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FACT FILE IMAGE RATING
PRICE (on the road): £16,995. Range from £12,695. ENGINE: 1,496cc, all alloy, 16-valve, DOHC, direct injection (115hp, 148Nm/109lb torque) TOP SPEED: 169mph; 0-62mph: 5.8s. MPG: Urban: 43.5; extra urban: 68.9; combined: 56.5. CO2: 117g/km. £140 pa road tax. First year £160. INS GROUP: 20. REAR MIRROR MONSTER: Swept back and swish, with black edged lights and foggies and a deep front spoiler. Looks mean but it’s lying. BACKSIDE BEAUTY: Extremely smart.Twofeet-long lights appear to shrink from front to back as they go from the sides into the tailgate. PLAYTIME PLEASER: Sat nav, cruise control with speed limiter, climate control, trip computer, keyless entry and start, heated door mirrors, auto lights and wipers, rear parking sensors, leather seats with suede inserts, DAB CD-stereo with Bluetooth, twin USB, MP3 and aux connection. TASTY TOUCHES: Boot extends to five feet with the rear seats folded down, but... NAUGHTY NIGGLES: They don’t fold flat and leave a six-inch ledge in the middle. FAST OR LAST: OK once you get it going but is very slow to respond to the throttle even at motorway speeds. WONGA WONDER: Not cheap and really annoying, but it is well made and efficient. WOULD CHANTELLE LIKE IT? Chantelle would try it out, then run away. She hasn’t the patience.
BAFFLED or confused? What am I this week? Probably both.
Take a look at the name of the car I’ve been testing. It’s the Mazda2 GT Sport.
Doesn’t that sound fantastic? You bet it does. That’s a name which is guaranteed to tempt boy racers the world over.
You can almost hear them sneering. “So you’ve got a Volkswagen Polo? Well lucky you. I’ve got a Mazda2 GT Sport. It’s got a 1.5-litre engine with 115hp and it only weighs 1045kg. Goes like a bullet, so don’t try to keep up with me.”
Quickly
At this stage Boy Racer puts his foot down and tears off to Halfords to buy some blue headlight bulbs.
Trouble is, though, as soon as he gets around the corner he slows down. Why?
Because there’s something about the Mazda2 GT Sport that puts you off driving it quickly. I’m still trying to work out what it was that made me drive around for a week as if I’d been placed into a medically induced coma.
Well it wasn’t the Mazda’s lack of speed because it had plenty, nor was it its handling because that was first class, too. Could it have been its surprisingly smooth ride which was more like being in a limo than a sports car, especially on motorways? No way. That’s a bonus rather than a penalty.
Sorry, it was the sheer effort of making it go quickly. To say that the Mazda2 GT Sport is a sparkling little car would be as likely as claiming that accountancy is exciting or politicians tell the truth.
Driving this car in any other way than dull is a mental impossibility. First thing that hits you about it is its total lack of go.
It may have 115hp but it’s only got 148Nm (109lb) of torque and as even that pathetic figure doesn’t CAN anyone say what they like about the past and think everyone will have forgotten the facts?
BMW clearly think so. Here’s how they describe the first M5 of 1984: “It was the car that started the high performance super saloon genre.”
Really? That’s interesting. BMW are clearly forgetting the Ford Sierra Cosworth, Lotus Carlton, Lancia Thema V8, Renault 21 Turbo and the mighty Audi Quattro, all around in 1984.
Still, one thing’s for sure. Quick as all these cars were they’d have looked a golf buggy in comparison to the new M5, left, that goes on sale in February for, wait for it, £89,640. And that’s before you’ve looked at an extras list that could easily take the car into the £100,000 price bracket.
So what does the sixth kick in until it reaches 4,000rpm you’d have to be: a) incredibly patient waiting for it to hit that figure or b) drive around everywhere in second gear so at least you’d get an instant hit when you put your foot down.
Claim
There’s a good reason not to drive in second because that would destroy one of this little Mazda’s main attributes, its fuel efficiency.
Of course Mazda’s claim of it averaging 56mpg is as believable as a 2015 CO2 figure from Volkswagen, but at least I managed to get 41mpg, and believe me I wasn’t, at any stage, tempted to drive it quickly generation BMW M5 get you in 2018? Quite a lot.
For starters there’s a mighty 4.4-litre V8 twin turbo with 600hp and 750Nm (555lb) of torque that catapults the car from 0-62mph in 3.4s on its way to a limited 155mph, while not surprisingly it’s all kept under control electronically.
Superior
A superfast eight-speed Steptronic gearbox and a four-wheel-drive system offer: “Superior driving dynamics and traction.”
A couple of things that have improved over the years are an average fuel figure of 27mpg and CO2 emissions of 241g/km.
In 1984 it would have emptied your wallet quicker than a fire and punched a hole in the atmosphere at the same time. except just once in the whole week I had the car. That was when my disbelief of Mazda’s startlingly quick 0-62mph time of 8.8s and 124mph top speed finally got the better of me so I took it to my local, er, “track” to test it out.
Guess what? The figures are spot on, but the initial wheel spin and consequential shuddering and banging coming through the car makes it almost as painfully annoying as driving it quickly.
Why Mazda have actually bothered building a torque-free, nonturbo charged motor, then calling it the GT, defies sense. What they should have done is give it a proper engine or simply not bothered.
They could easily have called it something swish, because its overall ride, spaciousness and level of kit can’t be faulted, but it’s a GT in name only.
That’s why its insurance group is the same as a Jeep Patriot, which is bought by people who want the image, rather than the reality of actually daring to take it off road.
The Patriot, however, does live up to its badge by actually being a decent off-roader, the Mazda2 GT on the other hand, should be renamed the Mazda2 Extra Smooth, because that’s what it offers. Nice ride, shame about the pace.