[h=2]Long Road Racing: Tailored Experience[/h]The perfect sports car? That depends who you ask. The optimum solution lies somewhere between a racecar for the street and a road car that fits its owner's everyday needs – but exactly where on the matrix of performance, usability and comfort varies from driver to driver.
From uncompromising, out-and-out asphalt-eater, to daily commuter that switches to fun mode when the weekend arrives, the spectrum is wide. Long Road Racing totally gets that, which is why it's using its race track-honed experience and expertise to deliver individually-tailored engineered solutions for every true sports car enthusiast.
North Carolina-based LRR builds racecars – specifically, the new Global MX-5 Cup car for Mazda. And, sure, it could easily put the suspension components from that car on your road car MX-5, but that's not ideal – and it's not really what LRR, nor its growing base of road-car customers, is shooting for.
"It's not putting a racecar on the street; that's not the intent," says LRR principal Glenn Long. "To that end, we don't just bolt on a bunch of Global MX-5 Cup parts. What our customers are looking for is the next-level enthusiast car. They still want to be able to go to the store and get a quart of milk, but they also want to be able to carve the mountain road.
"They have varied tastes for what they want in, say, the suspension or an exhaust system. We talk with each customer, determine their specific needs and goals, and provide an engineered solution that delivers the experience they're looking for."
Bob Wiseman is one of those customers. In fact, you could call him the catalyst for LRR to consider modifying road MX-5s to suit an enthusiast's individual tastes.
Wiseman likes riding his motorcycle on mountain roads, but his wife doesn't. He decided a Miata was the solution to share the enjoyment. Yet out on the winding roads of western North Carolina, he discovered it didn't provide quite the experience he'd wished for, and asked Long Road Racing if it could help him out. After talking a while, LRR's expert engineering staff agreed to see what they could do to give Wiseman the driving characteristics and experience he desired.
"It exceeded my expectations by a factor of many times," says Wiseman of the resulting car. "Every time my wife and I go out in the car, we enjoy it more. It corners flatly and requires much less steering input. They put upgraded brake calipers on the vehicle and stainless steel brake lines. There's immediate response to whatever pressure you put on the brake pedal. It makes the car a true sports car."
For any MX-5 owner who wants something more personalized than the way it came from the factory, the front-engine, rear-wheel-drive roadster's popularity means aftermarket shocks, springs, swaybars and other goodies are readily available, and more so as the recently-introduced, fourth-gen version has more time in the marketplace. But slapping performance parts on a car is one thing; applying a tailored, engineered solution is quite another.
"I don't think that everybody who wants to modify their car should be our customer," says Long. "There are many companies out there where you can 'point and click' your way to happiness. But in my mind, that's not our customer. We're looking for somebody who wants more of an end-to-end experience, resulting in the solution they want.
"That's not to say that if someone is in Seattle, they have to ship the car to us in North Carolina. After a detailed conversation with them on their specific requirements, we can certainly put the package together that can be installed locally."