Ride On Board The Ultimate N/A Mazda MX-5 At The Nürburgring

There are lots of ways of getting more power out of a Mazda MX-5. You could turbocharge it, or supercharge it, or perform any one of a vast number of fairly common engine swaps. Or, if you’re German MX-5 tuning specialist SPS Motorsport, you could retain part of the car’s core character – a small, rev-happy naturally aspirated four-cylinder – and work to squeeze as much power out of it as possible.

That’s just what SPS has done with a track-built ND MX-5, which has been documented by the excellent YouTube channel OneLapHeroes. The car began life as a regular 2.0-litre MX-5, and SPS set out around two years ago with a view to squeezing 200bhp from its little four-cylinder engine.

If this all sounds a bit like another rear-drive Japanese roadster with an atmospheric four-pot, that’s no coincidence: SPS calls the tuning setup the ‘S2000 package’. Thanks to some “crazy aggressive” cams, improved cooling and a custom exhaust, the company reckons the car is pushing around 223ps and 280nm of torque – that’s 220bhp and 207lb ft.

Those are some rather impressive gains over a standard MX-5 2.0’s 181bhp and 151lb ft. The changes have also seen the engine’s redline raised to around 8100rpm, up from the standard car’s already impressive 7500rpm limit.

Elsewhere, it’s wearing some fairly serious aero bits, a two-way suspension setup with race-style uniball joints in place of rubber bushings, and a carbon roof originally developed for the ND’s Italian cousin, the Abarth 124 Spider. Some of these changes help keep weight down to around 980kg.

After a tour of the car, we’re treated to an on-board lap as it gets absolutely sent around the Nürburgring, raspy four-pot singing away. It’s a very amusing demonstration – as if it needed proving any more – that modest power and low weight is just as effective a combination as a heavy, powerful sledgehammer of a car.