If you’re a fan of the Mazda Miata’s amazing balance and handling characteristics, then Tonight’s Break/Fix guest is to blame. He is best known as the Concept Engineer for the original Miata and he developed the original suspension as well as the packaging layout, achieving the group’s goal of the ultimate “Lightweight Sports car.”
Norman H. Garrett III is an accomplished Automotive Engineer having worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru and Volvo. His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena, with notable success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials. He has supported Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Lab, and if that wasn’t enough, you might recognize him from some of his most recent articles on Hagerty like “A few things you should know before you steal my 914” and “Right seat confessions of an on track driving instructor.“
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Spotlight
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III - Automotive Engineer for Mazda
His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena, with notable success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials. He has supported Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Lab. He has worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru and Volvo.
Contact: Prof. Norman H. Garrett III at Visit Online!
Notes
- Origin Story – Who/What/Where/When got you into cars? Was it a childhood passion? Came from a racing family?
- What led you to automotive engineering? (and to Mazda) + Miata development
- Sports cars of the past
- General restoration of old cars discussion
- Engine tuning for power and performance….
- The ridiculousness of autonomous driving and EVs
- Hydrogen as the best fuel ever
and much, much more!
Transcript
Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they get that job or become that person?
The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.
Crew Chief Eric: If you’re a fan of the Mazda Miata’s amazing balance and handling characteristics, then tonight’s break fix guest is 100 percent to blame. He is best known as the concept engineer for the original Miata, and he developed the original suspension as well as the packaging layout, achieving the group’s goal of the ultimate lightweight sports car.
Norman H. Garrett III is an accomplished automotive engineer, having worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru, and Volvo. His corporate experiences span the global [00:01:00] automotive development arena, with notable success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials. He has supported Georgia Tech, as well as Oak Ridge National Lab, and if that wasn’t enough, you might recognize him from some of his most recent articles on Hagerty, like, A Few Things You Should Know Before You Steal My 914, and Right Seat Confessions of an On Track Driving Instructor.
And with that, we’d like to welcome Norman to BrakeFix to share some of his stories. So welcome.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Good evening, Eric. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Crew Chief Eric: Your petrolheadness, if that’s a word, it goes way, way back. So why don’t we rewind the clock and talk about your origin story? The who, the what, the where, and the when that got you into cars.
Was this a childhood passion? Did you come from a racing family? What led you to become an automotive engineer?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Uh, I’d have to say the good Lord just kind of put the gene in me, motor oil in the blood and all that. My father was a physician. My grandfather who lived near us was a [00:02:00] businessman from New York, but I got the bug early.
I was taking everything apart in the house at the age of four. It would be decades before I could put it all back together again, but it was one of those hellion kids that I read every label in the cabinet when I was three years, four years old, just started reading every jar in the grocery store and thirsty for anything to get my hands on and then found the public library had books on cars.
And from second grade, third grade on those bicycling to all the libraries and Guilford County and getting advised with my parents to check out every book I could check out 12 books at a time and memorize them. If it had cars on the cover, I got the book.
Crew Chief Eric: Back then. What was the car that got your attention the most?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Boy, you know, you get imprinted as a kid and as a gosling, I guess I got imprinted on big American cars and then very cool European sports cars. In the hometown I was in, in Greensboro, North Carolina, it was a pretty good center for sports cars. A lot of Aussie, Hilly 3000s, Jaguar XKEs. But at the same time, 66 Tornadoes, Spaceship cars, just things that the executives would drive that [00:03:00] would just knock your stocks off.
I mean, it was an amazing time to be a kid growing up in the 60s. The arrogance of Detroit as they moved away from the gaudy chrome age to the space age, it was fascinating to me. It really didn’t matter if it had gasoline in the tank from a lawnmower to a jet engine airplane. And it was fascinating to me.
Anything that was motive. I loved
Crew Chief Eric: coming up through the sixties. I mean, what an amazing time for bespoke cars too, where automotive design was all over the place compared to now where things are extremely cookie cutter. To your point, to use the phrase, the arrogance of Detroit, they went from that to the muscle car era, thanks to Pontiac and John DeLorean and others.
Right. But then we headed into the Malays era and it all seemed to go downhill very quickly from there.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: It got pretty sad. Yeah. When I graduated engineering school in the early eighties, it was like not the best time to be slowly recovering from the mugging that the seventies had done to the automotive industry.
It was a pretty sad time, but the sixties were just amazing. We call them designers now, but I call them stylists where the stylists were just ruling the day. And the engineers took a back [00:04:00] seat. Cars were made to look a certain way in the, in the U S made to look like an object of desire. Whether they drove that way or not would be another issue, whereas the European cars were, you know, more sporty and more set up for racing or you at least spirited driving so early on you you could choose a path in the North Carolina South it being stock car country.
Even in the sixties, you would choose your path. Either you were gonna be a Detroit Musclehead or you were gonna be one of those Tweed Cap wearing guys that like the European cars. I fell into that cap pretty early. I had my Hot Rod Magazine subscription at age seven, but I had my road and track and car and driver and MotorTrend at age seven as well.
Love them all, but aggregated toward spirited driving, drag racing, and all that was fun. Turning left around an oval for a hundred laps just didn’t interest me. We needed left and right turns.
Crew Chief Eric: You’re talking about European sports cars is predominantly during that time, British roadsters, right? Because Porsche hadn’t quite established itself yet as a juggernaut in the United States.
The Italians have been floundering forever stateside. So it was really the Brits [00:05:00] that were leading that charge.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: It was, and there was dirt cheap. I mean, I was mowing grass, you know, $3 a yard in my early teens. My first car we can talk about, but my first sports car was a spitfire that I got for 150 bucks in today’s dollars, you know, $800.
It was something you could buy by mowing yards. I got it when I was 14 years old and fixed it up to drive when I got my license. But they were cheap. They were everywhere, and they were all broken, and so they were all cheap.
Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned your first car. So that Spitfire, that Triumph was not your first.
So what was your first car?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, it becomes a long legacy. Before I was born, my grandfather retired from his company in New York, sold the company and came down about 150 acres of raw land and started playing basically Sim City. With 150 acres, but a pond in a barns and all that. Of course he bought what everybody did in the early sixties, an old world war two Jeep, a leftover Jeep first year after the war, CJ two way at the age of six, I was driving it, sitting on a phone book and driving that around the farm and learning how to double clutch and drift in two wheel drive and had a lot of [00:06:00] fun and we still have that in the family.
So that was my very first car, even though it was not titled per se in my name, my first car car. Was when I was 12, my dad had a patient that owned the Chrysler dealership and someone had traded in Ford Galaxy with a thrown rod, which was worth nothing at this point in 1962 Galaxy in 1969 would have been through four owners already and fully depreciated such for the 60.
If you didn’t change a car every year, you looked like you were poor. It’d be like having a flip phone today or whatever is the faux pas you have for carrying something in public that you shouldn’t be having. And this car, even though it was only six or seven years old, had been fully depreciated through all its owners and it’s on a rod.
So we got it for free. He towed it into the backyard, much to my mother’s chagrin, and I started playing with it. So that was my first official car. It traveled all of 100 feet or 50 feet to the end of the driveway one day, and then we blew it up just for fun. Not a functional car, but I learned a lot.
Changed the rod bearings in it. Painted the valve covers, aluminum, silver, because that’s what you do. Have a lot of fun. I think when I was 13, we got rid of it and I got into [00:07:00] motorcycles and started racing motocross and that consumed my interest until a great turning event came with my father through some great wisdom and sheer luck.
I had another patient who owned the Datsun dealership and lo and behold, he bought a Datsun 510, 1970 Datsun 510. That became my autocross car. When I was 15. I was autocrossing lying about having a license and would go to SSA events and autocross that car and modified it with a Peter Brock’s, A BRE suspension, and got into suspension design and theory curiosity with that car.
That kind lined me up along the way. It had a lot of TR threes after the Spitfire. TR fours. Europas Jag X Ks. Got into 914s. I’ve had like a dozen 914s. Got into 911s. I’ve tried to have more cars than my age. I’ve had 73 cars and I’m probably, I don’t know, 40 motorcycles. So I could be on Lifetime as a hoarder.
I do flush them out. Right now I only have a few in the driveway, so. And not all of them run. My excuse is they don’t all run, so it’s okay.
Crew Chief Eric: You know, sometimes we ask this question [00:08:00] of our guests. What’s the most gorgeous car of all time? The sexiest car all the time? Prettiest car? Things like that. I want to ask you this question because it goes so far back into your history.
The cars you thought were awesome when you were a kid, are they still the most awesome cars now that you’re an adult looking back? Is Still that prettiest car, is that that one that imprinted on you or is it something different when you kind of compare A to B
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: 66 to still knocks my socks off. Uh, and I actually had a weird experience uh, three years ago.
I was at a race shop in Concord, North Carolina and a guy had a 64 Imperial, which is not a car you see often. It’s the Green Hornet car. Yep. And you see Cadillacs in that air and you see Lincolns all the time and you never see Imperials. ’cause most of them were ruined in demolition derbies. ’cause they were impossible.
They actually got outlawed for demolition derby because they didn’t break. I ended up buying the darn thing. It was a 60, 000 mile car out of Oklahoma. I named it Edna and fell in love. And that era, again, just that audacity of this thing was huge. It was like having a porch, you know, attached to your house that you could drive around the block.
It [00:09:00] was an amazing vehicle. So I’d have to say the imprinting lasts still with me. An engineer, I’m still a very visual person. So the sleep things that were happening in the seventies. If you’re going to lead to the question of what is the most beautiful car ever? I’d have to say the very few ugly cars in the sports car world.
The day where it may be the worst looking one, the Jag, a E type coupe, that, and the, and the Ferrari 275 GTB and the Miura, you can’t say any one. It’s like asking which of my children was best looking.
Crew Chief Eric: I mean, the commendatore always said, you know, Enzo, yes, that the E type was the most. Beautiful car that he had ever seen.
And look at all the cars that he had penned over the years.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Right, exactly. So we can jump ahead. When I was working in the design studio at Mazda, I was a studio engineer and I was able to work in the studio and watch the process of someone building a car from scratch out of thin air, literally out of clay and trying to make it beautiful.
And. It’s very difficult to do. I’m not a sketch artist. Barely make something that looks like what it should look like. I have a daughter who’s a Rembrandt level artist, and she can do amazing things with pen and ink. And the clay [00:10:00] modelers who interpreted what the stylist designers were saying at Mazda, to watch that process was remarkable.
And I really came out of that saying, It’s really hard to make a pretty car. It is very hard to make a three dimensional object gorgeous. God does it very well with people. And horses and giraffes, but for us to make something and then with the Miata, the RX 7, third gen RX 7 was a great exercise in that.
How beautiful can a shape be? And I think that was a penultimate exercise by, um, Chinson when he did that work. Watching that come together, I’d walk up to them at night and I’d say, guys, You know, it won’t cost me any more money to tool up a very beautiful fender. So why don’t you stay late tonight and make this fender beautiful?
Cause you’re not there yet. And we all would be critical of the shapes. And that’s also very difficult for a stylist slash designer to do the work because everyone’s a critic. They come in and say, that’s just not right. But then they think it’s beautiful. And the person may have bad taste. The executives may not get where they’re going, et cetera, et cetera.
I really came to appreciate how difficult it is to make a shape beautiful. And that makes me appreciate all the more an E type. The covered headlight E types don’t have a bad [00:11:00] angle. But on the same effect, we’re all used to seeing C4 Corvettes and we’re tired of seeing C4 Corvettes, maybe, but that shows the skill level of GM’s design studio, that there is really not a bad angle on a C4 Corvette.
You’re so used to it that you may not appreciate it, but if you were to drop that car in the 1940s into a car show, people would go crazy. It takes a lot of skill to have a car that looks beautiful from all angles. I was working at Subaru prior to Mazda when the first Subaru XT. I remember this is like it was yesterday.
We walked into the warehouse and the XT was facing a sideways. We saw the profile view of the XT and we went crazy. Cause a Subaru XT in 1985 model, 1986 model in side view, profile view is not ugly. It’s actually pretty interesting looking car for 1985. The minute you walk to the front three quarter, the whole thing.
Drops like a house of cards again, it’s very difficult to make a three dimensional object gorgeous. And you have to appreciate the skill of what it takes. And there’s very few people know what they can do. There’s not a, there’s probably not a hundred guys in the [00:12:00] world and women that can do three dimensional shapes that are gorgeous that has nothing to do with engineering or how cars drive, but just on their sheer look in some ways, the automotive industry is like the women’s shoe business.
It has to look great to sell and cars don’t look great. Don’t sell.
Crew Chief Eric: I haven’t thought about the XT in a long time. And it reminds me that visually it’s a precursor to the SVX similar sort of design. It might not have been thought of that way, but I kind of put those links in the chain together. Sometimes when I see a car and go, it has heritage right there.
So it’s kind of funny and you don’t see XTs ever on the road. I mean, if they even exist anymore, for that matter. You said you started at Subaru and then went to Mazda. How did you go from growing up in the Carolinas to suddenly finding yourself in design studios in California and things like that? What was that transition like?
How did you get your way in?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I’ll leave with a statement. It’s very difficult to get into the automotive industry. Or at least it was in the eighties and it still kind of is, but once you’re in, it’s pretty easy to move around. I went to Georgia tech [00:13:00] to learn how to design race cars or to continue my education in chassis and suspension and race car designing to punctuate that statement.
Now the Miata is the most raced car in the world because there’s a great satisfaction to that circle of life. Not just due to my credit, but what Mazda did with that design. When I graduated in early 81, I had offers. It was a great time to be an engineer, had a lot of job offers. I did not really want to go to Detroit.
And no offense to Detroit. I did not want to be the right rear door Cadillac ashtray engineer. And there is one, and I didn’t want to be that guy due to my father’s not influence. He never asked me to be a doctor, do anything else, but I wanted to use my skills to help humanity in a moment of a 22 year old empathy for the world.
So I went to the West coast to do cardiovascular implant research, and I was hired by, Heart valve company in Southern California in Irvine and design artificial heart valves and annual pesky rings. Other cardiovascular implants for about a year and a half. And ironically, my window in my office in that building looked out across to the Mazda design studio, but realized my heart wouldn’t.
That’s a bad [00:14:00] pun. My heart was not in that job, so to speak. And so left and went to Subaru when they were looking for a design engineer and did that job for a couple of years. And then Mazda had an opening. Just as they were getting the studio going for a studio engineer jumped at that chance and it was amazing because the first day on the job, they said, we’re thinking about doing a lightweight sports car.
What do you know about race cars? And I said, well, I have, that’s, you know, my number one fan. That’s what I’ve been my whole life is trying to do the race cars or sports cars. So at that point I’d had. Probably 30 European sports cars. So it was a perfect melding of opportunity and preparation for me.
Crew Chief Eric: So did you also come up through an SAE type of program?
I was, I
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: joined SAE as a student. I’ve actually a 40 year, 42 years now, I’ve been an SAE joined as a student. We didn’t have formula SAE then we had mini Baja and we had student competition on relevant engineering at Georgia Tech, which was where all the schools did this. Georgia Tech, we built a hydrogen car, hydrogen powered vehicle based on a Fiat 128, which is.
That’s a whole nother story. Sort of like
Crew Chief Eric: your [00:15:00] Datsun 510, but I wasn’t going to go there.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, that’s a, that’s damning by harsh praise to say that they’re the same. They both have a boxy shape and there’s no more similarity than that. I was very heavily involved in SAE and it was a pretty strong program at tech.
Although Michigan would have been better or, you know, where there was an automotive engineering, you know, master’s and PhD programs. But it was a very interesting time. We were reeling off the seventies where EPA and crash protection and the insurance lobby had just crushed the industry. All the research dollars had gone into a mission certification.
We had 455 cubic inch Oldsmobiles making 160 horsepower. Just a horrible time, horrible time. We had a 55 mile an hour speed limit that was clamped on the year I got my driver’s license. It was not a great time, but at the same time. We have all these great British first cars that dentists and doctors had bought and then couldn’t keep running.
So we could buy them for nothing for a few hundred dollars. You could buy a TR six, my Jag about for 600 bucks. And I got it because it was just sitting at a repair shop and a guy couldn’t afford to fix it. But it was a different [00:16:00] world and a sidebar. So if you knew how to do your own work, restoring a car in the seventies, there was no internet, there were no manuals, there were no parts.
It was a lot of blacksmithing. Luckily, English cars are blacksmith together. So you get blacksmith one back together. The NGTD that’s behind me is largely built with a hammer and some pig iron. So you can fix it. pretty readily with a crescent wrench and a hammer. But you get into more sophisticated things.
There wasn’t a microchip or a computer in anything except my early 914s and we immediately put carburetors on them. But the 70s was a very difficult time. Now you can be very bold and buy a complicated, the car next to me here, the 964, a car with 30 year old German processors that are dying as we speak.
You can listen carefully and hear them crinkling themselves to death. Yet on the internet, There’s not a problem yet I’ve had with it that you don’t find 20 guys that have already fixed it. And they’re telling you how to fix it, where to get the part or where to get the will fit part from advanced auto instead of the one that Porsche wants you to buy.
So it’s a great time now to restore these old cars.
Crew Chief Eric: You decided that there wasn’t anything exciting as Subaru anymore and you get this opportunity at Mazda. How did that play [00:17:00] out?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, it was funny. I wasn’t really looking for a job. Someone just told me, Hey, Mazda is looking for an engineer just for yucks.
I sent the resume over, but I was very happy. Phenomenal company, 40 workweek company car. Everything was perfect about Subaru of America at Subaru Technical Center, but just sent the resume out. At Georgia Tech, they had told us that you should change jobs every two years for your first 10 years so that you experience different companies and grow.
A lot of people have 20 years experience in the job. It’s really one year, 19 times. They really said be aggressive until you’re 30 or 32 and try to get as much experience as you can in any engineering, and they’ll make you a better engineer. And so I’d been a Subaru, not quite two years, but the Mazda thing, they built the arc seven and I love the rotary engine.
I was very fascinated by it and people were racing them and all that. So it was just seemed like, well, let’s go see what they had to say. And I’d kind of learned the Subaru world had kind of caught up to what they were doing. And we had just done the design work for cars that were coming out in a couple of years.
And it wasn’t going to be, it’d be five more years. We didn’t need more new cars. So it’s just [00:18:00] kind of a perfect storm. But once I got there, it was perfect opportunity. It was kind of a perfect match for the, the audience, the arc seven programs. It fit with my interest. I worked, you know, 60, 70 hours a week for free, basically.
Um, after the 40 hours a week, I worked because I just loved it. I had a great appetite for the work they were asking me to do. All of us felt that way. Everybody was just working their tail off because it was a dream job to be able to design, whether it was a Miata or the third gen RX 7 or the second gen RX 7, to be able to work on these cars and get paid for it was kind of a dream for all of us gearheads.
Crew Chief Eric: So if we align the stories of some previous guests, Also from the world of SRO, you were rubbing elbows with folks like Dean case and Jim Jordan and others who have been on road fix as well. So, I mean, talk about a long history there too, at all roads lead to Mazda. It seems like,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: yeah, well, I mean, I think it was an attractive company from an employee standpoint, engineer.
Anyway, you’d be like, I’d like to work with this company and it’d be like, where I applied to Porsche when I was a junior at Georgia tech and I got her at this. Flush letter from them saying, no, thank you. But it’s, it’s [00:19:00] very, yeah, there’s certain companies you’d like to work for. I was the first engineer hired by Mazda and, uh, a couple of years in, I said, okay, we need to expand.
And so we, we posted the job in Detroit and in Southern California. We got like 200 resumes, all of a lot of guys from Ford and GM and Chrysler wanted to move to Detroit. You know, Newport Beach Irvine in Southern California. And I had this stack of hundreds and hundreds of resumes and I’m going through them and there’s this one from this guy from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
And he had an essay paper that he had written, stapled to his resume. And I go on, this guy’s got enough moxie to write an essay paper on his own. He’s 21, 22 years old. And he drives a Mini Cooper like the original Mini Cooper. And I’m like. Okay. We’ve got to interview this guy. Dean walked in the door and I said, okay, that’s it.
You’re done. You’re, you’re, you’re hired. There’s no question. We need you. If you have a mini Cooper, you can keep it running and have a engineering degree. Where’s that?
Crew Chief Eric: So did he have long hair then? Like he does now.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Now, if you Google Jack Nicholson, 1960 is what, that’s what he looked like. He looked like a young Jack Nicholson.
Crew Chief Eric: Dean told us the story of. the Miata from [00:20:00] his perspective, but I want to get it from your perspective when I ask you some poignant questions as well. So how early or late in the Miata’s birth process did you get engaged?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I came in just as the first clay model. was finished. And so the first clay model was just a flyer.
Let’s just do a two seater. The package development underneath it was a Mazda GLC front engine rear wheel drive car, live axle, very tall engine, very tall package. When you look at the image of the first clay model and the first running prototype, very, very tall. So they needed a packaging engineer to bring that down to sports car world.
But that was just more. It was really good at making a clay model and or making a running prototype of a concept to their credit. They really were brilliant in many ways about design. They would build in many cases, a running clay model fiberglass version and put it out in traffic. And I remember many times we would take the cars down to Laguna Beach and drive these rickety prototypes.
Almost a kit car, but with a shell on it up and down Laguna beach. While our executives would sit at a [00:21:00] cafe, a sidewalk and watch it in traffic. And it was really excellent because you can look at a car in a curtain viewing yard, and you get a real world view of what it looks like seeing it in traffic.
You really get to see what a beautiful car looks like. So I came in just as we started building a running prototype of that first play a model, and it was commissioned by ID international automotive design owned and run by the late John shoots in out of England. And they built them on in prototype and shipped it over right hand drive.
And I remember the night we unpacked it and I haven’t told the story before. I actually snuck it out and drove it around Newport beat for about a half an hour at night, knowing no one can get a picture of it, realizing you’re going to have British electronics and they’d never been driven before. It was a great risk.
I didn’t have a wreck or break the car, brought it back. And then later we took it to Santa Barbara and there’s, there’s a trip that’s been talked about a lot where we showed that car up in Santa Barbara. So from there, the program got go ahead to go to the next phase, which would be to do a serious package.
of a sports car. And that’s where my work began, uh, put the engineering under the shape. And that’s where the push and pull the tug of war began [00:22:00] of Hayashi san and Yagi san, Mark Jordan, Kamatano and Shinzon all wanted a very low cowl point. The windshield wiper area wanted a very low hood line. I wanted a low belt line because the spit fire that I had, you could put your arm out the window and it would just fit your armpit.
And if, and that’s really important so that you don’t look like you stole your dad’s car. I think it’s the Lexus SC 300 that even a six foot tall guy looks like he’s 12 year old kid. Not flattering, nor is it fun. Low belt line, things like that. We all talked about how to get this package correct from the first clay to the second clay.
And if you look at pictures of the second clay model, you’ll see that It’s actually really tight. It’s not that glamorous of a shape. That’s a tremendous accomplishment, if I may say so, for the engineering team in Japan and the work I was doing to get that tight and get it small. Along the way of getting it small, I was working on making it raceable.
And that is double wishbone suspension, weight distribution inside the wheel center lines. Weight distribution, left to right, correct. All of the things that make a car tunable for racing. If you have the weight distribution and the suspension geometry is wrong in the layout [00:23:00] stage, and you get locked into that, you can never tune that out.
You can’t take a live axle Camaro and make it, you can’t make it a fantastic race car, you can make it competent with great tires and sway bars and lock down the springs and dampers. So the thing doesn’t move, make it into a go kart and then it handles, but it’s not what we were shooting for with the Miata.
We were really looking for a car. That communicated lightness and nimbleness to the owner. And that starts at the design stage of the initial layout, where do the components go and what kind of space do you leave for the suspension that you need to give you the camber patterns that you want so that you can let the body roll.
Crew Chief Eric: So you touch on something really important, the lightness and the speed, and that’s the mantra of Lotus. And it’s often said, you know, when you ask people, the answer is always Miata. And then the joke is the original answer was always Lotus. And when you look at the NA Miata, you see a lot of inspiration from the Elan.
There’s always been rumors and things like that, that Mazda bought cars and took them apart or this and that, or they were copying this and the other thing. But it sounds like you guys were starting from scratch, but did you take inspiration from [00:24:00] Lotus?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: No, not, I mean, you can say that from a styling standpoint, only because there’s a long hood short deck car, as is a C4 Corvette, as is a lot of cars.
So proportions are there. And a lot is actually about. 70 percent or 75 percent the size of a Miata. It’s actually a very small, fragile car. I don’t know how many thousands they sold, but it was not that greatly accepted of a car as good a design as it was. And I’m not dissing the design at all. Being a former Europa owner, I loved everything Colin Chapman did with Lotus cars.
From an engineering standpoint, there’s not one iota from it. So it’s kind of a naive ninth grader, kind of a mentality to say that it’s designed after the alarm. Did you look under the skin immediately? The Lotus Elan had the backbone chassis, uh, actually has Colin Chapman’s version of McPherson struts.
He had Chapman struts in the rear and just not, not anywhere near the same car. We actually, IAD. After they did the first model, we commissioned them because Mazda had no manpower to do this work. We’re all working, looting hand to mouth, so to speak, with time. They asked ID to do a chassis proposal and they proposed a backbone chassis.
It looked just like a Lotus [00:25:00] Elan, and it was heavy and wrong and wouldn’t have passed side impact crash testing. Didn’t have the torsional rigidity that we needed for the convertible. And Elan worked because it didn’t have very much of a heavy chassis. The chassis was fine because the body didn’t weigh anything.
The whole car is 1, 500, 1, 600 pounds. And it’s hard for people to understand this, but the real feat of the NA Miata. is a thousand kilogram car that can take a 30 mile an hour crash in the front. There’s not an M. G. B. R. Spitfire that close to that, particularly when they were frame on body cars, unibody car like the two 40 Z.
All of those have to change as they got into the eighties and the insurance companies require that crash test. We were locked into that from day one. We had to have Third, about our crash protection. And this is a side story. We are worried about rollover protection because in 76, Cadillac said the last convertible that’ll ever be made is the Cadillac El Condor Auto.
You better buy this. There’ll never be another convertible period. And so the Japanese had taken that to heart. And I remember they came to me and they said, can you look this up? Because I don’t think we can build a convertible anymore. Literally had to read the federal motor vehicle safety standard, which is.
The reams [00:26:00] and reams of boring, boring regulations. And I got to the section on rollover protection and I fell in love with the GM lawyers for this one moment because they had petitioned subparagraph 5996b that said all the things that had to happen and then there’s one little clause said convertibles colon.
Exempt. I copied that and faxed it to Japan and everybody was like, Oh, we can make a convertible.
Crew Chief Eric: Funny you bring that up because I remember reading in Lee Iacocca’s first autobiography where he mentions that when he gets to Chrysler and he said there hasn’t been a convertible for sale for so long in the United States.
And the story goes, as he writes it, then he waltzes down to the production area where they’re building the LeBarons and he goes, cut the roof off. And they’re like, excuse me, why do you guys just saws all the roof off? I want to see it as a convertible. And they’re like, you’re crazy. And then the next year there’s a LeBaron convertible.
It’s the first reintroduced convertible in the United States since that El Dorado. And that was in the early, early eighties,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: right?
Crew Chief Eric: There was a 20 year blackout period. Yeah. Although, you [00:27:00] know,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: the LeBaron wasn’t really, the K car was improved by having a stop that got off.
Crew Chief Eric: No, no, no, it was not. To go back to what we were talking about before the Miata, if it isn’t a copy of the Elan, which we know it isn’t, it does derive its inspiration from classic British roadsters.
When you look at it, you think Lotus Elan or MGB or Spitfire or whatever. It just has that appeal to it. It’s I’d hate to say one of the last true roadsters, if you look at, especially when it came out, right. And we joke about this all the time, in some cases, certain cars, they’re designed early and come out in the next decade.
So the Miata is like the best nineties car designed in the eighties. If you think about it, how long it takes these vehicles to come to market. But if you look at everything that came before, even the Italian roadsters, like the Fiat 124 Spyder and the Alfa Duetto and things like that, they were all gone by that point where they had been sunsetted.
It’s the last hope for anybody that wanted a true roadster until obviously the Boxster came along many, [00:28:00] many years later and things like that.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah. That’s a really good point.
Crew Chief Eric: So that being said, why flip up headlights? You’re building this revolutionary car and you hang on to something that is so 80s.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, you have to go back to the FMVSS, the headlamp height requirement, 19 inches to the center or whatever it is. I can’t remember the exact number. You would have to have a bug eye Sprite or a 240Z, or you had to put the headlights up where a 911 has them. And we wanted a low hood. And the RX 7 first gen had already done it.
So it was just a, it was really a part spin kind of a decision. The mechanism was off the shelf, so to speak. It made the front end look great. So back to your point about making it look old when it was new, we wanted it to look five years old when it came out. That it looked classic, and that it would look the same 20 years from now.
That it would still be a proper looking car, be in its own right, an attractive feature. And the same thing happened for the FD RX 7, the last generation RX 7 was Let’s make a gorgeous car, just as gorgeous as it can be. Cause Ferrari never worried about what era they were making these great cars. And this, and look at the mirror.
It didn’t matter what year that came out. It was going to be gorgeous. So we [00:29:00] tried to disengage ourselves from the trends. Now you look at a modern Prius and this crazy back end they’ve got on them. That car’s going to look horrible in five years or 10 or in five minutes. However,
Crew Chief Eric: it didn’t look good to begin with.
So
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: yeah, so it’s not going to age well. So we purposely, the stylists and the designers and the team were like, well, let’s make this thing look. Classic when it comes out, but age well. And that comes from the classic proportions you’re talking about. And the Lucy lawn, I’ll say, uh, praise for the engineers that was done by an engineer as was the nine 11.
And, you know, certain shapes are just naturally almost mathematically correct. And even the Jaguar E type coupe is combination of three ellipses, if you could draw it. That’s the only car I can draw. Cause it’s three ellipses. You can put certain standard rules of proportion into play and come up with some pretty good shapes.
And that’s. But the NA and the NC and of course the ND all have that same kind of proportion, short deck, long hood, low belt line.
Crew Chief Eric: The NC put on the freshman 15 though, I mean we all know that right? Ford got their hands in that, so it’s all another story.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yes, the NCs are actually great driving cars.
They’re amazing to drive,
Crew Chief Eric: they’re [00:30:00] absolutely fantastic.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah, I’ve been around Laguna Seca for a bunch of hot laps in a spec Miata NC version, and it’s a blast. It got heavy because Ford got involved and asked for off the shelf items, and that makes things heavy. That was the beauty of the NA, it was a thousand kilogram car.
So we’re going to make a thousand kilogram sports car. And it was beautiful because the RX 7 was already there. FC RX 7 existed as the 944 competitor. Like it or not, it was a great car, a lot of technology in it, drove like a dream. And for its period was attractive when it came out. And to me, you know, it had its moment in time.
Bob Hall will tell you this, every product planner will tell you this, every car moves up in its price and weight as it ages, and the Miata was not exempt from that, neither was the RX 7, neither was the RAV4, everything gets bigger kind of as it grows. And that was the beauty of what happened with the ND was I said, wait a minute.
This is not what needs to happen is you need to get back to the formula. And they did, you know, we were under a thousand kilograms for the NA in the non airbag spec. Well, they actually, even the airbag spec, the U. S. spec was 2168 or something. So right [00:31:00] under 2, 200 pounds, which is a thousand kilograms. And the ninth grade physics doesn’t go away.
If you have a tennis ball on a fishing line, you can swing it all you want. You put a brick on that fishing line. You can’t turn the corner. It doesn’t matter how much you love your GTR. It is a very heavy car to ask to go around corners. I teach driving schools at the tracks in the Southeast. We love the GTRs, but it’s a whole lot different action around the track than a Miata or an MR2 or, you know, some of the lightweight car
Crew Chief Eric: at that time at Mazda.
Like you said, there was a lot of rotary action going on, right? You still had the FC and you had the FD coming out and other vehicles. So why put A British like, Qazi inspired, twin cam four cylinder in the Miata and not a rotary. Who made that decision?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: That’s an excellent question. The team in California, we’ve fought for three or four main features.
Had to be front engine rear wheel drive. Had to be convertible. It had to be a four cylinder engine. The rotary is great. Did not have the character we were looking for. We wanted the noisy communicative vibration of a twin cam [00:32:00] Porsche like an Alfa Romeo would have. And we had Alfa 2000s that had great engines.
We all loved their five speeds. All of that was great. So we really wanted that character of a classic sports car. From an engineering standpoint, the centerline of a rotary engine is much higher than the crankshaft centerline of a four cylinder. So it intrudes in the bell housing and the firewall area such that the HVAC system is very difficult to package.
I made a drawing, I packaged a 12A, And one of my layouts for the Miata, and it fit, it’s all fine. But you pick up three or four inches in the center under the bell housing. And now the clutch and flywheel are where now the radio is in the Miata. It also messes with the center of gravity. Couple of things happened.
The RX 7 FD had this phenomenal low hood line, and that’s what the rotary can give you. And that was where we were going with the NA Miata. Great. Let’s do a low hood line. But we did it with a four cylinder, which was actually, it was a lot of work to try to get that to happen with a low cowl point windshield wiper area and a low hood line with a four cylinder was very difficult, but the rotary character to the summarize of the team, Bob Hall, Tom Montana, myself, Mark Jordan, [00:33:00] all of us, uh, Jim Kilburn.
We all were like, this has to be a four cylinder Raspi note car. Another point is naturally aspirated rotary engines have really good power, but the torque curve is dead flat. And you don’t feel even the, uh, normally naturally aspirated FC arc sevens are very, very fast, but it didn’t feel fast. It’s like going down an elevator.
Once you accelerated, you kind of didn’t feel. And in the Miata, it was purposely tuned so that the torque curve has an ever increasing slope. Your inner ear is constantly getting pulled to another degree of acceleration. And it makes you think you’re a lot faster than you are. But it’s very entertaining and very rewarding.
An 8 second or 9 second 0 60 feels a lot faster than it is because your inner ear is getting the satisfaction of every increasing acceleration, millisecond by millisecond. Rotary engine really doesn’t deliver that in a naturally aspirated sense.
Crew Chief Eric: You said earlier you’re not an artist, maybe akin to styling of the Volvo 850.
Not to talk about Volvo, but we can go there. Straight edge. Right. My daughter could draw a [00:34:00] 50, but that’s okay. That aside, and you are an artist, right? If you look at the Miata, it is a gorgeous design. It’s timeless. The FDR seven, even more. So you can take that car today, show up at a car show. And people go, I don’t know what year this is from, even though it’s from 1993, the same is true of the Mark four Supra and the Audi R8.
There’s a lot of designs that are just timeless. But when you look at the original Miata and maybe the NB, you would see the flaws. What are some things about the Miata that just irritate you that maybe you had to compromise on that you had wished were different or you had planned to be different?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I’ll have to say, Eric, this sounds like I’ve drank the Kool Aid many times over, but there’s not a thing about it I don’t love.
I drive a BRG every day and I look back at it every time I walk away from it. And there’s not an angle to my C4 Corvette Comet. There’s not an angle about it I don’t like. And the MB actually, in its own right, was excellent. If you’re going to do fixed headlights and move a car forward, it’s actually a better car.
Not necessarily a better Miata, but it’s a better car. It’s the same car underneath, essentially. Those two are very satisfying shapes to me. Drove the [00:35:00] first, uh, it was a service prototype in, uh, gosh, this would have been April of 89, three months before the official introduction. I got my hands, I was at a SCCA event and I was invited to speak and Mazda had delivered one of the service cars because they put those out to the service training centers early and they trailered it to this autocross event and they let me take it around the track.
And I’ll never forget, I had a passenger, Vince Tittle was with me, we get in the car and we go up to this J turn, uh, you know, like I’m Probably a 30 mile an hour entry and then whatever you want to do on the outside. I’d never driven the car before. I’d never driven any production Miata. This is the first one anyone had seen in the U S I was this sweeping left turn with a real sharp apex.
And I went into it full throttle and probably 50 miles an hour in second lifted the back end, stepped out three degrees, like you expect it to nail the apex, stop on the gas and the thing took a set and shot corner out was perfect. And it was like, this car is perfect. It was unbelievable. Well, it was. The weird science movie kind of moment of wow, they took this two dimensional object.
We all [00:36:00] drew this three dimensional clay model and with the brilliance of Mazda engineers turned it into the dream because we made a laundry list of what it should be like. It’s one thing to say, here’s the beachfront property. I want a three level modern house along the lines of falling water by Frank Lloyd Wright.
There’s another thing to actually get that to actually make that happen and Mazda made it happen to your point of what would I change? The only thing I didn’t like about it was the ship knob. Because the Mazda guys were so good at NVH and they could have made that car very Lexus quiet as Toyota does.
They were very much a stickler, had been dinged in the past about vibrations to the shift handle. So they put this half a pound shift knob on it and it, that was the only thing I could find a fault with, is that it would, that was just a little heavy. The rest of the car is perfect.
Crew Chief Eric: You say yourself, it puts a smile on your face.
That you see the success of the Miata, especially in amateur racing and all the, you know, Miata cups and MX5 cups and things like that, that have existed over the years. But when you walk through the paddock and you see a Miata that’s been converted, has been modified, has all these things that they’ve come up with, do you kind of scratch your head and go, why?
Or [00:37:00] does it upset you? You just kind of like let it roll. I mean, that’s your baby, right? It’s the Miata. And then you just said the suspension’s perfect. And here they are throwing it away, going, ah, that stuff is junk. This is what you really need.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, there are a lot of people that are messing up the suspension with that.
And in my, my book, uh, I wrote about how not to mess the car up. As far as the customizing and all that, when we, when we designed the car, we literally, Eric said, we’re designing this car for the guy cutting grass. 500 bucks to buy me out of the blue car behind me is my son’s car. We got for 500 bucks. He got it when he was 12 and he fixed it up and drove it when he, since he was 16.
And that’s that fifth owner is who we wanted the car to have because we got cars that way. So we said, we need this car to be that fourth, fifth owner guy or girl. They get this thing for working at McDonald’s for X dollars an hour can afford to buy this entry level car when they’re a teenager in high school, whatever they do with it.
I think it’s fantastic. Some of the creative stuff’s amazing. I’m not really that much a fan of 10 degrees, negative camber, but other than some of the things. And it’s fine. It’s expression. When we had our British cars in the [00:38:00] 70s and 60s, we were just trying to keep them alive. We did not have any time to be creative.
Um, now, here we have a car that, to be honest, don’t break. So what are you going to do with it? Well, let’s modify it. I’m all for it. Everyone has different tastes. If I was 30, I might have a lot more to say about it. But being twice that, I’m kind of like, I see what everybody’s expressing themselves. I think it’s great.
Crew Chief Eric: I meant even in the spec series, right? Where it’s like, thou shalt use this suspension. And it feels like sacrilege, right?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Oh, well, no, I get that for spec. So for racing, I’m more of the 60s Grand Prix, where you just do the best you can do. And the rules are very loose. And it’s a very short rule book. Spec series, though, you have to either cheat really well or drive really much like an idiot.
And be really aggressive or just be really talented, but the spec series is there. I mean, we saw that with the Dotsons and all that stuff as it began, where you have a spec series. And I understand the spirit of what a spec series is trying to do. So your question was more of clamping down the creativity of how this design could be changed.
Crew Chief Eric: Or maybe changing it in such a way that goes against what [00:39:00] you initially designed. Like the car actually handles worse than you intended it to.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: A lot of people have an egregious reaction. They’ve got a really stiff springs and really high sway bars because they have terrible camber patterns. And when you have a BMW three series that has semi trailing arms and comparison struts, yeah, you need to clamp that down.
Don’t let the darn thing roll because the camber patterns are terrible. And then the oddest case is we designed it to have. Very good camber patterns. And the journalists always talk about how much body roll, even the Indy has body roll communicates to the driver that tells your inner ear. You’re in a corner and it’s how you communicate back to the driver.
Another 10th of a degree of role tells you you’re now closer to the limit of the suspension or your adhesions. It’s a way you communicate to the driver. Now a race driver doesn’t need that level of communication is trying to get more and more traction and acceleration and the corners, but ultimate G force is not what the Street goes for and I think mature enthusiasts know that what’s good for the racetrack is completely wrong for the street and the Miata is designed and delivered as a street car as are most 9 11’s and 9 14’s and 9 44’s and all the sports cars that we love [00:40:00] all come designed to be driven on the street because otherwise you can’t sell 40, 000 of the year.
Case in point, the S 2000 Honda. was over damped and over sprung. I think if you did a statistical study, very few male owners would have kidney stones of s two thousands because they were so rough. Everything was shaken out of you. It was not a pleasant car to live with, but it was very fast, great, beautiful engine, one of the best engines ever made and great performance on the track for the journalists to print really good articles about.
And that’s fine. They placed it above the Miata in that respect, but not a great car to live with.
Crew Chief Eric: That’s a fair statement. Unfair statements would probably be all the memes and jokes and things that go along with Miata ownership, but we’re going to skip all those
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: and
Crew Chief Eric: answer a very important question that a lot of people don’t seem to know the answer to.
A, is it Miata? B, is it MX 5? And if it is Miata, what does Miata even mean?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, if no one knows the story, it could be Unos Roadstar. So in Japan, it’s the Unos, MX 5 in Europe. Uh, it’ll always be a Miata to me. Yeah. So Miata is a ride by master [00:41:00] is a great product planner and bless him. He was three beers into reading the German dictionary one night and found old high German for reward prize is the word Miata, M I A T A.
And he said, yeah, that’s a good name. And we tested it. Uh, we Mazda tested it. It sounded Italian to the focus groups should sold. Call it a Miata.
Crew Chief Eric: There you go.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: We had on the clay models. If you see pictures. One of the early clay models had 1600s as the name. It was the Mazda 1600s, which is an ancient name to put on a car, but that’s what we wanted to call it.
But that’s why we were engineers and not product planners.
Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Like Nissan and the fair lady, 2000 and stuff like
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: that. Like Bluebird. How would you like your Bluebird to the other racetrack? Yeah, so
Crew Chief Eric: what does the MX stand for for those that don’t know?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, MX is Mazdas. The X is like rx, and MX is just a, it’s a moniker.
There may actually be a whole dossier somewhere. There’s a big report on what MX stands for, and I, it’s in Japanese, so I didn’t read it, but it’s set. I’m sure something like more, better, best, and [00:42:00] X for excellence. But there’s MX, that’s kind of the sports car series for Mazda.
Crew Chief Eric: I read somewhere that the X stood for experimental, going back to some of the early cars, but whatever, who knows, right?
Could be,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: yeah, I, so to me, P729 is what the car is to me, and my license plate actually on my BRG is P729, and that’s what the car, that’s our project number, that was our secret project number, so to me, the car will always be a P729. The N A anyway.
Crew Chief Eric: The N E, if there is one, what do you think? What’s the fifth generation of the Miata look like in your imagination?
Is it going to be an E V? Is it even going to exist? Is it going to be slightly larger than the N D?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: It’ll never be an E V, so let’s throw that away. E V is like listening to your favorite song on mute. That’s a
Crew Chief Eric: great way to put it.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: That’s what I think of VVs and I’ve driven Tesla Model S’s a lot of times.
The Tesla’s, it’s great, but you kind of get bored with them after the fifth time you’ve done a zero to 60 in four seconds. Like, okay, that’s fun, but there’s no communication whatsoever. So the Miata being a communicative [00:43:00] device needs a four stroke engine. So let’s keep it at that way. I’ve gotten in charge of this.
Let’s say, um, knowing the Mazda people, I think they learned the lesson with the NC and the ND that lighter is better. And at some point it’s kind of like this thing is perfected. You look at the Corvette, the C5 chassis. was perfected. The C six is the C five of the new bodies and the C four actually set the stage for the C fives.
At some point you’ve got this excellent chassis. The N D is so good. You don’t need to spend 100 million retooling yet another suspension design. And so the question is, how long do you go before you rebody it? And that’s always the question. You watch sales. And you think when it needs to be refreshed and you refresh it a little bit, and then you do a major rebody at some point again, I’m not in charge, but I think you see it more on the lines of let’s take this great chassis.
That’s excellent. Even in the modern world. This is a 6 seconds, 0 to 60 car. So what more do you need than all that? And it does the crash protection. It does all the things you have to have. It’s still a 200, 000. My son’s blue car out here is 310, 000 miles on the car. Already it’s evolved to be a phenomenal [00:44:00] device for transportation.
So I think now it comes down to design and styling. And so how do you keep modern with that? I mean, there’s some beautiful cars out here in that category. The, the current BMW Z4, particularly the hardtop version is a gorgeous proportions and the ND is also gorgeous. And that was so difficult to do. The team that did that, Derek and the team are to be commended because that.
It’s like let’s freeway gone with the wind or something is how you come to that. And I think they did a phenomenal job again, a car without a bad angle on it.
Crew Chief Eric: So I’m a little bit more partial to the Miata’s close cousin, the Fiat, as I like to call it, the Fiat 124 Abarth. What do you think of that re skinned, re imagined You
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: know, it offended me a lot less than I thought it would.
I’d say I drove it. I didn’t like, I don’t like turbo engines because they’re non linear power delivery devices. And with a manual transmission, you get a lot of non linear power. It’s hard to apex a corner at full song with non linear power. So I wasn’t really pleased with the visceral nature of driving one.
The way it looked, I was like, you [00:45:00] know what? That’s actually not an ugly car. It actually is a pleasant looking vehicle. It’s not a Miata, and I think it’s fine. The whole point of this, we’ll go back to a sidebar here. When the first NA Miata got the automatic transmission, all the purists cried. And we said, Guys, if it keeps the five speed cars on the road, because now Mazda sells 5, 000 extra 10, 000 or 20, 000 extra cars, you’ve got to keep the product alive.
When this nine 64 next to me was sold, Porsche only sold 4, 000 cars that year of nine 11s, 4, 000 cars will kill a company. The NSX died there. FDR seven died out of low volume. You have to keep volume up at the end of the day. It’s a business. If the Fiat. Keeps that platform going and makes it profitable for all concerned.
Then it keeps that platform going and that’s good for everybody.
Crew Chief Eric: And unfortunately they put a pin in the one 24 at the moment. Although I hear rumor that they might be reintroducing it as the Alfa Romeo duetto version, many of us is just. The spider, I’ve seen some concept pictures of it. It’s pretty cool.
There also lingers that question of [00:46:00] why.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah, well, yeah. So for the purist, that’s the problem. It’s like my, my son is an intern with Apple and he knows way too much about iPhones and computers. The purist is so close to this, that we can’t suspend disbelief long enough to think that a fiat is something other than a reskinned endemiata.
And that would happen with any alpha version of it. Again, We’ll go back to 1900 when people bought chassis and re skinned them with some beautiful, you know, Duesenbergs and things like that later on came from coach makers, knowing how to re skin chassis. Maybe there’s a version of that in the modern world for these niche cars.
Ford Mach E is selling, you know, I think I saw hundreds of thousands of these things. So that’s what they want. The Fiero died when it got under a hundred thousand units a year. You have to keep volumes up. The Miata is profitable at 20 to 40, 000 units a year. And so that’s a nice niche, but that comes from Mazda knowing how to build cars really well.
And do it on a shared assembly line, which GM and others don’t do.
Crew Chief Eric: I also think it’s helpful that Mazda invested so much in their motor sports program, right. Especially with, you know, help from people like Dean and Jim and [00:47:00] others who were involved in those programs and getting them off the ground.
Because when you talk about the Fiero, you’re right. It was a great car in its last two years, right? You always kind of go, when they finally got it right, they stopped selling it, which is always the case with any sports car. Look at the 9 44 with the non turbo S twos, everybody goes, it was amazing.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Right.
Crew Chief Eric: But then they got rid of it. You know, things like that. Mazda invested a lot in the motorsport side of it and grassroots motorsports has kept the Miata. The NA Miata is around now for 32 years. Right. I mean, they keep going strong. I wonder if some of those cars, not just by volume would have perpetuated if they had had the backing of motorsport behind them.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: They might have. And then, then the engineering wants to say, but you, could you really make a Fiero race? Cause you look at the solstice, they tried to make a solstice series. And the Solstice was not a sports car, it was a very nice shape with no soul with a bunch of Cavalier parts underneath. So it didn’t work.
Crew Chief Eric: But the question is, did it work in Europe? Because it was the Vauxhall VXR as well as the Opel GT. So here’s GM selling against itself. That was a big problem with [00:48:00] GM. It’s like, we’re going to introduce the same car with five different badges that looks five different ways. And everybody goes, Oh, the Saturn Sky and the Solstice and the Opel and the Vauxhall are all the same car.
And now their volume numbers are down artificially If you cumulatively looked at all of it, it actually sold pretty well on the global market, right? You know,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: but that makes the accountants and the actuarials happy because they got volumes and they had to amortize that tooling somehow.
Crew Chief Eric: True. But the problem is in Mazda’s case, they went, we have one Miata and we sell the same Miata everywhere.
It’s like Catholic church. You know what you’re getting every year.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I like that. Yeah, you’re right. It’s all, it’s fine. One menu, but, but, Yeah, Order McDonald’s, uh, you know, Big Mac is the same world round. But, you know, when we were small, like Mazda, and have to amortize the tooling, we did the, the story for the Inaneata, the whole program was, development cost was 123 million.
So multiply that by Two and a half, three, you know, to get that number. That’s really a cheap program, but you’ve got to amortize it over small [00:49:00] volumes, maybe 50, 60, 000 cars a year. That’s a difficult thing. And the end of the day, you know, Ferrari builds 200 cars and charges back in the day, back in the sixties and seventies, they built 200 of something, and maybe they’d have 4, 000 of a Dino or something.
So very low volumes. And that just doesn’t fly in the modern world. So back to the alpha, if alpha could take an Indy chassis or an Indy chassis, wherever it comes. To be and make a car of it in low volumes better for the market. A friend of mine has a fiat, as you will loves it, and because it’s different, it’s a matter of what you’re looking for.
In my case, for me personally, I’m 0.01 percenter of the market. Nobody’s gonna build a car for me ’cause I’m driving all these old things with no computers or whatever. But the mass market, the 90th percentile customer is maybe coming out of a Civic or a WRX or something, a different kind of car, and they aren’t gonna be that specialized for a two seat sports car with a small trunk.
There are compromises
Crew Chief Eric: with the Miata having been such a high volume vehicle. If you look at its entire lifespan, it keeps it out of the realm and [00:50:00] out of the reach of ever being a collector car. So when you compare it to the old Fiats and the Alfa Romeos and the Ferraris and the Triumphs and MGs, it’ll never attain that status because there’s just too many of them.
And unlike 911s where people converted them into race cars and there’s fabulous 911 race cars out there that are collectible. Some people are converting them back to street cars now and things like that. I don’t ever see that happening with the Miata.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Prices are starting to go up. Hagerty’s index is rising for the NAs.
Not that I think that needs to happen. Again, I like it that everybody used to have a cheap one. Most of my kids have had a Miata and we got them all pretty cheap. I like that they’re low priced. I don’t know, will they ever be collectible? That’s a hard thing. I’m the wrong guy to talk about collectibility because some of the auction houses and cars that are artificially jacked up in their prices, just cause somebody says it’s worth that.
I’ve seen 500, that, you know, we used to throw away for 500 bucks. So it’s kind of like. But
Crew Chief Eric: if you turn that over, car produced at the same time, the FDR X7 is definitely a collector vehicle, [00:51:00]
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: right? And maybe due to its rarity. So your comment is that damned by its popularity, that’s fine. The metric of, is it collectible or not really doesn’t matter to me.
And in fact, as often been said, the five or six of us that developed the original Miata from product planning, Bob Hall in design, Tom and Mark Jordan, Chin and Yagi san, Hashi san, and myself in the engineering and Dean Cates, we just wanted a dozen cars to be built. It could have failed the next year. We really didn’t care.
We just wanted one for ourselves. So the fact that there’s over a million of them on the road is great. It means we get parts really easy for the ones we have.
Crew Chief Eric: And I feel you there. And I bring this up only because in recent times coming from a BW Porsche Audi family, I see the same thing with Mark 1 and Mark 2 GTIs.
And people are like, Oh, 27, 000 for my Mark 1 GTI. I’m like, get out of here. They made a million of them. Yeah. Still junk.
Crew Chief Brad: Right.
Crew Chief Eric: Only jacking up the value for nostalgia purposes. It’s not a 911. Same is true of a 945. It was the commodity Porsche, just like the 308 Ferrari, there was a million of them. You’re like, all [00:52:00] right, fine.
That’s great for the enthusiast because there will always be an enthusiast base for cars like that. And you’ll continue to see them at the track alongside of C4 E30 and E36 BMWs and everything that we love about. Going to those types of events. So the Biana has its home and it, I think it always will.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: And then that makes me happy as one of the original team members, because it means that it’ll be the proletariat’s car. It’ll be a car people can enjoy and keep trading and keep passing along. Did the math one night. There’s been over a million, say a million, 1. 2 million built, but they’ve all been traded.
So there’s probably like 3 million. Enthusiasts in the world that have enjoyed a Miata. That’s a great footprint. I don’t know. This is an amazing thing That’s what we wanted We wanted everybody to enjoy this great little concept of a car and in our world It was a distillation back to the original design team one day We sat down and said what kind of cars have you had and everybody talked and so we had a coon tie So I had a Val Alunga’s You know, some phenomenal cars.
I said it before, it’s like we all brought our cigar box full of favorite marbles to the table and dumped all the marbles [00:53:00] on the table. And then we picked the best marbles out of the batch. And it was, Oh, I would have the weight distribution of the on the, you know, the low belt line of the Spitfire, sheer gorgeousness of the XKE, the Vallelunga’s proportion for a small car, all of these things.
Let’s put this into one car in Mazda. Japan was 10, 000 miles away and we didn’t have internet. We had faxes. So we were kind of, we were just left. It was like the teacher was out of the room in the sky. Kids got to play in the classroom. Uh, we just got on the chalkboard and just made up this thing. Sent it over to Japan and they caught the fever and said, Wow, this actually could work.
And then it took off. And they engineered, you know, the final bits and put the thing together and tuned it. And to that point, Mazda gets so much credit because it’s like the last generation MR2. I guess that would have been the third gen MR2. It was a phenomena. It was like a little 348 Ferrari. It was a beautiful little car, well evolved, no soul whatsoever.
The first one was a transformer car. It was a very period car, full of Corolla parts, had no soul. You could drift it on an entrance ramp, but it just didn’t have, it wasn’t connected to itself. And we wanted to avoid that Stepford wife. Literally, we use that term the [00:54:00] Stanford wife nature of the Japanese cars that had no soul and we wanted to put a soul into the Miata and we described the best we could from our experiences from our 65 sports cars and Japan in perfect Japanese style dissected those words and got their own metrics and their own 160 different exhaust systems and whatever just went through the process to make a car fit that target and have a soul.
Crew Chief Eric: Funny you bring up the original MR2 because, you know, that goes in line with what we were talking about earlier about Japanese do have a propensity to copy and enhance, and they’re very good at that. And when you look at that first gen MR2, you go fiat X one nine, except they didn’t really know how to do it.
The second MR2, we’re not really sure. And the third one was the poor man’s Elise, right? We all know that. That whole chassis was shared with Lotus or whatever, but there’s a lot of that going on. But again, to your point, the Miata stood alone. It took its inspiration from those great British roadsters that we talked about earlier.
I want to kind of talk about a couple other things that are important to you, which is restoring old cars. You’re maintaining a fleet of older vehicles. You’ve. Done [00:55:00] the revolving door of cars over the years, along with keeping up with old cars is also engine tuning and performance. And there’s a lot of hocus pocus and a lot of, he said, she said, when it comes to building cars, I mean, I talk about this a lot in my student sessions that I give, you know, at HPDs and time trials, where it’s like, you don’t have a wind tunnel at your disposal.
Are you sure that that’s spoiler or air dam that you’re adding that a designer like Norman put on actually is. Benefiting the car, you know, that sort of thing. So I’m sure those are pet peeves of yours as well. So I just wanted to touch on that as we progress the conversation.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I agree. I just, I’m into patina now in my older years, because I’ve seen so many over restored cars.
I remember I was at Rick Strayman’s restoration shop in coastal Mesa back when I was with Milesda. And he was using Emron paint, the two part urethane paint on the drive shaft of an MGTC. And I said, nobody needs a high gloss drive shaft on an MCTC. Some guy brushed it on at the factory out of a tar bucket.
Now you’re overdoing [00:56:00] it. Don’t over restore a car. Actually, I love the Imperial that I bought because it had original paint, and it was in my old 914 that I wrote about in Hagerty. Dusty, chalky paint. And when I drive it, people go, Oh, that’s an old 914. That’s right. It’s an old 914. It should be old. It’s a 40 year old car.
It should look that way or just me. If you’re 20 and 30, you can think what you want, but when you’re my age, you’ve seen so many restored cars that don’t really look like what they did in the showroom. It doesn’t bring it back. When I see them faded, With a little dust on the chrome and a little bit of taillights.
That’s how the cars look. And that takes me back. That takes me more back than over short cars. Rest two months are kind of cool, kind of fun to have a car that performs better than the Stockman’s because the dirty little secret that’s now pretty much exposed is that all these muscle cars in the sixties were horrible to drive.
They didn’t turn corners. They didn’t stop where the darn, and they really weren’t that fast. TRX SI would smoke any of them in, in a modern market. Restore modding them into, you know, better tires, better brakes, better suspensions, um, it’s still getting the look. It comes down to this in my perspective. Now there’s a [00:57:00] point of idolatry with automotive shapes is that you can just idolize the way the shape looks.
The way I do a C2 Corvette, split window singray or the Tornado. I love the shape. And for me having one fifth scale model of these cars, it would be 90 percent of the enjoyment of ever having it because driving some of these cars is not, driving a C2 Corvette is not a lovely experience. They’re just lovely to look at.
So there’s a golden calf Moses moment of they’re great to look at. They’re not that great to own.
Crew Chief Eric: I’m right there with you. I mean, if I had to choose, you know, if you told me, Oh, a C2 Corvette, especially a split window, I would respond and say, give me a Bowtail Riviera instead. It’s a bigger car. Yeah.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah.
It’s
Crew Chief Eric: a cool car, right? You know, and you can have a lot of fun with that and not have the whole stigma that goes along with owning a Corvette, you know,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: You don’t have to have the old chains and the open shirt, you mean?
Crew Chief Eric: And the new balances, right? That’s
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: right. That’s right.
Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk a little bit about tuning engines for performance.
There’s a lot of black magic there too. I mean, in the old days, Yeah. With a [00:58:00] carburetor, you know, put your screwdriver to your ear, you know, things like that. It was a lot different than with a fuel injected engine. Like is in the Miata, some of these bolt ons that people advertise, I mean, you see all the time, guys like mighty car mods, the Aussies are always proving how some of this stuff, people are just wasting their money.
The stock air box flows better air than, you know, your filter. Because Norman designed it that way.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah. And I think that switch flipped around 1990, Miata came out, the aftermarket started to decline in its ability to make cars better. And that comes from, as I said, Mazda engineers, when they went through the B series engine, put the twin cam engine on it, cross flow head, 10 to a half to one compression ratio.
The cams are perfect. When the cars came out, everybody tried to make cams. Everybody tried to make. Things to make it faster. It just didn’t work. There was nothing to do it. We dynoed an engine and found out that it was running 11 and a half to one air fuel ratio and 7, 000 RPM. You can’t do any better than that.
Why chip it in the realm where the emissions were being tested. It ran stoichiometric and ran perfect air fuel ratio and made perfect [00:59:00] emissions at part throttle at 3, 500 RPM, but you floor it at 5, 000 RPM and you had a perfect map. Perfect ignition timing, perfect fuel. There was nothing to improve.
There has never been a successful chip made for an A and B Miata, et cetera. Cause Mazda knew what they were doing by 1990. Everybody figured it out. Even the factory header can be improved upon, but it’s a three to four horsepower change. It’s not a, in the sixties, you could get 50 horsepower out of a Nova by just.
Change in a manifold and put them on some mufflers. Those days are long behind us, but the aftermarket keeps churning the activity and people are very optimistic about what will make their car faster. But it really moved outward from the core of the engine to where when only two came out in 96, it was a cat back system and an air filter.
And that was really all you could do to a car to make any better. And that might give you 10 percent company. I started in 94 receiving superchargers that later became Jackson racing superchargers and was picked up by Moss motors. It became from that frustration. Was the only way to make any more power was to actually force induce the engine.
And I was not a fan of [01:00:00] turbos because they’re nonlinear response. And my, what I said previously about on a track day, when you put in 10 percent more throttle, you should get 10 percent more power and a turbo will give you 20 percent more power. And it’s really hard to hit your apexes when you can’t control the linearity of your power delivery.
So Eaton was making the roots for GM and Ford. And I went to their factory and. A Georgia, I was living in Atlanta at the time, went to Athens, Georgia, and I said, the Miata needs a supercharger. We actually had, I packaged one in one of my drawings for the original Miata, right where the power sharing pump, we were gonna put a supercharger, there’s room for it, et cetera, et cetera.
People slammed the Miata for not having any power. Only explain that for a moment. The in a Miata came out with 116 hundred 20 horsepower. For insurance reasons. In 1986, the C-R-X-S-I in Southern California was a hundred dollars a month to insure for a 16-year-old. And that was more than the car payment bills were being affected by it.
So Mazda said, we can’t make this car go crazy. And Mazda, we actually met with Nationwide and State Farm and said, how do we keep the insurance low on this car? And it used to be the headlamp lid on the Miata was 18. [01:01:00] The front bumper was 50 bucks or whatever. It was all the Made to be cheap to fix. So the insurance rating would be low and the cars are cheap to insure, which is actually an interesting story in the Miata.
Um, the NA Miata got dinged on a zero to 60 because you have to shift out of second to get to 60. It’s zero to 58. 5 is really fast. It’s like, I think high sevens, but that shift takes you to the 9. 2 range. And for the 1. 8, the NA8. They made it so that it would go over 60 in seconds. So you’d have to do that shift.
And that got it down to the seven, eight range. I think
Crew Chief Eric: a little bit of trivia there, right?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah. If it had been 150 horsepower car, it would have had to see our XSI category and it couldn’t have been sold. It would not have sold at the rate because people couldn’t afford it or only older, wealthy people, you know, it wouldn’t have gotten into the group.
We want it, which was a smaller crowd with younger people. What we said was let’s let the aftermarket make it more powerful. So back to Eden, I went to them and they said, we don’t make a blower small enough. You need a 45 cubic inch blower supercharger. We only make a 62 for GM. And I said, well, what if I paid for the [01:02:00] tooling to make a 45 cubic inch unit?
And they said, okay, we could take the Buick unit and cast a new housing. It’s got the rotors down. You’ll pay the tooling and guarantee that you’ll buy 50 a month. We’ll do it. And I went, well, okay. 50 months is kind of a lot, but let’s do it. So I threw my hat across the river and signed up for that contract.
And we created Sieben superchargers with Jim Downing, the Mazda racer. And it took off with gangbusters. People went crazy because they were getting 40 percent more power and something they could bolt on in 90 minutes or a couple hours in an afternoon without drilling up their car. And it was totally reversible.
We got a carb approved and it was a beautiful system that Eaton helped us engineer. And that was 40 percent more power. You get 160 horse out of your NA Miata and it became a wonderful car to drive. In a eight cars with a 1. 8 liter and a Torsen and a supercharger. Fenneman has one. He drives it more than he drives a 911.
It’s actually almost as perfect car. And that’s where the Indy has become. The Indy is 160, 180 horsepower, 1000 telegram range car. That’s a really great formula. Short wheelbase, lightweight car with high power. Aftermarket ran just into a log jam when OBD2 came out. [01:03:00] And aside from throwing the malfunction alive in the dash, also just, there was nothing to do on the inside of the engine to make more power.
Crew Chief Eric: So, I have a pit stop question to ask you before we move on to our sort of last segment. You being the engineer, you’re in the design room, and two drawings are slid to you as the decision maker. And one of them is the Porsche 959, and the other is the Ferrari F40. Which do you choose to move forward with?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Hmm, the 959, because it can be made into a road car. And that’s what my 964 is. I have a C4 964, so it’s a 959 underneath. The 959 is a lot more difficult to make than the F40. The F40 is a race car, and its styling is, in my case, not as beautiful into my eye. Even though the 959 is very Teutonic. If you’re asking which one would I want to develop, the 959 would be a bigger challenge.
The F40 is a Le Mans prototype with a body on it.
Crew Chief Eric: That was a very, very well put answer. And I want to tell you that you are in an exclusive club of people that have chosen the 959 over the [01:04:00] F40. So that number is not very
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: big. Uh, the 959 could have air conditioning and wipers. The F40 barely had, I mean, it, it was.
But that’s the
Crew Chief Eric: beauty of the F40 is it doesn’t have all that stuff. I mean, granted, I mean, the argument is always, Same. The 9 59 is technologically superior. Yeah. But as I’ve said before, when the F 40 was introduced, it was like when fire was presented to the cave people. Right? Yes. Right. It’s, it just lights you up inside.
Right. I
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: agree. I agree. And I’ve never driven an F 40, but I believe I would be faster around Reen in a 9 59 than an F 40.
Crew Chief Eric: More than likely.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: I have a Ducati motorcycle that’s way over my head and abilities as a street rider, I know that sometimes too much is just too much.
Crew Chief Eric: And then I 59 was space age technology.
I mean, the all wheel drive, it was based on the Audi Quattro system and a bunch of other things, and it’s there to save you, you know, in that respect, compared to the F 40, which is just completely barbaric in comparison, right? Well, no,
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: and that’s right. It was, it’s a race car. It’s like, you, you can’t hurt yourself in this car.
Please [01:05:00] try not to, but you will. It’s funny that my, my nine 64 C4 cargo has that system in it. It has the four aft and lateral G sensors and the whole PDAS system that luckily you can defeat. Because it’s really irritating to try to drift the car, not drift, but to even get the yaw angle out to three degrees.
You can’t do it. It will not let you get the yaw out. And that’s 1991. And now the driver assist stuff drives me absolutely bonkers. I’d have to shut it off.
Crew Chief Eric: The difference between your 964 and 959 is the 964 uses the synchro system from the Volkswagen. So it’s a viscous, hauled back seat. Right. That’s right.
The 959 was the Audi Quattro. Quattro backwards, which is why I always joke that the 9 11 is nothing more than a front wheel drive with five reverse gears.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Eric. I love that. That’s excellent. Well, my daily driver is a 3. 2 liter Audi Quattro wagon. Oh,
Crew Chief Eric: nice. I
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: haven’t turned around the other way in that car.
Crew Chief Eric: I’m old school. We’ve had seven coops, two of which were U are Quatros. [01:06:00] Oh no. I owned an 80. I owned an 83. That was my car in college. Oh, Quatro, you’re killing
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: me. What a car. . Oh. We had one of those at Mazda and we just, we all fought for it. We all, every weekend. Wow. Anyhow, as, as
Crew Chief Eric: you know. one, the anemic 165 horsepower that the 10 valve five cylinder turbo made.
Yeah. It’s not enough for this weight of that car. 2, 800 pound car, 3000 pound car at the time, which is heavy.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Oh, but what a car.
Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned earlier, you’re not a big fan of EVs. And you know, we’re talking about tasteful retro mods and things like that. And people are now starting to put EV power plants into some of the old cars.
You hear about it all the time. The latest. Aston Martin abomination that’s going to have a Tesla power plant, you know, things like that. I’ve noted that you’ve said before the ridiculousness of autonomous driving and EVs. I want to get your take on what we call the evolution here at Brake Fix.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yes. I like it.
You know, I have to relax. I have to make room for everybody and be all inclusive for maybe, let’s say a [01:07:00] number, 70 percent of the people that treat a car like an appliance, no different than their microwave. Let them have their autonomous driving, but don’t make every car have it. Because Decker
Crew Chief Eric: can start making cars soon, you know, it’s all good.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah, let’s just all have taxis and Ubers. We don’t even need cars. I actually rented a car in Key West out of Miami. I rented a Hyundai with autonomous driving and it was actually okay in traffic. So if I lived in L. A. I could see the entertainment value of not reading a book, but just watching the car do its thing as it got me to work, but I don’t drive a car for community.
I drive a car for entertainment. All my cars. I try to drive a different car every day to work so that I can keep the fleet going and the challenge of and you know, or the motorcycle or something. The motorcycle you have. Four axes of freedom in a car. You have two or three axes of freedom. That’s the involvement.
It’s like, do you want to go dancing? You don’t want to watch people dance on TV. And the point is I’d rather go dancing and that’s what car driving is for me, it’s dancing. The more we numb it down, I think autonomous driving is for people who don’t like to drive and don’t want to drive and see it as a necessary evil.
And this is rather the unpublic [01:08:00] transportation. Cause that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re making a car into a public transport device. It’s dislodged from a railroad track.
Crew Chief Eric: Total recall foreshadowed this. They called it Johnny cab.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: You see, Hollywood is always thinking ahead. We should get Sidney to come back from the grave and help us with the future.
Crew Chief Eric: EVs are interesting. You know, we’ve talked to a bunch of people. I’ve been able to coach in a few myself and it has that roller coaster factor. It’s like we get to the top and then we crest and woo, and then the ride’s over because they just flatten out. They completely plateau. So it doesn’t have the same experience.
Ice car would have, but there has been some progress made in alternative and synthetic fuels. We hear about it coming from Porsche and other brands. I got really excited about hype. Now. I know it means that we can’t have manuals anymore. If we go down the hybrid route and I’m still a dinosaur, I love driving manual cars, but I saw the potential when they said hybrid and I went, Oh, great.
This is an opportunity for us to capitalize on some legacy technology that comes from the train world, like diesel electric hybrid. But [01:09:00] unfortunately, diesel gate ruined that for all of us.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Yeah. It surprises me that it killed it that much, but yeah, that did kill it. So
Crew Chief Eric: no 200 miles to the gallon diesel electric hybrids, because that would have been ideal, right?
How far could you go with that little generator humming at 600 RPM delivering 240 volts to that electric power plant, right? It’d
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: be perfect. But you’re, you’re right, Eric, hybrids all the way to goes a few comments on that. I teach automotive power plant design at the local university, and it always comes up, will the IC engine survive?
And it certainly will. And many applications, airplanes for one and tractors on the farm. Some guy who owns 5, 000 acres is not going to drive 20 minutes back to get a charging system for his tractor. And there’s certain applications where it has to stay, but it’s like the Prius equation, people buy Prius, Prius, Prii, what do they say?
The. That takes care of that market and leaves gasoline to the rest of us. Fine. Buy your Teslas, buy your EVs, buy your hybrids. That leaves gas for the rest of us, as long as there’s a market. We’re doing 300 million gallons of gasoline a day. That [01:10:00] river of commerce isn’t going to change easily, but the hybrid gives you no range anxiety.
It gives you a way to limp home, even if it’s not limping, you’re getting home. I have nine children. I would never have an EV because if somebody calls at three in the morning and I’ve got to go to the hospital and my EV is half charged and the hospital’s too far away, I mean, what? I’m not going to go camping in an F 150 electric lightning because I can’t recharge it at the top of the mountain, but for a segment of the market.
The million and a half people that bought Priuses that just use them as tools and commuters is fine. I think we’re going to have the co exist bumper sticker only meant for the, the effectiveness of this automotive market. Let’s all co exist. Some people want their hybrids. Some people want their EVs. Let us keep our ICE engines.
Crew Chief Eric: Those of us with ICE engines, ICEs, are we going to be like the Amish off to the shoulder, you know, doing our thing as the EVs go by? But all jokes aside, I feel that the ice power plants will become very equestrian for those that can afford the gasoline because gasoline prices will go up as demand goes down.
[01:11:00] Therefore, it will be like having horses in a stable and you’ll go out riding on the weekend at your country club, which will be the racetrack.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Possibly, but the one thing that, so here’s a model of this. Look at leaded gasoline in the 70s. Catalytic converters came in in 74. You can still buy leaded gasoline up to 1985 or later.
So I heard it was a couple of
Crew Chief Eric: years ago, actually. You could
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: actually buy it now at racetracks. Yeah. But the point was it was very socialist wise because poor people can’t afford the new technology. They’re driving old cars now, old cars last. actually much longer. A Camry now has 300, 000 miles. So a poor person can’t be ostracized from society by having to pay too much for gasoline.
So I put some faith in the powers that be that will keep gasoline affordable. To be frank about it, the lower class is going to have these IIC engines for 20 more years. There’s a little bit of hope in that. The other hope is that 5 a gallon or 4 a gallon gasoline has reached a, I think a very high rate when it should be about half of that if we were to stabilize the world economy.
But there’s synthetic fuels, e fuels coming that now don’t look that unaffordable when you’re [01:12:00] paying 120 a barrel. There’s a shifting moment for it. What I teach my students is hydrogen is the dream. IC engines love hydrogen. Hydrogen is a perfect fuel. It’s just extremely dangerous in some categories.
But it’s a beautiful solution to keep our piston engines. And right now, everything we have with piston engines work because factors are tooled for V8s or W6s or whatever you’re going to make. The factors are tooled for pistons and bores. Pistons and bores work really well. Sidebar rotary engines work phenomenal at hydrogen, but all these things we make and what we package or what work, even hybrids all work with pistons and internal combustion engines.
And the power density can’t be denied unless there’s some breakthrough technology right now, a gallon of gasoline, it takes three times as much battery space to do what one gallon of gasoline does. I believe
Crew Chief Eric: 6 kilowatt hours to one gallon of gasoline.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Something like that. You could, you could tell me you did the math on that one.
I don’t have that number memorized, but I’m sorry, but yeah, it’s just, it’s huge. And so the other problem with hybrid, I love hybrids, but the problem is you take a gasoline car [01:13:00] and then you find a way to package electric motor and a battery system and a battery management system and cut out a couple of cylinders.
So it’s not an easy thing to do because you had to first design an IC engine vehicle and then find room for more things. So for sports cars and small cars, it doesn’t really work. An SUV, a Yukon or a Tahoe could be a hybrid all day long and nobody will know. And it does get them in to be a 30 mile per gallon range kind of a vehicle.
If you do the math, uh, Chrysler town and country minivan, 70 miles an hour in Nevada desert with no headwind takes 40 horsepower. And so all you need is a 40 horse engine. So you can take a hybrid vehicle, take a Prius engine, which is a 60 horse engine and put it in that. And you’re fine. And you use the battery backup for climbing hills and passing.
And so that equation works really well. It’s 1950 train guys, General Electric and GM’s division. Everybody figured this efficiency equation out real easily. And maybe diesel will make a comeback when the new cycle gets off of Volkswagen’s case. But, but you’re right. I mean, but Skyactiv Mazda [01:14:00] has.
Skyactiv is at 42 percent efficient, diesels are 45 percent efficient, but the Skyactiv gasoline engine can reach 42 percent efficiency in its sweet spot. So we’re getting with nine speed transmissions to a point where we can get gas engines to be quite efficient.
Crew Chief Eric: So you brought up something really cool actually.
And we don’t get to talk about technical things like this too often on this show, but I want to bring up the sky active. Most people that do know what it really is, the Atkinson cycle engine or what I call the wobble crank. I would. I would love for you to explain in layman’s terms to our audience what the Skyactiv is all about and how it works and how it differs from the standard piston engine.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: There’s a couple different versions of it, but basically let’s touch on what you’re saying first by Atkinson. So Atkinson was a guy motivated by greed in the late 1800s because he wanted to get around auto’s patents. And auto had the force cycle engine all locked in. And so Atkinson realized that if he did a monkey motion crank shaft mechanism, he [01:15:00] could have a longer expansion stroke.
That is when the gasoline explodes and pushes on the piston, that stroke can be made longer if you decoupled yourself from the crankshaft in an imaginary world, it can be longer than the compression stroke was and every engine in the world, the compression stroke pushes the air up. You have the explosion and the explosion pushes the piston right back down on bottom dead center and they are equal distance.
The stroke is always the same. Atkinson got his patent by making a monkey motion crankshaft that made the expansion stroke longer. Right now, the exhaust valve opens when there’s about 70 or so PSI in the cylinder, and he was purporting that capturing that 70 PSI. would give you more power. Wait until there’s 10 PSI in the cylinder and capture those 60 PSI, the area under that curve could give you some extra power.
And that is a great theory and it works. Um, what doesn’t work is the monkey motion crankshaft. So now what we have is fake Atkinson’s and fake Miller’s. Well, Miller actually is real. Miller is an Atkinson cycle with a supercharger. So let’s walk through the progression. You’re taking an Atkinson cycle with a longer expansion stroke and you fake it.[01:16:00]
By just having a shorter compression stroke by not closing the intake valve at the right moment. If you leave the intake valve open too long, they always close after bottom does center. But if you leave it open way too long, then your compression stroke doesn’t start till the pistons much further up its stroke.
Now, by comparison, the expansion stroke is much longer. So it’s a fake Atkinson, but that’s what the EPA is allowing people to call Atkinsons. The problem with that is it doesn’t really breathe really well, but that is more efficient. But you kind of wasted the first part of your compression strobe. So it’s not that efficient.
Motorcycle comes in, which is where you put a turbocharger or supercharger on the system and force more air in. So that very short intake circuit you had now is compensated for its being handicapped and you catch back up. Like shoving in enough moles of oxygen to make it pretend like it had the full stroke.
That’s a Miller. Now Mazda took that and kept going when they built the Miller cycle engine in the millennia, they proved that a Miller cycle could be made more efficient. And the millennia for V6 got 32 miles per gallon or some phenomenal efficiency. And they were in the high thirties. percent efficiency [01:17:00] in their sweet spot.
And this is in the nineties. So the sky active takes that even further. And the ultimate iteration is to have an engine that doesn’t use a spark plug. I believe
Crew Chief Eric: that’s called a diesel
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: diesel engine. Exactly. So back to the diesel, we’ll get one past the media. We’ll have a diesel, but on gasoline, what it is, is we have a homogenous charge in the chamber and you let it blow up.
like a diesel by sheer pressure and temperature. The pressure and temperature are made by a turbocharger or supercharger and you let it blow up just because you’ve agitated it so much that the gasoline is going to go off. Now gasoline is very volatile so it’s very hard to time that perfectly. Where in one version of the Skyactiv, they’re using a spark assisted compression ignition.
So it’s like a diesel with a spark to force the timing to be at the right moment.
Crew Chief Eric: So like an anti lag where you would put the spark plug somewhere else. And backfire into the system
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: in a way. Yes, exactly. So you’re just, you’re forcing the issue. You can’t trust the compression to time it exactly. Right.
You have to have your timing in modern world within, you know, one or two degrees to [01:18:00] get the efficiency you’re looking for. There’s so much heat getting running out of the cylinder and things going on in the intake track. You can’t always time compression ignition. You can in a certain zone, but you can’t do it over the whole driving cycle.
Crew Chief Eric: I think it’s so funny that we come up with these really creative ways to do things that could be solved very simply. And part of the problem we’ve had with the efficiency of engines, I have to give the Americans credit where credit is due. It’s all about gearing, right? Big, lazy V8s making 160 horsepower and can’t get out of their own way.
But they’re strapped to some super long gears. But then you get in a Volkswagen and the German mentality is, I don’t want to downshift to pass, so we’re gonna put four 10 gears in it. It doesn’t make sense, right? If you put a double overdrive on a four cylinder, you’re gonna get 40 miles to the gallon even 30 years ago.
Right? I mean, there are some engines that will surprise you that are quite old. The five cylinder normally aspirated Audi motor was getting over 30 miles to the gallon in the early eighties. It had long gears in it instead of these like wind them up toy gear. So there’s a big [01:19:00] compromise there. And I think we’re making up for the feeling of torque with all sorts of really cool, you know, inventions, because that’s inevitably what we feel.
And I hate to say you get in a Miata and you’re like, it’s kind of torqueless. It
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: is. And for the reason we mentioned earlier about the insurance issues, when you do have that very, very tall, you know, it’s like the nine 14, you’re nine 14, the thing’s doing 3000 RPM at 75 and it’s gutless. So it’s fine. You lose performance, but you get efficiency.
I was able to get 40 miles per gallon out of my Datsun five, 10. In 1979, by 60 PSI on the tires, disconnecting the secondary carburetor, advancing the timing to like 60 degrees before top dead center, doing all kinds of crazy things that you shouldn’t be doing. And yeah, the engine would have blown up had I taken it out of that zone, but I got 40 miles per gallon.
I don’t have a car that made 30. Otherwise there’s ways to do it. So we go back to the 40 horsepower that a minivan takes to get down the highway. That’s where the hybrid does solve that issue for saving all the fuel and saving the planet, for the people that think that’s going to do it. Electric vehicles aren’t [01:20:00] really the answer because all they do is relocate pollution from city centers.
You’re just now moving the pollution out to the power plant, which may be coal in the United States. If you’re in Canada where it’s all nuclear or whatever, in a country with nuclear power, There’s a different argument for our country. EV is not really the answer. People think it is, but it’s not a zero emission vehicle.
It all comes down to how do you make the family traveling to Disney world from Atlanta on that eight hour drive? How did they get that minivan or Yukon XL full of kids to Disney world at an affordable price in a way that the driver’s not just going to hate what he’s driving. And maybe that’s the insidious plot behind autonomous driving.
Because if you don’t accelerate the past, because your little computer doesn’t let you, maybe you’ll be very happy with 40 horsepower. Maybe that’s it. They’re going to neuter all our cars and make them autonomous because they don’t want horsepower.
Crew Chief Eric: There you go. Oh my
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: gosh.
Crew Chief Eric: What was that old song? I like to drive 55.
You’re going to enjoy it.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Well, I was around when the 55 was implemented. That was, that was fat. So until they bring that back, I know things aren’t really that bad. Because [01:21:00] Nixon put that in place due to the, you know, the oil crisis. And we were all sitting in line trying to get fuel. Until we see it that bad again, then I’m not that worried.
Yeah. Well,
Crew Chief Eric: Norman, I have to say this has been a lot of fun, but I want to give you the opportunity. Any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover thus far?
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Two things. A fascinating project I’m working on now is a replacement, an evolution of the IC engine, where we’re replacing the poppet valve with a rotary valve, which has been tried for a hundred years, but has been perfected by, uh, Engine development team up here in race city, uh, North Carolina, Morrisville, and some engine developers hired me a couple of years ago.
And we actually are able to make much more power through higher volumetric efficiency than the poppet valve can allow because the poppet valve gets in the way. Now we’re running high compression ratios, super high volumetric efficiencies, great power densities. So the comment is that the IC engine is not dead.
There’s a lot between Skyactiv, what Mazda is doing. We’re seeing 30, 40 percent more power density in the engine with this valve we’re working on. It’s pretty interesting to see what can be done as we continue to apply ourselves to [01:22:00] it. It’s kind of like saying the telephone in 1970 was fully evolved and never going to get any better.
And look where we are now with our iPhones. So I think as we continue to work on IC engines, we can continue to make them more and more and more efficient. And shout out for certainly to Dean Case, who has often been a great friend and an old work cohort, introduced the two of us. And Dean’s just got a great career.
He’s had a dream. We’ve all, a lot of us have a dream job. You have a dream job. We’re all very blessed. But Dean’s just a great guy and he loves to put interesting people together. He’s like a collector or a filter for interesting people. I’m glad he put us together. Not that I’m so interesting, but I found you fascinating.
Crew Chief Eric: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Professor Garrett known to many of us around the paddock. It’s just Norman is a native of North Carolina with an engineering degree from Georgia tech, where he has also served as an adjunct faculty member. He is currently professor in the motorsports engineering school at UNC Charlotte, and the director of engineering at BazTech, an engine development company.
And if you want to learn more about Norman, you can check him out online by reading some of his most interesting articles on Hagerty. I’m sure [01:23:00] there’s more coming or reaching out to us for more information on how to get a hold of him. And that said, Norman, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show.
This has been an education. It’s been an absolute blast. And thanks for taking the time to share some stories with us and with our audience.
Prof. Norman H. Garrett III: Oh, it’s been fun. And it’s always fun to talk cars with smart people like you and your audience. All right. Take care.
Crew Chief Brad: Bye now.
If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770, or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.
org. We’d love to hear from you.
Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to [01:24:00] continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.
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Highlights
Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.
- 00:00 Introduction to Break/Fix Podcast
- 00:27 Meet Norman H. Garrett III
- 01:33 Norman’s Early Passion for Cars
- 05:25 First Cars and Early Experiences
- 12:35 Journey into Automotive Engineering
- 20:04 The Birth of the Mazda Miata
- 30:18 The Evolution of the Mazda RX-7 and Miata
- 31:33 The Decision Behind Miata’s Engine Choice
- 33:44 Driving Experience and Design Philosophy
- 36:38 Miata’s Popularity and Customization
- 42:25 The Future of Miata and Its Legacy
- 44:27 Comparing Miata with Other Sports Cars
- 54:52 Restoring and Modifying Classic Cars
- 57:59 Carburetors vs. Fuel Injected Engines
- 58:24 The Decline of Aftermarket Performance
- 59:45 The Rise of Superchargers
- 01:00:35 Miata’s Insurance Strategy
- 01:03:11 Porsche 959 vs. Ferrari F40
- 01:06:26 The Future of Autonomous Driving and EVs
- 01:09:23 The Evolution of Internal Combustion Engines
- 01:21:07 Closing Thoughts and Shout Outs
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Prof Garrett, Norman is a native of North Carolina with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, where he has also served as an adjunct faculty member. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Motorsports Engineering school at UNC-Charlotte and Director of Engineering at VAZTEC, an engine development company.
Great reads on Hagerty!
A few things to know before stealing my 914 – by Norman Garrett
Right Seat: Confessions of an on-track driving instructor – by Norman Garrett
Norman’s latest project: VAZTEC
With strong roots in the racing industry, Vaztec has over 150 years of collective knowledge and experience in engine technology and related development. Vaztec researches, develops, and commercializes its novel technology leveraging their resources and capabilities for the benefit of all. The company is focused on technological innovation to advance the lifespan of IC engines.
Their success is achieved with a focus on:
- Advancing technology maturity and validating key benefits
- Securing strong partnerships to accelerate commercialization
- Reinvesting in R&D with a focus on continuous improvement
The following content has been brought to you by SRO Motorsports America and their partners at AWS, Crowdstrike, Fanatec, Pirelli, and the Skip Barber Racing School.
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