Just a reality check man-
If your budget is really 10k, in all truth you cannot afford to mod an S2k. You may be able to pick one up for 8.5k on s2ki or whatnot but it would have 160,000 miles and who knows what done to it. Anything with less miles would be a salvage car or some other issue.
S2k parts are not cheap. Sure the aftermarket has expanded, but you are not going to get easy power out of the car. Not to mention, other stuff like suspension / tires / wheels is not going to be cheap either.
If your budget is JUST 10k for the car and you have 5k to play with after that to even do stuff to it, yeah I guess you could do the S2k / hardtop / bar / suspension etc. But it will take several Gs, not a couple thousand to do what I think you want to do with it. This is my assumption, correct me if I’m wrong…
Some things to think about-
For $8k you could buy a very nicely modded Miata. Nicely meaning complete suspension, bar, likely seats, and an engine that is turbocharged with a quality kit and not ghetto fabbed. If you are the type of person who could get around the fact that it’s a Miata (i.e. you are comfortable with your (hetero?)sexuality) consider the following:
- It will be way cheaper to fix/maintain than an S2k
- It will be probably be just as quick (or quicker) as a stock/lightly modded S2k, in a straight line and around a track
- It can be used as a daily driver, including bad snow days
- It will ALREADY have a hardtop / roll bar
- You will have $2k left over to “make it your own” and sell off suspension / wheels on the modded car and go with some crazy isht.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me an AP1 and 9K redline and all of that good stuff, but if you think about it, there’s not much it will offer you over the Miata aside from the looks and the sound/thrill of N/A (although, for $10k you can easily create a Miata with 140-150 whp giving similar lb/hp and the same free revving feel, and uh that’s with car included).