IT IS THE WORK OF A MOMENT, a sleight of hand. I'm heading down 12th Avenue, the silhouette of One World Trade Center in the windshield, just half an hour before the stroke of midnight. Late in the evening, as the song says, and all the music seeping through: in this case, the symphony of New York City, louder than the stereo, even though the windows are up. "Look at that," my companion says, and she points to a space just to the left of the Freedom Tower's muscular spire. The clouds have parted and the full moon is shining, just for a moment.

In a single motion, I reach up and pull the clamp holding the Miata's soft-top in place, then wrist-flick the handle back. We're open to the sky now, cold spring air from the Hudson filling the cabin. I slot fourth, the cars ahead of us free-falling past and into our mirrors. It pulls a laugh out of her, half-embarrassed, half-joyful. I smile to see it. And just like that, we are gone, the jet-exhaust taillights seared into the retinas of the eyes blinking behind us.

Nobody thinks of a two-seat convertible as the ideal car for any city. Certainly not for the city. But with the skyscrapers above and the Brooklyn Bridge ahead, it's perfect. Who would want to be trapped inside some stolid sedan or feckless crossover when the season of hot blood approaches? There's a full moon rising; let's go out and feel the night. For that, no steel roof will do. Some moments absolutely require a roadster.

What, in turn, does the roadster require of us? Perhaps a bit of reputational rehabilitation, as it were. In the postwar period, open-topped sports cars were the default choice for racing and recreational drivers alike. Road & Track covers of the Fifties frequently featured something along those lines, whether it was an MG TD (April 1951), an Alfa 2.9 (July and October 1951), or an Allard (December 1952). This state of affairs continued more or less unchanged all the way to the Tet Offensive. In the days of ladder frames and carrozzeria construction, adding a steel roof often meant extra weight, cost, and complexity. Even when the result was plainly gorgeous, as with the E-type Jaguar, the MGB GT, and the '63 Corvette Sting Ray, most buyers preferred the wind in their hair to the smooth sweep and grand-touring comfort of a fastback silhouette.

Sean Klingelhoefer

By the late Sixties, it was widely expected that the federal government would add strict rollover standards to the daunting list of newly enacted automotive regulations. An entire generation of sporting automobiles, from the Porsche 911 to the second-generation Camaro and Fiat X 1/9, was designed and engineered under the assumption that convertibles would soon be an impossibility.

Come 1975, targa roofs, T-tops, and large steel sunroofs had replaced folding fabric in the decade's hottest machinery. You could still get a convertible from British Leyland, but the MGB and its fellow travelers were antiquated designs saddled with rubber bumpers and asthmatic engines. Even the humblest four-cylinder Mustang or Chevrolet Citation could drop an MGB or a Spitfire from a stoplight or around a road course.

Companies began offering aftermarket conversions for customers willing to pay serious money to have a modern car with melanoma potential. Almost without exception, the resulting vehicles were horribly compromised, adding hundreds of pounds in poorly engineered reinforcements to get back some chassis rigidity in platforms that weren't that good to begin with. When it became apparent that the regulatory bell would not be tolling for the drop-top after all, and demand for convertibles soared again, automakers rushed them back into their lineups. In many cases, however, these were simply post-assembly-line lash-ups by the same aftermarket firms butchering private cars. Cowl shake and excessive flexibility were the rule, and there were almost no exceptions by which you could prove that rule. Heaven help the service technician who put an Eighties convertible on a four-post lift with the door open.

A whole generation of automotive enthusiasts grew up viewing convertibles as aberrations and abominations, flexible-flyers that weighed too much and didn't corner worth a damn compared with the coupes on which they were based. They wanted hardtops, and the harder the better. Targas and even sunroofs were seen as compromises, sops to the kind of people who preferred a Friday-night cruise-in to a fast lap of Watkins Glen. Without much fanfare, and almost certainly without the active connivance of a single marketing department, the image of the "pure sports car" had exchanged the canvas top for the steel roof.

Sean Klingelhoefer

Then the Mazda Miata showed up in 1989, followed in relatively short order by two-seat roadsters from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche. All were outstanding to one degree or another. It should have been enough to turn the tin-top tide, but instead, all of these cars, the Mazda in particular, were dismissed by the rising class of track-day cognoscenti. Not even the ascent of Spec Miata as the most popular road-racing class in America could sway the settled opinion of average enthusiasts. In the end, Porsche and BMW yielded to that opinion. Both introduced hardtop variants in an effort to regain credibility with buyers who had never considered a convertible for anything besides a Florida vacation rental.

So, the superiority of the coupe as a sporting proposition has long since entered the realm of conventional wisdom. But, like most conventional wisdom, it is no longer compatible with present-day reality. Thanks to computer-aided design and advanced materials technology, it's now possible to engineer roadsters that offer chassis rigidity and cornering capability similar, or even equal, to that of their fixed-roofed counterparts.

That's the theory, anyway—but why settle for idle speculation? To truly understand the state of the sporting roadster in 2016, we decided to take a few best-of-breed examples into the real world. No controlled loops. No flattering coastal routes. And no racetracks. Instead, we set out a course from the mountain roads of upstate New York all the way into the heart of Manhattan and back. We'd use the cars the same way owners use them, crashing into potholes and flicking down unforgiving two-lanes until their cowls were shaken, our souls were stirred, or possibly both.

Sean Klingelhoefer

The next question: Which cars to take? We wanted an example of the affordable roadster, and no entrant in this relatively limited market shines quite like the new Miata. With the attainable side of the equation covered, we decided to reach for the sky and bring a new Ferrari 488 Spider. We were hugely impressed by the 488 GTB during last fall's Performance Car of the Year testing; would the folding-hardtop version strike the same chord?

Last but not least, as Dom told Brian in Fast Five, we're gonna need two precision drivers, and we'll want each to have a little bit of both City Mouse and Country Mouse in them. Enter contributing editor Max Prince, born in the Midwest but currently residing in Brooklyn. He's a natural New York wheelman, calling it "a little bit of combat and a little bit of ballet." The other fellow? That would be me. I'm the opposite of Prince, born in Brooklyn and then moved to the Midwest in my youth. I've spent nearly 30 years driving unpredictable country roads and more than 15 years competing in various forms of racing around the globe. We'd be joined by a full photography crew, plus the occasional distaff companion, because what's the point otherwise?

Monday morning, I'm fresh off the plane and still clearing the pressure from my ears when I swing open the Miata's door, fold myself inside, and throw the top open. I haven't driven one of these cars in 16 months, but this feels like home. That color? Mazda calls it Ceramic Metallic, and it's a deep candy-coat gray that verges on white. The top of each door panel is painted in the same shade, so you can appreciate it from within the car. Absolutely stunning.

And this spec? Grand Touring, complete with tablet-size infotainment screen, leather seats, and a metallic center-console knob that clicks and twists like it's milled from solid nickel steel. There's no way a $30,000 car should have a piece of interior jewelry like this. Yet it's here, and it's just about perfect. The same way the shift throw is just about perfect, and the control efforts are just about perfect. There's just one little problem: This million-dollar knob is positioned directly beneath my right elbow when changing gears. Nearly every hurried shift—and I'll be making hundreds of them in the days to come—is accompanied by an inadvertent change of the radio station from XM to AM.

Sean Klingelhoefer

Pressing the Ferrari's throttle more than halfway unleashes a vicious NASCAR roar from the hawk-swallowing intakes behind you, and a head-snapping rush forward.

The interior aesthetic has more in common with a Pagani than the plastic-prosaic first-generation Miata 27 years ago, but subtle touches all around remind you that weight saving was Mazda's priority. The body panels ring hollow, and one of the fenders acquires a ding after just two nights in the city. The sunshades are molded from a piece of thin composite, folded at the leading edge to provide the illusion of thickness. Look into the door handles and you'll see the naked head of a single bolt that appears to hold the whole thing together. Even the wind deflector is skeletonized.

It's enough to make you feel guilty about adding the Grand Touring trim. But those feelings don't survive, not after the first time you dial in the expensive-feeling polished rings of the climate control, then enjoy that precise temperature through all combinations of sunlight and wind and top-up-and-downing. The stereo, too, is pleasant, if not particularly powerful. I'd buy my own Miata this way, acknowledging at some unconscious level that a future owner will rip all of this stuff out on the day he installs the roll cage and the fire-suppression system for club racing. That's his problem, not mine.

Sean Klingelhoefer

As I head to pick up Prince and the Ferrari, the two-liter feels plenty strong, and I'm always in the vanguard of traffic even when I'm not trying. Part of this is due to the immediacy with which you acquire a sense of the Miata's corners. Combined with the slack-free steering, all sorts of normally dodgy maneuvers are downright uneventful. Best of all, Mazda has finally spaced the pedals in such a manner as to make heel-and-toeing effortless for my size 10.5 New Balances.

Deep and abiding satisfaction with the Miata doesn't stop me from promptly abandoning it when we pull up to Ferrari's U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. I'll admit that I didn't exactly cheer the styling transition from the 458 Italia to the 488 GTB, even as I accepted the engineering reasons for refitting a pair of Panavia Tornado–level scoops to its formerly sleek flanks. Happily, the loss of the rear quarter-window in the Spider calms things down a bit.

Equally pleasing is that the 488 retains its predecessor's massive cockpit. You'd have to be an NBA center to feel cramped here; the Ferrari uses its cab-forward layout to provide space in exactly the same way the Lamborghini Huracán and McLaren 650S don't. Our test car has the carbon-fiber "arch" mini-console, which looks nice and does little to restrict one's feet or hands. In fact, there seems to be carbon fiber everywhere. Later, I'll find a plaque bolted onto the firewall in the front trunk detailing the full scope of the individual options fitted. The word "carbon" appears quite a bit. Surely any three of the 25 or so listed add-ons would cost as much as a Miata.

Sean Klingelhoefer

"Ferrari does a good job of selling the occasion," Prince notes, and he's right. The steering wheel has everything from start button to turn signals to wiper controls mounted on it in faux-F1 style. The center tach offers a full 2000 revs' worth of redline, perhaps to avoid making it plain to owners that this car is incapable of spinning to the 458's famous 9000 rpm.

Not that they'll care. This is one of history's most astoundingly powerful V-8 engines, and it propels the 488 with a level of raw, unapologetic thrust that wouldn't disgrace a Ducati Diavel. I promise that you, prospective 488 Spider owner, will drive this car in three different ways, consecutively. You will start by leaving the transmission in Auto mode and being cautiously optimistic with the throttle. In doing so, you'll learn that pressing said throttle more than halfway unleashes a new exhaust profile, a vicious NASCAR roar from the hawk-swallowing intakes behind you, a nervous squiggle from the rear end as the electronics abort an incipient swapping of the front and rear bumpers' position on the road, and a head-snapping rush forward.

Once you become entirely comfortable with this, you'll start putting it in Race mode, so you can annoy your fellow motorists with the dinosaur roar of the V-8. You'll learn to scan the horizon before squeezing the shift paddles (steering-column mounted, sadly) and trusting the computer to keep you on the straight and full-throttle narrow before the shift lights on the steering wheel flash, and you'll squeeze the paddle again, and the whole ordeal will repeat until you're either terrified, satisfied, or incarcerated.

Sean Klingelhoefer

Then, and only then, can you enter the true Zen of 488 Spider operation. It is this: Leave everything in Sport and Auto. Use the lightest of throttle. It's the only way you'll hear the turbos, which whistle briefly in each gear before fading away like dying sparrows. The car will shift for itself. The experience is silent, comfortable, and dreamlike. It also results in ludicrous, triple-digit speeds in all conditions. The Spider is incapable of driving slowly without deliberate effort on your part.

There's more similarity between the Miata and the Ferrari than you'd expect. The slash-and-burn styling, meant more to impress than to please. The odd touches of lightness; in the 488, it's a manual day/night mirror and two horizontal empty spaces behind the splitter that consciously recall the nose wings of an F1 car. Most of all, it's the absolute focus on the driver. Everything you need, at the fingertips.

To see if either car suffers for its open roof, we selected a few genuinely challenging and entirely abandoned back roads in upstate New York. There's rough road surface aplenty to generate cowl shake, twigs and branches scattered at random to give the rear suspensions a workout under power. After determining that we are well and truly alone on the mountain, I take the Miata first, with Prince following in the Ferrari.

Sean Klingelhoefer

The reader should be aware that, prior to this test, I swore a solemn oath to not follow the sad example of every Miata monologue in history by mentioning Jinba Ittai, the unity of horse and rider that is often cited as the guiding principle behind the little roadster. But after the first series of sharp downhill corners … oh, the hell with it. Jinba Ittai. This car is an extension of the driver.

It's not just the steering, which passes for telepathic in this electric-assist era but would impress even in the golden age of the roadster 50 years ago. It's the low doorsills and the way they communicate the subtle motions of the rear end to your elbow. It's the way the chassis rolls, first fast then slow, explaining exactly what's happening as you approach the limit of grip, then giving that final, perfectly controlled half inch of suspension travel, so you can do what you like on the edge of the tire. It's the way the front end bites even as the ball of your foot rolls off the brake pedal. It's everything.

Sean Klingelhoefer

And it's also nothing at all. No real inertia, not from the chassis and not from the drivetrain. No bad habits, no chugging push of the nose, and no lumbering stegosaurian surprise lift-throttle oversteer that arrives half a second after you've committed to your corner line. No drama at the redline; the engine just stops accelerating instead of thrap-thrap-thrapping at a limiter. Actually, that last bit I'd change. The two-liter is so rev-friendly that the soft limiter arrives more often, and more unexpectedly, than you really want. Maybe some sort of buzzer is in order, à la the original RX-7.

This is a car to make heroes of ordinary men. And I'd love to tell you that it's faster than the Ferrari on these third-gear two-lanes. I'd love to tell you that David slays Goliath. But the moment I swap into the 488, I'm on another plane of existence entirely. Prince has been Zen-driving the car, trying not to scare the local fauna or alert the constabulary, but I'm not inclined to hide my light under a bushel. I'm on the throttle with a vengeance from Moment Zero.

What's the Ferrari 488 Spider like? Well, it's just like the Miata. This, too, is a car that works with you. No surprises, just SR-71-on-afterburners power to get you to the corner, carbon-ceramics to stop you, and massive mechanical grip to strain your neck, even on slippery roads. The Miata can't touch it for pace, though. Not close. You won't see the Miata in your manually activated day-night mirror after the third corner. From then on, it's just you and the laws of physics in the kind of distrustful coexistence that marked the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1940.

Sean Klingelhoefer

But I have quibbles. To begin with, it's possible to fade the big carbon Brembos on a public road, to my surprise. I don't blame Brembo. I don't think they envisioned what a 661-hp twin-turbo engine with a broad torque curve could do in the wrong hands. Still. There's also the fact that visibility to the rear quarters is nil. The rear window raises and lowers with the top but remains halfway up, supposedly for wind buffering, when the top is down, which looks awkward. That is the sum total of my complaints.

I can't get either of these cars to display any of the typical convertible woes. Cowl shake? It doesn't exist. Inconsistent handling? Not a chance. As for the "compromises" that have traditionally accompanied convertible construction … well, you'd need a racetrack to find 'em, if they are there. A big racetrack. With bumps. The Nordschleife. Possibly Spa. But in the real world, there is simply no drawback whatsoever to having the retracting top.

Sean Klingelhoefer

I've explained that the Ferrari is fast enough to kill or imprison you. It does that exactly as well as the hardtop 488 GTB. What I've perhaps failed to mention is that, on a challenging two-lane, the Miata is also fast enough to kill or imprison you. More than a few times, I found myself lightly shivering after one of our quick runs, thinking back to the pace the little Mazda holds under full throttle through a series of turns. If this is a vehicle for the cowardly or uncommitted, then I'd hate to see what isn't. Maybe a six-wheel Tyrrell. Or a Higgins boat. After two long days of hooligan behavior upstate, we head 70 miles south and take the two roadsters into New York City. As you'd expect, the Miata is visible only to the occasional clued-in fellow behind the wheel of an STI or a GTI. The 488 is front and center in its own stage show, tentatively titled The Day the One Percent Came to Town in a Blue Ferrari Convertible and People Freaked Out.

Responses change as we move toward Greenwich Village and the south end of the island. In the Bronx, the driver of a squeaky-clean vintage S-class in the oncoming lanes almost decapitates himself on a pole leaning out to yell his approbation. In Harlem, a homeless man soliciting donations asks us to rev it up. Outside the Guggenheim, east of Central Park, there's a private party disgorging its guests from the rotunda onto the street. And although many of them can surely afford the Ferrari many times over, they aren't shy about asking to pose with the car as their friends point iPhones and snap away. I've driven expensive cars in the city, and I'm used to receiving all sorts of unpleasantness from New Yorkers, but something about the Spider is disarming. I think it's the combination of the color and the open sky. It suggests that I'm not above having a little fun, maybe. That I could have gotten a black 488 GTB and tinted the windows, but instead, I'm interacting with the city on its own terms. For better or worse, I'm part of the scene.

Sean Klingelhoefer

It's the stuff of dreams—you have absolutely the finest small roadster ever built, and a superbly accomplished supercar with performance that far exceeds the F40's.

Come morning, I pick up Prince in Brooklyn and we head back upstate for a few more photographs and maybe just one more shot at those mountain roads. At the rendezvous point, I have my choice of the Miata or the Spider for the afternoon. It's the stuff of childhood dreams. On one hand, you have absolutely the finest small roadster ever built; on the other, a superbly accomplished supercar with performance that far exceeds the F40's.

Sean Klingelhoefer

All the stereotypes shatter in the cold light of the experiences we've had with these two cars. I was never uncomfortable in the Mazda, and I was never cramped or overheated in the Ferrari. The former is wickedly fast in all conditions; the latter, sure-footed and confident on narrow back roads. Virtually everything you could say about one of the cars can be said about the other, with one exception: I can afford the Miata, and I wouldn't have to buy a bunch of used Miatas first, or have a "special relationship" with a Mazda dealer. So it would be my personal choice of the two.

If you can afford the Ferrari, however, and you do have that relationship with your dealer, then I'd wholeheartedly support your buying it. I don't know what's more surprising: the existence of an uncompromised, nearly perfect $30,000 roadster, or the existence of an uncompromised, nearly perfect $300,000 roadster. And no matter which choice you make, there will come a time when you'll wish, however briefly, for the other. It doesn't really matter. Take your pick. Drop the top. Go out and feel the night.

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