William Quade

I’ve now owned my NB Miata for five years. I have been writing post where I cover each year of ownership.

This year I continue that format where I cover the year with a single photo and short description for each month of ownership. This particular post goes from March 2025 (where I left of last year’s post) through February 2026.

March 2025: Annual dyno testing

In March I got my car back on the dyno for SCCA MiDiv time trials classing. The only real change this year was the change from the square top intake manifold to the Skunk2 intake manifold. [Read More]

Over the past year I’ve had two throttle body failures on track in my NB Miata, one involving a complete mechanical failure of the throttle shaft. After the second incident, I decided I was done relying on aftermarket cable-driven throttle bodies and started converting the car to drive-by-wire.

This is the first post in a series covering that conversion using Megasquirt. The goal is to eliminate common mechanical failure points while opening the door to features like auto-blip, cruise control, and more flexible throttle mapping. [Read More]

I’ve now owned my NB Miata for four years. I have been writing post where I cover each year of ownership. This year I continue that format where I cover the year with a single photo and short description for each month of ownership. This particular post goes from March 2024 (where I left of last year’s post) through February 2025.

March 2024: Swapping in a rebuilt VVT motor with a 6 speed

Over the winter I prepped a BP6D VVT motor and got around to installing it into my car to replace the original BP4W in March.

I fell down the slippery slope of an engine swap. I was just going to drop in the motor as-is, but found the valves weren’t sealing very great. So I rebuilt the head. While the head was off I ended up doing a DIY hone with new OEM rings and Chinese pistons, along with a long list of goodies: [Read More]

If you are into track days or autocross eventually you’ll probably want to move away from regular street tires, and start using the faster 200TW or better rubber. One of the downsides of these fast tires is that they tend to not last so long if you are constantly driving them on the street.

Drivers of larger cars can stash an extra set of tires in the trunk or back seats, but that’s not possible with something small like a Mazda Miata. In this post I show you one solution to this problem, a tire trailer. [Read More]

It’s hard to believe that I’ve owned my NB Miata for three years already. For the first two years I wrote posts covering the previous year of ownership. This year I continue that format where I cover the year with a single photo and short description for that month of ownership. This particular post goes from March 2023 (where I left of last year’s post) through February 2024.

March 2023: Tire trailer upgrades

In 2022 I built a small tire trailer to bring additional tires and other supplies with me to track days. This year I made some upgrades to my trailer by adding a lower deck that goes down to just below the axle. [Read More]