Jaime has owned this miata for years now. We purchased it with a Jackson Racing supercharger installed ontop of the stock 1.6 liter maita engine. It was peppy, very reliable and fun at the autocross, but the time came to step up to a little... er, lot more power. We have swapped in a 335hp Ford 302 V8, T5 tranny and limited slip Thunderbird diff with shortened axles. A mustang brain and wiring harness were used to manage the motor. We purchased the conversion kit from Penache Motorsports, the mustang components from AMP Performance, important bolts from ARP and the rest of the bolts from our local Ace Hardware store. Kevin at Car Tech did a beautiful job fabbing the exhaust system which uses Magnaflow Hi-Flow cats and Spintech mufflers.

The conversion tooks us roughly six months time, though we usually only worked one day per week on the car. The engine is the first engine that we've ever built and the conversion was certainly the biggest mechanical task we've ever been faced with. Neither of us have had any sort of professional mechanics training. Everything was done via information from books, the internet, our friends, common sense and some trial and error.

The car will spin the rear tires at will in first gear, but it absolutely hooks up in second gear and pulls hard. Handling still feels like the same old Miata that we've come to love. The conversion is reported to add 250 pounds to the car, although we've installed aluminum heads and removed the AC system so we should have gained some of that back.

Click here for a sneak peak of what it sounds like.

Click here for a short video of me driving it down the street.

Click here to see our Miata make the transformation.