1990 Eunos Roadster

David was hoping for a week of top-down fun, but the Cornish weather had other ideas…

1990 MAZDA EUNOS ROADSTER

Just my flipping luck. The week I chose to head down to Cornwall for a bit of top-down fun in the MX-5 saw my home county nudging close to its highest-ever recorded temperature – a squelching 38 degrees. The weather in the West Country, on the other hand, was a bit more… British.

Not that this dented my enthusiasm even just a teeny bit. I’ve wanted to take the Mazda down to explore the West Country’s narrow lanes and postcard-perfect villages ever since I snapped it up more than five years ago, particularly because it’s something I

narrowly missed out on doing with my first MX-5. That particular outing saw me leaving the Mazda at home because it simply couldn’t carry all the clobber that the trip demanded, but on this occasion I insisted that my wife Natalie and I packed light. Fortunately, using a combination of the Mazda’s boot, the space behind the rear seats and the even smaller space between the seats meant that everything for a week away just about fitted. Hurrah!

Seven hours of motorways and one depressingly hot night in a Travelodge somewhere in Somerset later, and the Mazda rolled faultlessly into Falmouth. And straightaway, the street next to our B&B base looked strangely familiar to me, even though I’ve never been to the picturesque Cornish port before. Then, it clicked – it was the very street

that made an appearance in one of our The Way We Were nostalgia pieces, albeit at a time when the roads were packed with Ford Consuls and Morris Minors, not northerners driving a tiredlooking Japanese sports car. After doing my best to recreate the shot, I hopped back in to NRX, slotted its gear selector into Drive and headed off in search of what I’d really brought the car down here for – Cornwall’s utterly wonderful roads. There are all sorts of them criss-crossing their way across this beautiful county, but I was looking for one in particular – the B3306, which threads its way across the northern coast almost all the way to Land’s End. I was driving a Morgan 4/4 the last time I tried it, but if anything it was even better with the Mazda’s razor-sharp steering and double wishbone suspension taking care of the tricky bits.

If you’re thinking of doing it, my top tip is to avoid going into St Ives (which is best done on the train anyway), pick

it up at Zennor and enjoy nearly 20 miles of road that dance around clifftops and skip past long-abandoned tin mines en route to Land’s End. It is genuinely wonderful.

So I had one of the most enjoyable roads in Britain, one of the best-balanced cars of the last 30 years – and it was chucking it down, of course. Helpfully, it stopped just long enough for me to get a roofdown snap of the Mazda at Land’s End, but while everyone else was desperate to cool off, the Mazda spent the rest of its week away roof-up.

Not that I really minded. The Mazda is overdue some TLC to sort out the tattier aspects of its paintwork and tired bits of interior trim, but mechanically it’s spot on. It took on Cornwall’s mass of narrow country lanes in its stride, then tackled the worst bits of the motorway network and traffic jams on the A303 over 950 fuss-free miles, even allowing me a stop at the Haynes International Motor Museum on the way home.

A wholly successful and incident-free run, then.

All I need to do now is plan somewhere a bit sunnier for its next big trip. Does anyone know if it ever rains in John O’Groats?