we continue to work on IC engines, we can continue to make
• 1:22:09
  them more and more and more efficient.
• 1:22:11
  And shout out for certainly to Dean Case, who has often been a great friend and an
• 1:22:14
  old work cohort, introduced the two of us.
• 1:22:17
  And Dean's just got a great career.
• 1:22:18
  He's had a dream.
• 1:22:19
  We've all, a lot of us have a dream job.
• 1:22:21
  You have a dream job.
• 1:22:22
  We're all very blessed.
• 1:22:23
  But Dean's just a great guy and he loves to put interesting people together.
• 1:22:26
  He's like a collector or a filter for interesting people.
• 1:22:29
  I'm glad he put us together.
• 1:22:30
  Not that I'm so interesting, but I found you fascinating.
• 1:22:33
  Oh, thank you.
• 1:22:33
  I appreciate that.
• 1:22:34
  Professor Garrett known to many of us around the paddock.
• 1:22:37
  It's just Norman is a native of North Carolina with an engineering degree
• 1:22:40
  from Georgia tech, where he has also served as an adjunct faculty member.
• 1:22:44
  He is currently professor in the motorsports engineering school at UNC
• 1:22:48
  Charlotte, and the director of engineering at BazTech, an engine development company.
• 1:22:52
  And if you want to learn more about Norman, you can check him out
• 1:22:56
  online by reading some of his most interesting articles on Hagerty.
• 1:22:59
  I'm sure there's more coming or reaching out to us for more information
• 1:23:02
  on how to get a hold of him.
• 1:23:03
  And that said, Norman, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show.
• 1:23:06
  This has been an education.
• 1:23:08
  It's been an absolute blast.
• 1:23:09
  And thanks for taking the time to share some stories
• 1:23:11
  with us and with our audience.
• 1:23:12
  Oh, it's been fun.
• 1:23:13
  And it's always fun to talk cars with smart people like you and your audience.
• 1:23:16
  All right.
• 1:23:17
  Take care.
• 1:23:18
  Bye now.
• 1:23:23
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• 1:23:26
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• 1:23:29
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• 1:23:29
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• 1:23:30
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• 1:23:33
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• 1:23:38
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• 1:23:45
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• 1:23:46
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• 1:23:48
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• 1:23:50
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