The best MX-5 ND in Assetto Corsa is still the Kunos one

Assetto Corsa’s MX-5 ND is the 2015 ND1 soft top, added by Kunos in the 2016 Japanese Pack DLC along with the MX-5 Cup race version. Ten years of modding later, it is still the ND the community tells you to drive. The ND2 mods that exist either reuse the Kunos physics wholesale or have not earned trust, and no credible ND3 exists at all.

The Kunos ND1 is the benchmark, not the compromise

The stock car is the perennial r/assettocorsa answer for learning car control, and the standard it sets is physics credibility. In a thread asking for a drift car mod, the advice was to skip mods entirely: “take the Kunos Miata and drift it… if you can drift the ND1 miata then you can drift anything else with bullshit fake physics.” The same pattern holds in threads about its handling, where commenters compare it to other Kunos road cars (GT86, E30 M3), never to a mod ND.

Real ND owners rate it close enough to matter. One who drives an ND daily and sims on a Moza R3 says it “handles pretty similarly.” Another, who used AC Car Tuner to nudge the ND1 toward ND2 spec, put the gap at “about as different from my IRL ND as it is to the NC.”

The dissent exists and is worth reading: alekabul’s physics rework (2019) alleges a too-big turning circle, high center of gravity, wider-than-real tracks, and excess drag, calling the result a “clumsy MX-5 look-alike.” The community shrugged: roughly 1,250 downloads and one review in six years, and even the author concedes the stock car is “the already most forgiving and balanced car in AC.”

Want the ND2? Use the GitHub power-curve conversion

The real-world ND2 update (2019) raised the 2.0 Skyactiv-G from 155 hp to 181 hp and the redline from 6,800 to 7,500 rpm. No official AC car covers it, and the community’s answer is daniruiz’s AC_MAZDA_MX5-ND2 on GitHub: the Kunos car with a power curve “derived from multiple dyno runs of the ND2 with a stock engine” and the correct 7,500 rpm limiter. The suspension, tire, and aero data are byte-identical to stock, which is the point. You get the engine the ND2 actually has on top of physics nobody argues with.

It is a small project (single-digit GitHub stars), but it is the link that gets posted whenever someone asks for an ND2, and the reception is warm: “Your ND2 has become my favorite car in AC.”

The rest of the ND mod field, and why none of it wins

• zgshnk’s MX-5 ND2 (OverTake, August 2025) is the only ND mod attempting original physics, now running on CSP’s COSMIC extended suspension (requires CSP 0.2.2+). It sits at 3.4/5 from 5 reviews, and the changelog shows fundamentals still moving: a mass-balance fix 6 days after launch, a mass-distribution update at day 11, a full physics-model update in January 2026. Worth watching, not yet a recommendation.
• The RF ND2 is gone. The one credible hardtop mod was removed from OverTake within days for containing ripped Kunos content. ND2 RF owners in the announcement thread were audibly disappointed; copies now circulate only by DM.
• MNBA’s MX-5 ND Turbo is a 400+ hp fantasy build, encrypted so it cannot run on online servers, from a shop the community rates well below the top physics modders (“VRC and RSS are leagues above MNBA”).
• ND3 (the 2024 refresh): nothing. No mod with any traction models it. People in r/assettocorsa threads just wish for one.

The pattern across all of it: every ND mod either borrows the Kunos physics or gets dismissed for not having them. Drive the stock car, add the daniruiz curve if the ND2 engine matters to you, and install both through Content Manager.

The ND elsewhere: iRacing’s spec series

If you want to race the ND against people rather than tour it, iRacing runs the Global Mazda MX-5 Cup car as its rookie sports-car series, with races going off around the clock. It’s the same generation of car with a spec-cup setup, and the racecraft transfers directly.