The Mazda MX-5 Miata has remained one of the market’s most popular sports cars for decades and perfectly combines lightness with affordability and a simple, stripped-back driving experience that’s hard to match.
However, with cars continually being upgraded with more horsepower and torque, some have wondered if Mazda will turbocharge the car or perhaps install a more powerful engine to allow it to rival the Toyota GR 86 and Subaru BRZ. According to the Miata’s vehicle development engineer Dave Coleman, this isn’t going to happen.
“The Miata is a system; the whole car is optimized for [the current] power,” Coleman told CarBuzz. “Suddenly, we have to add a stronger drivetrain and bigger brakes. The snowball effect that [would] happen if we did something like that [would] make it not feel like a Miata. It’s not that having more power, within itself, would be bad, but there’s trade-offs. The value that we get out of [the Miata] being so incredibly light is something that you [would] lose.”
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Interestingly, Mazda never actually intended to increase power from the Miata when the car was updated for the 2019 model year. The car’s 2.0-liter Skyactive four-cylinder had been producing 155 hp up until that point but for 2019, that figure rose to 181 hp. Coleman says this was all due to Mazda increasing the engine’s redline.
“The whole purpose of that engine upgrade was to raise the redline for the driving experience and the flow of running through the gears up to 7,500 rpm,” he said. “The 26 horsepower was just what happens when you extend the power band up to that redline; it was never even mentioned in any of the planning or documents internally. At the end, we all just said, ‘Oh look… 26 more horsepower.'”
Coleman went on to explain that adding a turbocharger to the current-generation Miata wouldn’t work either. He says the car’s current engine offers responsiveness that couldn’t be matched if it was turbocharged, noting that if the company wanted responsiveness down low, it would need to fit a small turbo that would then choke at the top of the rev range.
