New exhaust and rear swaybar

We built our car using a Goodwin Racing exhaust consisting of a short tube header, midpipe (including a small, high-flow cat, and a reasonator,) and muffler.

Always looking for more power to try to even out our power to weight ratio with the earlier cars in the class (remember, we're still running our stock 98,000+ mile motor,) we were excited to hear that PPE Engineering was coming out with a new long tube header setup.

The advantage to the Goodwin header is that it is the same length as the stock header and therefore allows any part of the stock exhaust to be replaced with their higher flow pieces.  The downside of course, is that a short tube header is never going to put out as much power as a long tube header.

Since the team had purchased another 2006 MX-5 for a daily driver, it was an easy decision to put this new PPE exhaust on the DP car, as we could move the Goodwin stuff over to the daily driver.

The PPE exhaust came with the new long tube header and a shorter midpipe, which then connected to the Goodwin muffler.

A comparison between the Goodwin Racing short tube header (top) and new PPE Long Tube header

 

 

 

While we didn't do any dyno testing between the two units, there were a few independent people that did, and the PPE combo showed an increase across the board.

 

Secondly, we'd been running the stock rear swaybar since very early on in the development of the car.

 

Although the car has been working quite well, especially locally, we were looking for more rotation when running on concrete.  We don't have any sites locally that run on concrete, but the National Championships in Lincoln, NE are.

 

So, we ordered up a Racing Beat rear swaybar.  It is a 19mm bar vs. the stock 12mm and comes with urethane bushings and two holes for the endlinks to allow for adjustability.

 

 

 

The Sand and Sage club in eastern Washington was holding what will hopefully be an inaugural event in Ellensburg on a concrete pad at Bowers Field at the beginning of May.  So, we put the new bar on for a local event at Bremerton Raceway the weekend leading up to the Ellensburg event. 

 

We placed the bar on the softer of the two settings expecting the car to oversteer since we were on asphalt, but to our surprise, the car rotated better than it previously had, but was still very controllable.

 

When we made the trek to Ellensburg, we placed the bar on the stiffer setting.  It worked very well, with us taking the top Pax for the weekend.

 

Later in the season after running the Nationals Championships on the stiffer setting, we ran a local even on the stiffer setting, and the car still worked better on asphalt.....  While the car rotated better at Nationals than the 2011 event, we would still like to have even more stiffness in the rear.

 

So, we will very likely be looking at an even stiffer rear bar in the future!