On 5/18/2020 at 6:20 AM, Jabo said:

 I dropped a limestone paver on my right hand a few weeks ago resulting in two broken fingers and 'significant' tendon/ligament damage - everything is attached, just, but I've got next to no movement in my index and middle fingers. Hoping that it'll heal without surgery as I really don't want to go into hospital even just overnight, but we'll see.

Yep, assuming you're not making a joke, the Miata and the Fiat 124 Spider are essentially the same car, even built on the same tracks by Mazda in Japan, although this is the Abarth variant which is significantly warmed up - Garret turbo, Bilstein shocks all round, Brembo brakes, limited slip-diff etc etc. This is one of the first 1000 Abarth 124s produced as well so this was actually put together in Turin by Abarth - probably explains the questionable build quality in certain areas...

There's only a handful of them Stateside although they're still being built for NAPAC (production of both the Fiat and Abarth 124 ended for Europe in late 2018)

 

 

Nope, not joking at all. Those Miatas over here are pretty zippy, but there is place you can send them to have a Mustang 5.0 V8 swap with other upgrades to make them really fast.

 

 

A Fiata? How interesting, I've never seen one before. Over here we have something called a Miata by Mazda which bears some striking resemblance. Any relation between the two that you know of?