I'm putting an AJ30 engine in to My Mazda MX5, I must keep this Naturally Aspirated to keep My car legal here so I'm looking for any mods or performance upgrades that are possible with the AJ30 engine. I would like to get somewhere close to 300bhp
While I'm very aware that we should be trying to keep Jaguars on the road, this one is beyond repair but has been in the family almost since new and used to belong to My departed father so keeping the engine in a car that also has very emotive reasons for being kept is important.

Mods that will be done to the engine include:
hand made exhaust manifold,
removal of water pump (replaced with electric race water pump),
matching of manifold ports to the head ports.
replacement of air intake (and throttle body) with custom made piece.

Are there ways to increase the oil pressure/volume?

Any positive advice would be greatly appreciated.
Jack

 

What year generation MX5 are you working with?

Flying Miata has several kits to put V8's into Gen 1 and 2.

 

What are your plans for electronic engine control? Sounds like quite the fascinating project with a custom intake and throttle body, etc.

The reason I ask is the security features of the Jaguar engine control module may give you some grief. IIRC (a big if), antitheft functions are shared between the engine control module and instrument cluster. Both have to communicate with each other or fuel/spark are inhibited. From what I gather, it may not be practical to adapt the Jaguar ECM into another vehicle.

Or are you looking at some type of aftermarket control to get around these limitations?

What are your plans for a transmission? A quick search showed Mazda also used a variant of the AJ30 engine. Any chance the bolt patterns are the same?

 

In australia we have some rather draconian power to weight ratio rules that prohibit me from putting in any engine over 3.2ltrs (naturally aspirated) in an NA MX5 so as much as I would like to put a 5ltr windsor in the car the AJ30 is a great option.

 

+1 on what you'll use for a PCM.

I can't see 300HP. Has anyone ever with that engine? How long did it survive if so...

 

I plan to use a stand alone ECU (probably a Haltec Elite) so will not need to worry about any of the security aspects. I will be using the mazda 5speed and that will require an adapter plate to be made. There is a company in the Uk currently offering this kit but getting that kit out to Australia is rather expensive.

 

Ah, it seems you have this well thought out. Sorry I can't help much with your stated desire to get more power out of the engine. I'm sure it's possible somehow, but I'm in the Mr. Rogers stage of my life and have little current experience in this field.

Do you mind if I go off on a tangent and ask more questions about integrating the AJ30 into a different chassis? Not a lot of discussion about this in the forum, so you're going to be somewhat of a pioneer on the subject. For example, do you have emissions testing in your neck of the woods? If so, how is it accomplished? Where I live (Oregon US of A), I have to take the car to a state-run inspection station every two years. They connect a cable to the car's OBD port under the dash. If no emissions faults are present, I'm good to go, and they never even open the hood. It's a very quick and simple process. However, I notice this test reads out the VIN, engine type, etc. If the test station computer can't see this information, things can get ugly. I'm wondering what workarounds exist to make the test station happy, i.e. so their computer sees what it expects to see.

Not trying to talk you out of the conversion, not by a long shot. This sounds like a very cool project. I'm just curious if you have to make any allowances for things such as emissions testing.