Roof and justice
The hardtop MX 5 may not be perfect, but it’s always fun to drive, which is pretty close. By
IT’S BEEN A strange year in the Mazda MX-5 RF. On the one hand, I’ve loved driving it; on the other hand, I’ve spent my whole time working out how to improve it. It’s crazy – I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve put in, mentally converting it into a proper fastback GT: working out the cool, sloping roofline; the McLaren 570GT-style side-opening rear hatch; the parcel deck behind the seats. It’s like I actually work for Mazda and there’s going to be some reward for all this graft. Instead, I have to remind myself that Mazda didn’t actually build a GT – it built this.
Any car that causes such nagging thoughts is clearly flawed, and I think the RF is. It’s heavier than the soft-top, more expensive, the interior is noisy when the top is up and blustery when it’s down. It’s not as pure or as open to the skies as the roadster, and it’s slower to 60mph (albeit by a hair’s breadth).
All this, yet Mazda tells me the RF still outsold the roadster last year: 2911 hard-tops to 1787 soft-tops. So what do I know, eh?
I reckon, though – and please, any RF owners reading this, tell me I’m wrong – I reckon most RF owners drive with the roof up virtually all the time. I know I did, over the last year – I probably had the targa top down about 10 times during the course of the year, and even then, only in the first six months. After that, it stayed up – not because of the weather, but because the flappinggusts-in-face experience just wasn’t endearing.
However, it’s easy to pick holes in the RF, and equally easy to gloss over its many charms. There are so few small, light, rear-drive cars out there, the Mazda is worthy of high praise just for that. I actually enjoyed driving it every time I got in it; I never tired of the accurate steering, or the nimble chassis. As I discovered when I swapped it for a Toyota GT86 for a week, there are certainly more benign sports cars out there – the MX-5 has a darty, pointy sharpness that does to your eyeballs what a horse does to its ears when a dog barks – you have to be EYES FORWARD when driving the RF at speed.
It’s certainly engaging and… I’m trying to think, what’s the opposite of porridge? Whatever – the MX-5 is the opposite of porridge.
So, there are some cars that come and go and frankly you almost forget you ever drove them. But the Mazda is a car with character, a car to remember, a car I’ve taken lots of photos of, pictures that will get printed and stuck in my family photo album, with the caption ‘ This is the car I drove in 2017’. And that says something, doesn’t it?
Still, if you ask my advice, I’ll always say ‘buy the roadster’. Then you can just enjoy it, without the nagging doubts.