Project BRG: Completing the Circle of V-Specialness

19 January 2023

As many of you know, I thought having a weird flat-bottom SaaS steering wheel in a V-Special car felt wrong. When I bought the car, the V-Special floor mats and the original Nardi woodgrain shift knob were also missing. Since then, I have found and installed both of those items and now the steering wheel is the last piece of the puzzle.

Luckily, Garage5 is located just a short drive away from me in Christchurch and being MX-5 heaven, they had three Nardi Classic 360mm woodgrain steering wheels which would have come factory in V-Special model Roadsters. Having ordered some Cusco bracing which turned out not to fit my car, I traded that in, plus some cash for the steering wheel you're about to see.

After ripping the old SaaS unit off, I found out that my after-market boss kit had both the Momo and Nardi stud patterns meaning that I wouldn't have to buy a new one. After slipping the Zinc-coated plate on, and then connecting the red wire to the horn button, I cleaned the surface of the steering wheel between the hardware with water.

After this, I placed a strip of Scotch 3M Extreme 30lbs double-sided tape on top and at the bottom of where the horn button sits. This was to make sure my horn button surrounding ring piece wouldn't jiggle about. I also later realized that the tape I used was way too thick so I'd recommend you get the really thin clear stuff.

With my steering wheel now fully tightened using the new hardware that came with the piece, the horn button surrounding ring secured, and the horn button connected, all that was left was to press the horn button into place.

Now that it's all in, I'm happy to say my interior is complete for now. Collecting the V-Special bits is now ticked off the to-do list.

For some more positive news, I was able to identify my unknown front strut bar as a Tanabe Sustec unit by scrolling through the suspension section of an old HyperRev magazine.

Since I have now addressed my biggest peeve, the steering wheel, I also decided to address one of the smaller ones that catches me every time I look at the front of the car. The tacky LED front fog lights always annoyed me, but I was so-so on removing them in case I wanted to reuse the wiring for some better-looking fog lights.

Once I saw the wiring though, those thoughts quickly disappeared and as soon as I had some free time, I decided to rip it all out.

As you can see the wiring was a mess and a pill bottle was even used. After cutting all the wires off the headlight harness, the next problem was removing the front fog lights.

All the bolts were rusty and even after a good coating of WD-40, all but one stripped and couldn't be removed. Due to this, I resorted to ripping the fog lights down until the bracket was bent enough to unscrew the fog light mounts directly from the front bumper.

After everything was ripped out, I taped up the wires, and tucked the harness under the headlights. Job all done.

Even saved myself 277g of dodgy wiring.

At this point, I realized that this was the first time I've seen my headlights up and that they are actually not stock. They turned out to be some Hella H4's made in Germany.

Overall, I think that just removing the weird LED fog lights and throwing them in the bin completely transformed the front end from tacky to clean. Due my to-do list being shortened, there aren't many more projects to do as of now, but I'm sure the car will break down on me to give me something to do again.