Tired old stereotypes be damned. Do not head past this page and lightly dismiss the MX-5 as a ‘hairdresser’s car’ while eagerly searching out the latest info on the new Focus Asbo RS on page 116.
Why? Because you’re not Jeremy Clarkson from 1992. Because you are capable of seeing this is the all-new MX-5 and that this little red car is properly, seriously important. Not just to Mazda – clearly, it is important to Mazda because it makes money selling cars – but more so because the MX-5 is the bestselling two-seater sports car of all time. Of all time. And if it gets this new one right, it might just be one of our few chances to enjoy the kind of simplicity and purity of experience that has smeared grins under the artfully waxed moustaches of motoring enthusiasts for decades. A benign, innocent beam that has become scarcer with every passing year.
To pull that of, the new MX-5 needs to conform to a very specifc recipe that I’ve already got seared into my head: it has to be light, compact, deceptively simple, fast enough for fun but frugal enough to exist in a modern world, be good-looking enough to at least rattle your bars a bit and rugged enough to live outside on the street with the stray dogs, dustbins and weather. Tall order. That’s a fairly broad list, and I’ll get to whether it manages all that in a minute. But frst, a history lesson...
It is important, when idly considering the MX-5, that we are aware of the little roadster’s back story, the motivation for its character. It might have spawned a veritable swarm of imitators, but this was not a design that aped anything else in production when it arrived in 1989. In one sense, it led the way and broke new ground. In another, it was a monumental piece of plagiarism, one which Mazda was quite surprisingly brazen about.
It was a chap called Bob Hall, an ex-car journalist who’d recently begun working at Mazda’s Californian research facility some time in 1981, who set about persuading Mazda that it needed to build a car that went back to the roots of it all, something that recalled the great two-seater roadsters of the Sixties. Something cool. He must have been persuasive, because the company not only took him at his word, but put him in charge of the project. His team then studied the Lotus Elan and contemporary MG products very, very carefully… and, after a bit of boiling, extemporising and fddling with rulers, the MX-5 was born.
Small, light and simple, it had steering so tactile that it could tell you if the ant you’d just driven over was left- or right-handed. It had a gearchange so slick and snickety to use that it’d keep you awake at night with itchy fngers after driving it. It made car testers of the day fumble with tortuous analogies about bolt-action rifes and slotting things home in fashions positive. Quite simply, the thing was brilliant. In fact, it still is: drive an original one now, and a great many things make sense. And a great many other things suddenly look ridiculous.
But that was 25 years ago. Mk1 MX-5s are now classics in their own right, right up there with retro status for the yoof. They’ve even been decent enough to rust around the front end, so you could restore one for the full classic-car experience. But down the years since ’89, the MX-5 has, along with everything and everyone else, gained weight and complexity. Middle-aged spread in car form.
Time for a revival. Time to see if Mazda can do it again. Only this time it’s trying to recapture the essence of the car that recaptured the essence of the original two-seater roadsters. Metaphysics in the metal, or just getting back to what’s really important, if you want to be less pretentious.
We’ll start at the beginning. First up, the engine. There were so many opportunities to get this wrong. Everyone who isn’t making a hybrid or all-electric powerplant is plumbing turbos into downsized petrol engines these days to lower emissions. So it’s pleasing to see that the MX-5 is revvily naturally aspirated, relying on just ambient air pressure to feed the four
cylinders. Not big, either: there will be a 2.0 available, but you can feel that the car was designed from scratch around the modest 1.5 ftted to mine today. Good.
Next: suspension. The original was brilliant – feather-light and communicative, supple, frm and controlled without feeling like it was going to bounce of a discarded Coke tin and deposit you bumside backwards in a tree. Luckily, Mazda reasoned that if it worked then, it’ll work now, and stuck with the same double-wishbone set-up. Again, good.
Of course, the previous two points mean very little if the car weighs as much as a Range Rover, and the original car was light. So is the new one. Weighing in at 980kg, it de-blubbers the outgoing model by over 100kg and earns the right to be described as very, very light.
My fnal point is price: the original MX-5 had to be afordable, a sports car for real people not millionaires. It cost about 15 grand. The new one will cost from about 19. A hike of four grand in a quarter of a century is pretty sensible, if you ask me. An Aston Martin V8 has gone up by twelvety billion in the same period. So, does it all work? Yes. Yes, it does. I may be spoiling the denouement a little here, but I’m not going to arse about leading you up the garden path and pretending it doesn’t then, at the last minute, saying it does. I’ll get straight to it: it’s bloody brilliant. The noise, the feel, the sense, it’s all there. Mazda’s only gone and bloody done it.
Immediately, I knew everything was in the right place. A scant mile up the road, I could feel the relationship between rear wheels, my own rear, the engine and the front wheels was all as it should be. The engine, in fact, is lodged entirely behind the front wheels, which makes the MX-5 technically front-midengined and helps enormously in the eternal search for that perfect 50/50 weight distribution. And on the subject of weight: there isn’t any. It feels light and sharp – eager, willing, ready for fun, ready to exploit every last one of the 129 horses from the fzzy little four-pot. These are all very good frst impressions.
At a time when Alfa makes such a fuss about the 4C being light, seeming to deliberately make it feel spartan inside to serve as a constant reminder of the Herculean eforts that have gone into keeping the weight down, it’s refreshing and hilarious that Mazda manages to send the little MX-5 out to bat weighing barely more, but with no visible or tactile reminders of it. No nagging signals of austerity in the pursuit of agility. It will, if treated kindly, return 50mpg, but you don’t feel like a monk on a pilgrimage while you’re doing it.
The interior is simple, yes, and uncluttered, but it feels roomy enough, even though it’s actually smaller
“IT’S BRILLIANT. MAZDA’S ONLY GONE AND DONE IT”
in plan view than the original. Everything is where you expect to fnd it, and once you’ve found it, doesn’t feel like it’s made out of old plastic egg boxes. You can link your phone to it, download apps to the central screen, it’s got satnav, all of that stuf.
Above all else, though – above everything, in fact – it’s just a very, very happy place to be. I beat it like the naughty puppy it is, all day long, tearing up and down hills, pushing the limits of mechanical grip from its skinny little tyres, never worried that my right foot would suddenly jab too hard and throw away all traction through spinning rear wheels.
Instead, I focused as hard as my mind would allow, clear as it was of the fear of overdoing it, on carving beautiful lines through twist after turn. I grinned harder than I have grinned in a car for a long time. Yes, some might criticise it for being a bit soft under late braking into a tight turn, but I don’t want a track-day car. It’s an MX-5; when I’ve fnished hooning it about like a demented terrier, I might want to tootle along leafy lanes to a nice pub. And on such a day, I shall want to throw back the roof, which takes approximately a second, thanks to a single press and pull handle. And it can be thrown up again from the driver’s seat in the same time.
It’s the innate simplicity that the MX-5 seems to have nailed. The steering, for instance, is electric. That’s a big one, could be a disaster. No, it felt great. Communicative enough, perhaps not as sharp as the original, but that’s the only area I’d say it falls down in comparison and only by the smallest of margins.
I kept looking for a faw, a glaring error. There isn’t one, or at least not one big enough to take the gloss of it for me. I drove it up twisting mountain roads where my only goal in a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or even a Porsche would have been survival. Today, though, I fnished each run and turned round and did it again. There was always a tighter line, a bit more power to be found or a prettier view to spot.
This car ofers genuine, proper, uncomplicated fun. I had forgotten how good it felt to drive a car down a twisty road and enjoy it at the time, not in a panting heap after, where the joy comes from having made it. It wasn’t challenging me; I was challenging it, and I’d forgotten just how much fun it is to feel like you’re whipping the horse along a fnal furlong, urging it on and focusing on getting your lines just
“I GRINNED HARDER THAN I HAVE IN A CAR FOR A LONG TIME”
right, squeezing all the shove the engine has to give and using it to the best efect you can.
They race MX-5s, but that doesn’t mean the road-going cars have to be snorting monsters. And where else are you going to fnd this kind of experience today? I’d say pretty much nowhere. Hot hatches no longer ofer anything like it, with only the Fiesta ST, perhaps, getting even close. Mostly they have flappy-paddle ’boxes and big engines, they are enormous and, like an embarrassing child in a wedding suit, fooling no one by trying to act all grown up.
There are other two-seat roadsters, yes, but they are diferent. A Boxster, a Z4, an SLK, cost twice as much, weigh half as much again and are all taking things too seriously next to the genredefining little Mazda. This is the go-to car if you want to set out into the countryside and test your driving skills, feel the wind in your hair and have a laugh. And not go immediately to prison.
All of which means there really is only one fy in the ointment: that image. Did I care a tiny bit some yobbo might think it’s a hairdresser’s car? Nope. There will always be those who would be satisfied if they drove a steamroller as long as it said Lamborghini on the back. And they, thankfully, will never get the MX-5. It isn’t for them. It seems very early for me to fnd my Car of the Year. But I think I just did.