Words Eoin Young Photos Terry Marshall
Carroll Shelby coined the recipe when he decided to mate a big American Ford V8 engine to a demure British AC sports chassis to create the Cobra. Dave McQueen is a Shelby disciple. He spent 25 years in South Africa and built himself a replica Cobra, but back home in Christchurch he decided to start again, this time using a Mazda MX-5 for the shoehorn power transplant
The little black hardtop Mazda disguises the fact that there are twice the number of horses itching to spin the rear wheels as the MX-5 makers intended. The 5.0-litre Mustang V8 is bog standard, but it still pumps out 172kW or 230bhp, compared with the car’s original 1600cc four-cylinder powerplant which gave 87kW (116bhp) at 6500rpm.
The story started when Dave put his hand up at the Turner’s auction house in Christchurch on March 2, 2001, and bought himself a 1992 Eunos Roadster with 105,000 clicks on the clock. That was the easy bit. A Mazda MX-V8 is not a new concept, but it was for Dave. He had read engine-swap articles in various motoring magazines, so he was aware of what was required. First item on his shopping list was a 5.0-litre HO Ford Mustang V8, to which he would mate a Toyota Supra W55 gearbox feeding through a Ford 302 flywheel and pressure plate, with a Supra clutch plate, a slave cylinder from an XY Ford Falcon with a bell-housing made up by Conversion Components in Waihi, and a 2.73:1 Ford Thunderbird IRS diff from Charlton Imports at Gore.
Daredevil
Getting off the line is a careful operation. I was going to say delicate, but delicate isn’t a word that comes to mind when you’re sitting behind a well-muscled package like this. You need a clutch thigh like Dan Carter, and some care to mate the throttle with the feed-in. After that it’s just a matter of keeping within the speed limit.
It’s a car that will dare you, but it has amazing balance. Installing the V8 meant a re-think all round the car. The rear springs were moved to the front, and heavier rear springs were made up with uprated sway bars front and rear. Hubs were custom-made by Damin Cotter to accept RX-7 Batman bearings, callipers and rotors, bolted to standard MX-5 wishbones.
It is the ultimate MX-5, very much a Q-car, a tidy little two-seater with disguised performance. Only the woofle of the V8 gives the game away
Mazda parts came from Mark at Mazline in Christchurch. All the electrical work was done by Ashley Mulholland, who also installed the Link Computer. The headers and stainless steel exhaust system were created by Paul Gibbs at PC Exhausts. The hand-stitched trim was done by Brendan at Canterbury Upholsterers, and the polished black body finish came from Holland Panel and Paint at Rolleston.
The result is a tidy black gem, sitting squat with wider wheels in elegantly flared arches. At the steering wheel it’s standard MX-5, but the view out front is quite different. A power bulge covers the V8 headers, with louvres to aid under-bonnet cooling. The nose air intake has been re-shaped and enlarged, with a stylised Mazda emblem as a centrepiece to the new grille.
In this form it is the ultimate MX-5, very much a Q-car, a tidy little two-seater with disguised performance. Only the woofle of the V8 gives the game away. Twice the power means half the work, and on a trip the Mazda turns in around 10.1l/100km (28mpg). Dave’s personal registration number is a wonderful salute to the project — MX5000.
Shelby’s point of view
I know it’s fashionable to salivate over Shelby Cobras, either original (rare on our roads) or replicated, but I have never been able to see the point. This may have come from a trip with Tom Warth — then of Motorbooks — in the States, when he collected me in a very original Cobra off a London flight in the middle of the USA. We seemed to drive for what seemed like hours in furnace heat, me trying to cope with sudden dehydration (fluid levels plummeting after the non-stop intake on the long flight), and nursing my suitcase on my knees since there was no luggage room.
Years later I had lunch with Carroll Shelby in a little Italian restaurant in the village of Villars, at the top of the Ollon-Villars hill climb in Switzerland. Lunch lasted until somewhere south of 5pm, and by now I was brave enough to tell Carroll that I couldn’t understand why punters paid so much for his Cobras, because I thought they were, er, very basic forms of transport. He guffawed and, rather to my surprise, said that he agreed with me. He thought the Sunbeam Tiger was a much better road car — and that’s when I became aware that it was Shelby who had also created the Sunbeam Tiger, transplanting the modest Rootes four-cylinder with a V8.
It has gone into the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful sports car ever built, with sales soaring beyond any car-maker’s imagination
It should have been a Brit
Many regard the MX-5 as the MG the Brits didn’t build. MG created the idea of a small, affordable sports car and spawned generations of sports car enthusiasts around the world, but it quite simply failed to follow up. Mazda did. And now it has gone into the Guinness Book of Records as the most successful sports car ever built, with sales soaring beyond any car-maker’s imagination since its first appearance in 1989. It has been sold as the MX-5, Miata or Eunos — depending on which part of the world you’re buying it in.
Auckland motoring scribe Donn Anderson loaned me his brand-new MX-5 back in 1990, and I was captivated. I had to own one, and when I got back to Surrey I invested in an MX-5. My friends thought I had lost all reason. They may have been right.
When I was researching background for this feature on the McQueen MX-V8 I visited Fazazz, in Christchurch, and turned up a copy of a volume of collected road tests put together by Unique Motor Books in the UK. To my total surprise, and a sliver of pride, I realised that the first two MX-5 features had been written by me in Autocar in the UK in 1990 and 1991. The articles charted the coming and the going of my MX-5, and I shamelessly quote my own words, 15 years and a lot of living down the track.
The 1990 report was sub-headed “Columnist Eoin Young, freshly Mazda MX-5 mounted, is smiling all the way to the Barley Mow.” The reference is to the period public house that was almost my second home in the village of West Horsley in Surrey.
“Some of my Formula 1 journalistic mates held a sweepstake over dinner at the Phoenix GP on how long I would keep my Mazda MX-5. Shortest bet was two weeks. I have this tendency towards fickleness in motor cars — recent loves have been as varied as a pair of 4×4 Sierras, a Scorpio and a couple of 325 BMWs — but after five weeks and 1400 miles, my red MX-5 and I are hitting it off well.
“It’s my first Japanese car and I’m smitten, as most new owners are, with the way everything works and fits. The MX-5 might have been cut to my size by a sort of Japanese Jermyn Street motor car shirt-maker. The arms are just the right length. Everything falls to hand, as they used to say. As opposed to falling off.
“The gearshift is an on-going delight. I’d like to shake the hand of the Autocar tester who likened it to a rifle-bolt because that’s exactly the sensation — the same wrist-flicking positive action.
“The main complaint from other owners had been a lack of power and more would be pleasant for that urgent bit of overtaking, but for the moment I’m resisting the turbo conversion.
“I think I like its looks, but I can’t really tell how I look to others because I’ve only seen two other MX-5s in the distance. They’re still scarce enough in my corner of Surrey that we MX-5 owners wave to each other¦”
Summer Blues
A year later, 1992, and I was writing again in Autocar under the headline Summer Blues: “’Why did you sell it?’ That’s the question everyone asks, except those who know me best.
They all wondered why I bought the MX-5 in the first place, so they are not at all surprised that I have sold it after 4000 miles [6437km] and four months. One version of my story is that I suddenly needed the money more than I needed a sports car. Another version is that it was too small.
“’But it was too small when you bought it,’ protests colleague Nigel Roebuck. ‘You didn’t expect it to grow afterwards, did you?’ Very amusing¦
“Then there was the ego problem and the remarks about so many MX-5s being driven by 50-year-olds. Is it the second-time-round search for the sunshine and excitement of a sports car? At the Barley Mow it was referred to from Day One as The Hairdresser’s Car. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The pub was the one trip that was supposed to be fun, travelling with the top down on a Sunday lunchtime when there wasn’t a grand prix.
The 5.0-litre Mustang V8 pumps out 172kW compared with the car’s original, 87kW 1600cc four-cylinder powerplant
“The third version of ‘why I sold it’ is that I finally had to admit that it didn’t have enough power. Not that I want to set any lap records round the M25, or cut my time to Silverstone by 10 minutes. Just that for the second time I was trying to pass a lorry on a country road with what I thought was loads of time to get by — then realised that I couldn’t because the car had run out of puff. The first time I thought I’d just misjudged the move; the second time I knew there simply wasn’t enough power in hand for the way I drive¦”
Dave McQueen has solved that problem for good with his sleek, black MX-5000 hardtop!
Acknowledgements
Dave McQueen would like to thank all those who entered into the spirit of the MX-5000 project by enthusiastically contributing their skills, services and encouragement above and beyond the call of duty.
