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Miata Road Trip Europe: Ijmuiden, Holland

This post was originally published on August 11, 2016 on Grand Prix Road Trip blog at MyRoadTrip.net // under the title:

MAZDA MX-5: AMSTERDAM TO IJMUIDEN, NORTH HOLLAND MIATA ROAD TRIP VISITING A DUTCH MX-5 SPORT TUNER

My most epic Mazda MX-5 Miata Road Trip took place this July in conjunction with my Motorsport Euro Trip to volunteer a few races in Western Europe. First stop was the Netherlands.

  • European MX-5 Miata Road Trip Overview:
    • Post Card from the Dutch MX-5 Miata Road Trip
    • Post Card from the German MX-5 Miata Road Trip
    • Post Card from the Belgian MX-5 Miata Road Trip
    • Post Card from the French MX-5 Miata Road Trip
      • Amsterdam to IJmuiden Miata Road Trip
      • Cologne to Dusseldorf Miata Road Trip
      • Nordschleife, Nurburgring Miata Road Trip 
      • Liege MX-5 Miata Road Trip
      • Paris by Night Miata Road Trip

The plan was to meet up with an MX-5 Miata owner in Amsterdam and chat over lunch while checking out his car. I wanted to see as many Euro-spec Miata’s as I could find. So I arrived at AMS airport early in the morning before 8am, took a bus to my hostel, went to get some lunch to kill a little bit of time and waited for Vincent, the Dutch MX-5 owner to come from The Hague.

Lucky for me he showed up! Unfortunately not in his Miata, which was waiting for parts (heh heh). But the Renault Megane he came in was very comfortable and without wasting any time we went on a road trip towards the North Sea coast towards Haarlem (yep, the original city Harlem in Manhattan is named after). The mission for the trip was to check out MX-5 Sport specialist and all the Miata’s in his garage. www.mx5sports.nl We got there around lunch time which of course meant the doors were closed… Shoot!

I took some pix of the cars outside, and we went for our own lunch nearby at an amazing seafood place (which was right in the port town overlooking a canal filled with fishing boats).

My favorite Miata was the NC of course…

The delicious Dutch food!

Post-lunch we headed back to the tuner who runs a very impressive one-man operation. The NC we saw outside was getting new shocks and springs put on and we had a nice chat about modifying my car with some suspension components for our terrible NY/NJ roads.

After a what seemed like an hour chat we moved on to the next stop… another MX-5 tuner about an hour’s drive inland.

mx5-winkel.nl was the place we wanted to check out, but they had moved to a new location which was about an hour away in another direction… so we decided to head back to Amsterdam and call it a day. There was lots of traffic on the A-road heading back into the capital, lucky for me I saw quite a few trucks (lorries) heading to Zandvoort for the DTM event. We saw a few Mercedes-AMG teams, and several BMW team trucks and buses.

First day in Europe was a huge success! Thank you Vincent!

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