An unofficial history of the Miata

Bob Hall was an auto scribe back in the late 1970s, and is also one of a set of twins who happen to be the smartest two guys I know in this business.

Hall and Mark Jordan — the son of Chuck Jordan, former chief designer for General Motors and a car designer himself — were having a drink in a bar in Irvine, Calif., in the mid-to-late 1970s. Both being inveterate car guys, talk centred on their second-favourite topic.

They wondered why there weren’t any affordable sports cars at that time? As Hall subsequently told me, “Why doesn’t somebody make an MGB that didn’t leak oil onto your driveway?” Sketches on what I hope was literally a cocktail napkin (that part of the story is unclear, at least in my memory) eventually ended up in the hands of Jordan’s boss, Tom Matano at Mazda’s U.S. headquarters. It remained something of a secret project for a while but eventually achieved formal status.

The original Miata looked awfully like the early-’60s Lotus Elan. In the Star’s initial review of the car, we actually ran a photo of the Miata nose-to-nose with a shot of the Elan.

The Miata lives on; the Elan did not. The Miata had — has — hordes of specialized fans. It also has become the most-raced production car in history.

I wonder how much of this success has been down to the Miata being affordable, fun to drive and accessible to the vast majority of sports car intenders, and how much is due to the fact that it didn’t leak oil onto your driveway?

Probably a whole lot of both. Jim Kenzie