Whether you’re modifying a car to make it accelerate harder, corner faster, look better, or just simply to make it your own, you want to start with the cleanest, straightest, most honest and unmessed-with car you can find.
And if you wanted to build an NA Mazda MX-5 you probably couldn’t ask for a better base than this immaculate 1990 car which is up for sale on Bring-a-Trailer. The question is, could you really bring yourself to ruin its originality to make it “better”, or is it too good to mod and should be preserved as a four-wheeled window into the past?
Won in a competition by its original owner back in 1990, this first-generation Miata has covered just 6,868 miles and looks nothing like the scruffy or modified 30-year old MX-5s mostly seen today. For a start, it’s still wearing the steel wheels that mark it out as a base model, and the lightest configuration of Miata available at the time. The sole option on this car was floor mats at $59, which seems kind of steep considering there are only two.
Base Miatas did without alloy wheels, electric windows, power steering or air conditioning, but still got the same 116 hp (118 PS) 1.6-liter twin-cam inline-four driving the rear wheels through a five-speed manual transmission. They also got a fat four-spoke airbag wheel that’s heaps uglier than the balloon-free three-spoke version fitted to European cars, but with a curb weight of just 2,182 lbs (990 kg), it’s what happens when you turn that wheel that matters most.
The engine bay and interior pictures make it look like we’re seeing a six-month old car, and the aftermarket radio-cassette player, apparently fitted by the original dealer in late 1990, is another portal to a time long ago. It looks terrible and probably sounds worse, but there’s something cool about knowing it’s been with the car all this time.
And that’s the thing with this car. It’s so perfectly preserved that much as we’d love to tear into it and make the mother of all modded Miatas, we’re not sure we’d have the heart. Interestingly, the original window sticker visible in the Bring-a-Trailer listing shows the 1990 price of this MX-5 as $14,173, which equates to $30,766 today, making it considerably more expensive than 2022’s Miata MX-5. One of those will set you back $27,825 including destination with no options and comes with an extra 65 hp over the old timer.
What would you do if this MX-5 fell into your hands? Leave a comment and let us know.
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