By The best sports cars are the ones that give you the best experience. Lightweight, small roadsters are a dying art, found nowadays almost exclusively in the hands of retirees and highschoolers with rich parents. Mazda’s contribution to the soft top sports car segment is one of the longest lasting of the bunch, thanks to consistent styling, rear wheel drive through a six-speed manual transmission, and excellent driving experience. The Mazda MX-5 Miata is in its fourth generation after thirty years, and now shares a platform with the turbocharged, Italian Abarth 124 Spider. They’re faster now than every Mazda Miata since the Mazdaspeed NB of the early 2000s, and still sitting comfortably under 2500 lbs despite the addition of modern safety features (and an optional power hardtop). That light weight goes a long way around corners, but the ND Miata can be made to stick even harder to the road or track with better tires and brakes.
Systems Check
The first step to making something better is making sure nothing’s wrong in the first place. Your MX-5’s braking system is capable, but very much designed for the street. It will suffer in high temperatures and after extended use; the stock brake pads on almost every street car are designed for soft, gradual deceleration from low speeds at best, and one panic stop on the highway at worst. They aren’t built to hold up to repeated, hard slowdowns while racing around a track or up and down mountain roads, and this has caused many a fender-bender in unprepared track Miatas. Maintenance is key: if you’re doing any sort of spirited driving, make sure your pads still have plenty of life left on them, your rotors are straight and surfaced, and you’ve got the right amount and type of brake fluid.
Additionally, proper cooling goes a long way for all of the components of your vehicle on the track or in the canyon. It’s safe to say that making sure you can stop should be a higher priority than having to take a breather after 10 passes. Brake ducting makes sure that cold air can be fed from the front of your vehicle against the brake rotors and calipers, and can keep you on-track longer.
Rotors
Now that your stock brakes are working like they’re supposed to, let’s talk about upgrades! Like most cars, Miatas come standard with smooth rotors. Upgraded rotors by themselves won’t do much other than help your car look and stay cool, so the most important thing is to find rotors that you like. As a blanket upgrade, StopTech and EBC make great rotors with a ton of different finishes. We’re a fan of slotted rotors in bare metal, but there are also cross-drilled and combination options like EBC’s 3GD Series or flat blanks like their RK Series.
Calipers
95% of the time, caliper upgrades mean new rotors too: these are components of a “big brake kit.” For a full-on aftermarket caliper upgrade, Flyin’ Miata offers several kits that include four or six piston calipers and far larger rotors than what come from the factory on any Miata. Their most impressive is the Big Mama Jama kit, which comes with almost 13” front rotors and 6-piston Wilwood calipers. For an additional fee, you can add 4-piston rear Wilwood calipers as well. If you happen to be one of the mad lads who sticks a V8 in a one-ton Mazda, this is the braking system upgrade for you.
Pads
No matter if you’re running an otherwise-stock setup or the Big Mama Jama, you need brake pads! More specifically, if you’re actually running your car to the point where you need better brakes, you need performance brake pads. From the factory, your MX-5 comes with semi-metallic brake pads. These use a combination of synthetic materials and up to 60% metal materials. The metal component makes semi-metallic brake pads relatively resistant to heat and wear, meaning they will create less brake dust and be more consistent in their performance even at high heat levels. However, this component also causes the pads to wear the rotors faster, especially when the pads are in need of replacement. Like ceramic rotors, ceramic brake pads are the significant upgrade over steel compound semi-metallic pads, but are only really necessary in extreme applications. Ceramic pads are so good at dissipating heat that they likely won’t even warm up to their normal operating temperature during street use, and as such will create an incredible amount of noise and make everyone around you think your Miata is very broken.
If you’re mostly planning on using your car on the street, standard OEM-replacement semi-metallic pads are still more than enough for your Miata. If you want to go higher end, EBC Red Stuff is a good start, offering better street performance and minimum brake dust. For autocross and occasional track day use, EBC Yellow Stuff; if you’re going any faster than that regularly, high-end application-specific race pads are a worthwhile upgrade to eliminate brake fade and stand up in the face of full race weekends and endurance championships.
Improving Braking Speed
Upgraded pads, calipers, and rotors will do a whole lot of good for stopping consistence, but what makes the most difference in stopping distance is tires and weight. It may seem silly to suggest on a Miata, but weight reduction makes you faster at everything. You’ll see faster 0-60 times, faster cornering speeds, and faster stopping times. Think about what you do and don’t need in your car, as the easiest weight reduction is getting rid of your big subwoofer box and amp, the bag of frisbees in the trunk you never use, your spare tire/jack/toolbox (at least while on the track), and so on. Beyond weight reduction, good tires make a world of difference in braking. The better they stick, the less you slip, the less ABS has to kick in, and the faster you stop.
No matter if you’re a car enthusiast driving your Miata to work every day or a hoon sliding around the canyons every night, it’s important to know what’s going on during braking, and it’s important to know that the hardware you’re using is up to snuff. For OEM replacement and performance brake rotors, pads and kits, head over to the Motoroso Marketplace and take a look around!
