When it comes to affordable sports cars - Mazda MX-5 is the benchmark
I tend to think of the MX-5, which has shifted more than 1 million units in its storied 35-year history, as the ultimate affordable sports car for the road. It’s a frenzy of fun.
Is rampant overconfidence a uniquely human flaw? Every time our dog thinks it can outpace or outsmart our cat I see flickers of it, but I think that’s just stupidity. Professor Google has just informed me that the honey badger is the most anthropomorphically overconfident beast, because, like a particular class of short men, it will pick fights with things far bigger than it, including crocodiles and lions.
While this is the equivalent of Richard Hammond fighting Godzilla, it also reminds me of my recent and very human hubris when setting off to drive the new Mazda MX-5 at The Bend Motorsport Park (I hope someone named it that purely for the gag about going around it). Taking a car like the mighty mouse Mazda – with its 2.0-litre, four-cylinder engine making just 135kW and 205Nm – to this giant, properly scary track in South Australia (The Bend is the second longest permanent race circuit in the world, after the legendary Nürburgring in Germany) felt like entering myself in the Olympic 100m trials.
I chuffed confidently to the colleague sharing the tiny cabin with me (the bristles on our chins occasionally creating sparks if we turned our heads too sharply) that we’d have time to write our reviews while waiting for the MX-5 to reach the end of the straight. After my recent outings on a race track with honey badger-mad monsters like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, with its 478kW and 770Nm, I felt stupidly overconfident that the experience would be more amusing than alarming.
It turned out, however, that The Bend offers a short circuit that looks like a dropped bundle of liquorice and contains no less than 22 corners in just 4km of track. Pish and tosh, I thought, that just means it will be even slower and, in a zippy, short-wheelbase, rear-drive roadster, a piece of cake with fun icing on top.
Only it wasn’t, because it was actually so busy, complex, hard to remember and, at times, scarily fast and edgy that my misplaced confidence flew out the open roof into the rushing air. Apparently a recent Gentleman Racer event (the kind where rich older fellows arrive with elbow patches sewn into their resplendent race suits) had to be called off after the familiarisation laps because no one could remember which way the track went.
This is one of the many superhuman skills of racing drivers. I remember talking to a Honda engineer whose job was teaching autonomous cars to drive around race tracks, a task he described as laborious. What constantly amazed him was how much better humans, or at least the racing drivers he hired to help him, were at it. Never having seen a track before, they’d be at max attack within two or three laps, the circuit already mind-mapped.
Following some of these professional freaks around The Bend, the Mazda felt more than fast enough (the company doesn’t provide a 0 to 100 time, even for its sportiest GT RS version, but it’s definitely under six seconds), and I felt increasingly ragged, not so much heart in mouth as heart thrashing like a fish in my chest.
The nimble Mazda is light, sharp and intensely involving to drive, particularly when you choose the six-speed-manual version, which you really must. Its classic rear-drive platform means the tail will wag happily, particularly if you play with this latest version’s new DSC (Dynamic Stability Control) Track mode, which allows even more slip and slide.
I tend to think of the MX-5, which has shifted more than 1 million units in its storied 35-year history, as the ultimate affordable sports car for the road. It’s a frenzy of fun.
After this experience, which finally clicked for me after I asked a racing driver to jump in the passenger seat and point out all of the ways in which I was making a mess of things, I realised it could make an excellent track car as well, for those who can afford such a luxury (prices have risen again, but they still start at just $41,520 for the base cloth-top version, rising to $56,120 for the hard-roofed RF GT RS). The kind that might enlighten rather than frighten, as it did late in the day as I finally began to make sense of the circuitous route.
And then, in the gloaming, a whump, a crunch and a dust ball that darkened sky and mood. A colleague, possibly with the overconfidence of youth, had eschewed the Nikki on assistance of an instructor and gone out alone, and gone hard, into a wall. Looking at the wreckage, and learning of the injuries to our hospitalised comrade, was a sobering reminder of what a serious business this is.
I thus plan to banish my overconfidence in future, and to avoid meeting honey badgers in dark alleys.
Mazda MX-5
Engine: 2.0-litre four cylinder (135kW, 205Nm)
Fuel Economy: 6.8L per 100km
Transmission: Six-speed manual , rear-wheel drive
Price: $31,250
Rating: 4.5/5
