Measuring the Immeasurable of the 2024 Mazda MX-5 Miata RF Club
The new Miata is updated to improve its driving feel, but can our instruments detect real changes?
Pros
- New steering rack improves both response and straight-line ease
- Retractable hard top comes with minimal weight and performance penalty
- Still one of the great driver’s cars
Cons
- Cramped if you’re of average height, impossible if you’re tall
- Acceleration is not particularly strong
- Braking distances just-OK by sports car standards
Before we get into our 2024 Mazda MX-5 Miata RF Club test results, let’s talk for a minute about subjective versus objective testing. Nearly all publications do subjective (i.e. seat-of-the-pants) testing, but MotorTrend is one of the few that still practices the (nearly) lost art of objective testing: hard numbers obtained in a proper, scientific, repeatable manner.
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It’s an intriguing exercise in the case of the 2024 Mazda Miata RF Club, which boasts subtle but significant changes meant to enhance the already-sublime driving experience. To wit, all Miatas get a new steering rack with reprogrammed assistance software. Club and Grand Touring models feature a new Mazda-designed limited-slip differential. Finally, Club versions get a new DSC Track mode for the stability control system, basically a Sport mode that will let the car slide around but still provide intervention if things go too far sideways.
Better Feel Versus Better Numbers
As we reported in our first drive of the 2024 Miata, these changes were intended to make a subjective difference, and they really do. The steering has much better on-center feel, with small movements less likely to trigger the ND-generation Miata’s trademark body roll. It’s less twitchy yet more responsive, an upgrade in anyone’s book.
The changes wrought by the new limited-slip differential are more difficult to quantify; its purpose, per Mazda’s press materials, is to provide stronger lock-up on corner entry to mitigate oversteer and reduced lockup on corner exit to lessen understeer. (How can a diff do all that? Bear in mind that in a car with as modest a powertrain as the Miata’s, chances are you’ll put full power to the rear axle as often you can.) And yes, we felt the changes. As one editor put it, “The front end and the rear end are finally on speaking terms.”
Kids, Don’t Try This at Home
As for stability control, while we don’t condone this sort of thing for on-street driving, when we test at the track, we turn stability control off. Not because we’re hairy-chested he-men who see electronic intervention as an affront to our fragile masculinity; in our own day-to-day and even track driving, we like the protection as long as it’s not intrusive (or, worse yet, punitive). But for our track testing, off it goes so that we can reach and measure the physical limits that ESC has to work with in an emergency.
What we found was that the 2024 Mazda Miata is deliciously loose. There’s oversteer on trail braking, oversteer during steady-state cornering, and oversteer on the throttle. From our testing notes logbook: “Who says you need power for power oversteer? This is the best car in which to learn driving dynamics.”
Old Versus New, by the Numbers
OK, so what about the objective testing we were banging on about at the beginning of this story? Do the changes make the 2024 Mazda Miata any quicker, either in a straight line or the curves? It just so happens we had a perfect basis for comparison, having tested a 2022 Miata MX-5 retractable hardtop (RF) in Club trim with a manual transmission in the spring of 2022. Our 2024 test car was nearly identical other than some hard-drivin’ wear on its factory-spec tires and a little more weight: The 2024 car tipped our scales at 2,454 pounds with 50/50 weight distribution, while the 2022 apportioned its 2,423 pounds at 51 percent in front and 49 percent in back.
We expected no changes in acceleration, because nothing in the powertrain changed. The 2024 Miata accelerated to 60 mph in 5.7 seconds, 0.2 second quicker than the 2022 version, which is likely down to launch technique. Both cars traversed the quarter mile in 14.5 seconds, though trap speed was a little higher in the older car (95.0 mph versus 94.1). We noted the Miata’s second gear is just tall enough to make 60 without hitting the rev limiter; a shift would have devastated the 0–60 time.
While there are as many ways to launch a manual-transmission car as there are stories in the naked city (8 million, if you’ve never seen the movie), there’s only one way to stop it: Jam on the brakes and hold on tight. The 2024 Mazda Miata stopped from 60 mph in 111 feet, 1 foot shorter than the ’22s best result.
Our handling tests are where we expected to see a difference, but there wasn’t much there. The 2024 Miata RF Club pulled 0.90 g (average) on the skidpad, a bit better than the 0.85 g we recorded in the ’22. It’s worth noting it was a hotter day when we tested the new car, which could have made its tires a bit gooier. (We correct our acceleration times for ambient conditions, but the SAE has devised no such correction for tire grip.) Out on the figure-eight track the results were much closer: The new Miata had a best lap time of 26.4 seconds at an average of 0.68 g, while the ’22 circled the course in 26.8 seconds at 0.64 g.
What About the Soft Top?
Incidentally, while we had the 2024 Mazda Miata RF Club in our hands for testing, Mazda also sent us a soft-top version of the same car, the tires of which lacked the signs of abuse our tin-top car showed. The soft-top car weighs 102 pounds less, though its weight distribution is forward biased at 52/48. We decided to put it through our testing regimen with the same driver at the wheel (because why wouldn’t we?).
With its reduced weight, the soft-top Miata was slightly nimbler, running to 60 in 5.6 seconds (0.1 second quicker than the RF) and taking down the quarter mile 0.3 second quicker with a 2-mph-faster trap speed. It also stopped shorter, braking from 60 in 108 feet. Skidpad grip was higher—0.92 g (average)—and the soft-top was quicker around the figure eight, circling it in 26 seconds flat at 0.71 g, despite not having its weight as well centered as the retractable hardtop car does.
Bottom line: From a raw-numbers standpoint, the new 2024 Mazda Miata is close enough to the old one that the differences in their performance may well be down to tire condition, track temp, and driver technique rather than the changes to the car. Buyers of the updated Miata may not have bragging rights when it comes to measurable figures, but then again, that’s not what this car and its latest round of changes are all about. The MX-5 has always been all about feel, and this Miata definitely feels better, even if our MotorTrend test numbers don’t prove it’s substantially a better performer.
After a two-decade career as a freelance writer, Aaron Gold joined MotorTrend’s sister publication Automobile in 2018 before moving to the MT staff in 2021. Aaron is a native New Yorker who now lives in Los Angeles with his spouse, too many pets, and a cantankerous 1983 GMC Suburban.
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