Gave the engine swapped Miata another try. Unfortunately with the PP changes, you have to drop down to SH tires. This slows down your lap times by 2-3 seconds. The tires can go the whole race without being changed, but the car gets a bit twitchy on the last couple laps. As if it weren’t twitchy enough…
Something must have happened in one or multiple updates, but for some reason the transmission in this car pretends to drop in to neutral if you go in to first gear at to fast of a speed. So, for the hairpin turn you may want to use engine braking to help you slow down. But you have to be careful. Even with the final drive gear as long as possible and first gear set to be as long as possible, if you go in to first at any speed faster than ~60mph the transmission will go in to neutral and wait about 4 or 5 seconds before going in to the gear you want. It’s a recipe for a spin out. It happened to me once in the race and cost me 9 seconds on that lap. I also had a spin out on lap 11 (never changed the tires) and that also cost me ~8-9 seconds.
That said the car is still insanely fast for this race. Ran a 25:35.712 with a fastest lap of 2:02.683. With out those spin outs I probably would have been sub-25:20 which is pretty close to what I ran when this car was on Medium tires. So slower lap times, but less time in the pits makes the race time just about equal.