It's a very good question... WELL...
My idea for a Mazda MX-5 with a V10 engine in it came about in 2020 into 2021, when I was cooped up in Edinburgh during lockdown.
As far as I was aware (and I gather it's still the case), no one had ever put a V10 engine into an MX-5. We have plenty of V6 swaps in the UK, V8 swaps are a big thing in the USA, and there's even a guy in South Africa who has skipped over me and slotted a Toyota V12 into an unsuspecting Miata.
I found the perfect V10 – a 2.0-litre, 22-degree V10 that was once conceptualised as a powertrain for a Connaught sportscar in the 1990s.
After doing some actual journalistic digging, I found it:
So what has happened to the V10 MX-5 project?
Well, maybe unsurprisingly, it centres around the engine. It has been heavily, heavily delayed, due to a whole host of different factors over the last three years.
To cut a long story short, the original Connaught engine turned out to be very much a briefly-tested concept, rather than a ready-to-rock-but-underfunded lost gem. So the guys and girls at Bevan Davidson International (the owners of the Connaught IP) have had to re-engineer the engine quite extensively to make it function in the real world.
It went from a new crank, to another new crank, to a different intake, to different cooling channels, and right now the sump is getting a re-do too.
Also, the coolest part of this engine concept is that it's modular, so you could multiply up from a V-twin all the way up to a V12 and beyond, all with the same tiny 200cc cylinders.
So a further delay on the V10 specifically is that BDI are going to develop a V6 engine first (1.2-litres) before expanding out to the 10-cylinder engine. I guess that's a good and bad thing – it should hopefully mean that a lot of the teething problems with the 22-degree layout can be smoothed in time for the V10, but obviously we now need to wait for an entire other engine to be developed, tested and put out into the world before there'll ever be a V10 engine in an MX-5.
A 10-cylinder MX-5 will happen, keep the faith...