I Bought Engineering Explained's Supercharged Miata

I bought my first car in the fall of 2017, as a Junior in college. The $2500 I had scraped together bought me a baby blue Lincoln Town car with a landau top. Visions of six-passenger college road trips danced in my head until, a week later, I attempted one. Half an hour in the check engine light started flashing. It wouldn’t stop until I sold the car a year later, with most of the Lincoln's time spent gathering dust in the lot where I had originally purchased it.

In the five years since, I’ve owned 10 cars. Nothing from a Porsche Boxster to a Lexus LS400 has been able to hold my attention for more than 10 months at a time, no car accumulating more than 10,000 miles. That is in large part due to the fact that, as my E39 M5 and LX470 both showed, I tend to buy awful examples of stellar cars and watch them deteriorate in front of my eyes. I’d think about whether I should sell them at least once a week, daydreaming about everything in budget that happened to pass me on the highway. I assumed I just wasn’t built to have a long-term car. But I just bought Engineering Explained’s supercharged ND1 MX-5 Miata Club, and I think it may fix me.

I’ve seen the light once before. Back in 2020 I bought a beautiful 34,000-mile AP1 Honda S2000, my attainable dream car, for a price that would make you want to punch me in the mouth. I paid eight grand for a two-owner car with zero rust, all of its maintenance up to date, no mods, and just one dent in the rocker panel. That car was my escape pod from quarantine in New York, the thing that got me into the woods and away from the oppressive weight of a city dark. I never even considered selling it.

I could imagine no better car for my life, but my car deserved a better life for itself. My clean, soft-top S2000 parked in Brooklyn overnight got stolen. I had the gall to act surprised. Insurance paid out far more than I’d spent on the car, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t replace it. Having purchased one for $8000, I couldn’t justify spending $20,000 on the same car, or $15,000 on a far worse one. I went back into the casino to try my luck with a Boxster, then an M5, then finally a Lexus LX and E30 two-car solution. Right when those two had me at my wit’s end, I got the text from Jason Fenske.

The meticulous man behind Engineering Explained had suggested I buy the Miata back in 2021, when I asked him his opinion on the M5 I was looking at. A yellow-wrapped, supercharged version of the world’s best sports car is the kind of car I couldn’t turn down. Sports car buyers should just suck it up and get a Miata, I always said. Here was a chance to do so, and I’d still own something unique.

Fenkse ended up needing the car for another year. I told him to text me the minute he decided to sell it. In the interim year, I tried on two separate occasions to buy a different, worse, supercharged, bright-yellow Miata. They fell through for reasons entirely outside of my control.