get 4 wheel alignment done

check adjustment of power frame/gearbox to chassis rails relative to service manual

Jackson Racing anti-roll bars - nice stiffening at roundabouts with limited ride implications (the same size as Dealer Alternative FM sways in 1.6 size so as good but cheaper (in UK) choice).

Eibach – really stiff and expensive

Or import e.g. Dealer Alternative!!

The green stuff that comes with the Dealer Alt bar is marine wheel bearing grease.

Stay with the stock springs - I fitted Dealer Alternative FM springs; 1" lower, progressive, about 20% up-rating, little ride penalty but they lose it on rough bumpy fast roads (the back end just stays up in the air due to limited suspension travel!) and can ground. The standard rear suspension travel is really a bit minimal, reducing it just makes it really bad! So unless it is for pose value ... which I must admit is about the only reason they are still on...well that and the stiffening effect; don’t go there! If you must lower get Koni Shock Absorbers and use the lower spring perches – easy to change if you hate it and costs you nothing as the standard shockers are thought to be toast by 30,000 miles.

There are heaps of springs out there but you want progressive (so they are comfortable but get harder as the load goes up) and not too much lowering. I found no UK springs that were only 25mm lowering, progressive and up rated about 20-30% . Most manufacturers and suppliers do not know the rates or the type of springs – be very careful here … most of these people just seem to take stock springs and tweak them with limited development work- look at their range of springs they make, it would take them a long time to actual optimise the design for all those cars …i.e. they do not do it. If you do lower the car then consider cutting a lump off the rear bump stops to give more travel for shocks to work in – down side is the sudden bump/lock up that occurs at the end of that travel. The bump stops are actually part of the stock suspension system as they are progressive – this reduces the need for thick anti-roll bars as stock. A complicated little subject on their own the bump stops..

Spax do springs in their kit – but they sag and I have little good reports on their ability to engineer things; the springs sag and the shockers foul.

Racing Beat springs with the logo in white are the "Street" spec, in black they're the "Race" spec, which are stiffer and lower than Street

"Ground control run 400+ pound fronts and 250+ rears Some of the auto-x ers had yellow Koni's re-valved them for compression and rebound adjustability,(at a nominal cost) found the best times with the compression
set to minimum and the rebound to a median position adjusted for balance front to rear." Charles Brown

600/400 one option with 350 max better for turbo to get power down?

Mk2
For the '98 and '99 with the Mazda(Shoa-brand) shocks, the adjustable Koni's are available.
For Bilstein replacement kit; to go into production in March 2000, new spring perches will be supplied with the shocks as a kit.

14 click adjustment, standard UK has no spring seat adjustment – order US style ones with full adjustable spring seat (C spanner and thread) – note that the rear perch fouls with the drive shaft if standard springs are lowered 25mm this way. These can be bought with springs in a kit – springs sag with age, up rates by 25%, progressive and lower by 35mm.

Sports are just up rated – good with standard springs and as replacement shockers.

Illumina are adjustable and US list likes them (but Konis expensive there)

Note that these AGX are made in US but KYB are Japan based company; in the UK you will be offered the un-adjustable versions from Japan which are just replacement type shockers.

"If you haven’t driven on the shocks before, I would start at 0 to allow the valves to bed in for 100 or so miles, then start clicking it up. We set customers cars to 10 front and 6 rear as a starting point." Val of Scimitar

Do a setup (race really) for about 1700 GBP

FRONT
Caster +4.7 to +5.5 (what ever the maximum attained is)
Camber -0.6 to -0.8 (this number varies with the caster)
Toe 1/16" per side, or 1/8" _total toe out_

REAR
Caster not applicable, there is no adjustment possible
Camber -1.1
Toe 1/16" per side, or 1/8" _total toe in_ or zero

Town and County Mazda, Aberdeen. £63

Arnold Clark Toyota, Linwood,, Scotland = waste of space – left adjuster slack

Pitstop, Aberdeen = total waste of space (got it wrong twice)

Kenneth Brown Engineering. Hillington, Glasgow = assured OK (Des Rocks) 20-40 UKP.

Barnetts of Mollinsburn near Cumbernauld = good (did my second one) but £70 ‘cause I took longer..

Feltham Tyre, Green Man Lane just East of runway 28R at Heathrow Tel 0208 890 7138 also branches in Slough and Newbury

Front Ride height Caster (+/-45' )

328-337mm 5d 16'

338-347mm 5d 02'

348-357mm 4d 49'

358-367mm 4d 35'

368-377mm 4d 21'

Front Ride height Camber (+/-45' )

328-337mm -0d 20'

338-347mm 0d 03'

348-357mm 0d 24'

358-367mm 0d 44'

368-377mm 1d 02'

Toe-in per side = 0d 09' +/-09'

Rear Ride height Camber (+/-30' )

346-355mm -1d 08'

356-365mm -0d 54'

366-375mm -0d 43'

376-385mm -0d 35'

386-395mm -0d 30'

Rear toe per side 0d 09' +/- 09'

Remember there are 60 minutes (that is what the { ‘} mark is for) in a degree.

But the real answer is to go and then be armed to deal with the alignment people... and find one that actually know what they are doing .. very rare outside race preparation shops.. I ended up using a tape measure to check the toe in/out alignment to prove it was wrong on my first alignment.

A note; "If you have an early Miata and/or if your car has seen frequent alignments, it might make sense to get a set of new bolts. Later M1s had a different style with a finer thread which allows for higher clamping force (NAY9-28-6AZ)." Werner

... with FM springs (25mm lower) .. attempting to get MIQ Millman settings… 75kg in driver’s seat;

front camber -1.14 -1.12

front castor 5.29 5.47

front toe 0.01 -0.01

0.13 set back

0.02 set back ... he did not know what this was either .. presume axle to axle alignment

rear camber -1.86 -2.25

rear toe 0.23 0.27

Mazda Performance Handbook and that gives settings for street as;
front camber -0.5 to -0.75deg

Rear camber -0.75 to -1.0deg
caster more than 5deg
toe in 1/16" front and rear

" I'm still learning about this stuff myself, but I have learned a bit since upgrading my suspension about a year and a half ago (FM springs, Tokico Illuminas, FM sways). Here's my take:

You may not be able to get anywhere near stock (or even Miq) camber settings, especially in the rear, depending on how much total drop resulted from whatever springs you're using. Further muddying the waters is the fact that how close you *can* get seems to vary wildly from one car to another.

Because of these factors, one can't simply go to an alignment shop and say "set it to these numbers". You really need to find an alignment shop with a tech who's willing to work with you to get it right. What I ended up doing was going to a shop used by several friends who campaign Spec Miata race cars. You might want to check with your friends who race or auto-x, and see what shops they recommend.

Having said that, here's the general "formula" I would use, with the assumption that the car will be driven aggressively:

1) Figure out what is the minimum rear camber you can achieve while maintaining the desired toe. Shoot for .16 deg positive toe (i.e., toe *in*) per side, maybe a bit less. Don't panic if you can't get less than -1.8 to -2.0 degrees (FWIW, I've got -2.1 deg in the rear). Whichever side has the higher camber, set the other side the same.

2) Take whatever figure you ended up with for rear camber, minus .5 degrees, and use that for the front camber. The greater the difference between front and rear camber, the greater the tendency for understeer. Decreasing the difference moves the handling towards oversteer. My
first alignment after the suspension upgrade had my rear camber at about -1.9 and front camber at about -.7. The car understeered like a pig no matter what I did with the sways. I'm now running -1.6 front/-2.1 rear; much better. On my last alignment, I had the front toe set to 0; so
far, I like the way it feels.

3) Set the front caster as positive as you can get it while maintaining the camber set previously.
"Jeff Thomson

To increase caster, the upper A arm mount point is moved back 3 mm and lower A arm mount points are moved forward 2.1 mm. To lower the front roll center, the lower A arm mounts are lowered 5.7 mm.

Since high caster can deaden steering response, the rack in the 1999 is modified at the left side to eliminate the strap mount in favor of through bolts. The 1999 rack can be retrofitted.

The front hub carriers are modified by raising the tierod end mounts 7.1 mm to reduce tow variation with suspension movement.

I'm running complete front and rear M2 suspension in an M1. Les at Apex racing

Ride height on Mk2 Sport front is 13.5 inches, rear is 14 inches. 1/4 tank of fue

Mazdaspeed did some – very hard

The shock absorber gaiters are integrated with the bump stops. After about 5 years the gaiters are cracked and useless. You can replace these with official ones for about 120 GBP for 4 or go cheap with motor cycle fork gaiters. There is also a parts number change. The cars up to ’94 used the same part front and rear while the later cars had a more progressive rear bump stops ;Mazda part# N021-34-111.

"I spent a good part of one weekend with the car on stands with the springs removed measuring by jacking up the spindles on a scale and measuring wheel travel and shock travel and the force needed to get that travel. I have the data somewhere, but basically there is over 2" of usable wheel travel from first contact with the bump stop to where I couldn't measure anymore (300 lbs on the scale).The bump stop is roughly exponentially progressive. It starts out surprisingly soft at about 40 lb/in and firms up to moderately soft, say about 100 lb/in during the first inch and a bit of wheel travel, then it starts getting much firmer, a few hundred lb/in in the next half inch or so of wheel travel, and finally it starts to get serious rising rapidly from there. I think the highest rate I could measure (how much for the next 1/16"?) was over 1000 lb/in. All these numbers are from memory and since I did both front and rear with both new style and old style stops I could be off on specifics. But I do remember clearly that there is lots of travel after touching the stops and that they start out really soft and have a very progressive rate rise. Also, the early stops were shorter, and did not have as long an initial soft travel of the later stops. The non-R later cars use the early stops in the rear, the R uses the later stops all around. My conclusion is that the "bump stops" are best thought of as "elastomeric springs", and that they are a big part of why the car works.Second, I think of the steel springs as controlling droop travel (above static ride height, like the inside wheels) and the "elastomeric springs" as limiting bump travel (outside wheels). As such the rate of the steel spring can be used to change the total body roll, transient response, and pitch motion. But the car still corners on the bump stops. So, I decided to put full length stops back in and live with the ride height." David Gould

"During its developement period, the power plant frame originally designed for the Miata was adapted to the 3rd gen RX-7. Mazda engineerings found that the super lightweight aluminum PPF used in the 116hp Miata was not
rigid enough for the 255hp RX-7. As a result, they opted for a heavier steel design. With turbo Miatas, I wouldn't be suprised if the stock PPF is twisting/deforming under heavy loads. " Shiv

"It is possible to slot the holes in the upper a-arm (at the knuckle end) slightly. A little bit goes a long way, You can also reinforce it with a welded plate like Les has. I slotted about 1/8-3/16", and can get near zero camber in the rear of the race car, with considerable lowering (2-3"). It also allows you to separate the rear toe and camber adjustments."Stan Whitney

Typical alignment variations with load on lowered car (RHD);

400/250 with ground control for street/track Bob Zahradnik