Most bikes carry tall first gears, since a motorcycle's ability to handle short first gears is limited by their tendency to flip over backward. The Hayabusa's monsterous 171-hp I-4 sits transversely under the rider's massive stones, sending power through a 6-speed dog box and on to a chain drive, like virtually every sport bike on the planet. The thought of that sound coming from a Miata is hard to shake.Īlone, I would have the self control to keep the Hayabusa and Miata apart, but stick me with twisted geniuses like Alex Vendler (the Gnome's creator) and Tim Taylor (father of the Hamster) and I'm as suggestible as a sorority girl at Spring break. The sight of the lowly, pedestrian Geo Metro, coupled with the spine quivering F-1 soundtrack of its CBR-1000R engine, is a prescription for obsession. The idea for this project was the inevitable result of sharing the pits with the nutjob creators of the MetroGnome and the Angry Hamster, the two bike-powered creations that dominate our Best Engineered Cars of Lemons series. That's Lotus Elise power, Lotus Elise weight, and even a slightly Lotus Eliseish rear weight bias, all at much less than Lotus Elise prices. With the proper application of weight weeniedom, we're confident we can drag the Miatabusa's curb weight down to 2,000 pounds.
That's less than half the weight of a Miata engine. Its 99 lb-ft toruqe output is nearly a dead match for the original Miata's 100 lb-ft, but its 171 hp (or 197 if you drop the big bucks on a 2008 or newer engine) will give the Miata the longitudinal urgency it so desperately needs.Įven better, the 'Busa's little bundle of power is a bantamweight 135 lbs. Unlike most sportbike engines, though, the Hayabusa's unusually large displacement makes it a relative torque monster. The Hayabusa engine, like most sportbikes, is like a little bundle of race engine technology in a convenient, bargain-priced, crash-recovery package. The Miata's racecar chassis is paired to a stout but anemic econobox engine, and the car's lightweight, “gram strategy” development mantra is seriously dented by the engine's bulky, cast-iron block. Somehow, though, their key elements of greatness dovetail perfectly. The other is only ridden by someone who does. One is terminally underpowered, lithe, nimble, cute as a button, and driven by someone so secure they don't care the rest of the world thinks they're a hairdresser. In a way, these two machines couldn't be more different. (The Hayabusa's dyno data, by the way, comes from Sport Rider Magazine's fantastic dyno chart database. Of course, this is flywheel rpm on the chart below, and since there's a gear between the crank and flywheel, the engine itself will still be spinning to 10,500 rpm. If we take power off the Hayabusa's input shaft, though, the gear reduction between the crank and flywheel bumps up the torque and pulls down the rpm. The Hayabusa's 1.3-liter engine is actually weaker than the Miata's 1.8 until you're past the Miata's redline. If we were to simply bolt a flywheel to the Hayabusa's crank (nothing simple about that, really) we'd end up with a situation like the dyno chart above. Cick here to visit the Project Miatabusa Homepage!