The Original Mazda MX-5, A Daily Driver?

By Aidan Tudge
Guest Writer, ABD.co.uk

If you were going to play the stereotype game and pair a car with a 20 year old 6’ 3” male, it probably wouldn’t be an MX-5 that was made before he was born. However, I don’t drive my car every day because I want to break a stereotype; I drive it every day because I believe it’s the best car for anyone who truly appreciates driving…

Interestingly, I’ve owned 2 MX-5s… The first, a purple one (yes purple) is currently sat alongside many other MX-5s. All those MX-5s that have daylight shining through the sills & tears pouring from their pop-up headlamps. We’ll gloss over that though. Besides, the ‘X’ in MX-5 stands for experimental, so I’ll call that car my experimental phase…

My second MX-5 was a punt, that risky online auction when you think “it’ll never go for that”. Then you get the notification on your phone that you’ve won. You’re not overcome with joy; you’re more overcome with insufficient funds. However I did some things I’m not proud of and ended up stood before the car outside Bristol. When signing the logbook with the previous owner, he told me “I only bought the car for the stereo system in it”. Oh well, it was mine now and drove it home, just making it over the speed bumps. The first thing to do was change the supposed ‘brand new’ battery (that was wedged in by the spare tyre). Surprisingly the car has been very good to me since, despite the ‘enthusiastic’ driving and radio castration.

The thing about the MX-5 is that it was designed by people who care. Mazda gave their three design teams in the US, Europe & Japan the task of creating a sports car, with the Californian team taking the victory. They tested the prototype of the car in the hills of California and tried to match the sound and the feel of it to classic British sports cars, but crucially Mazda built it. MX-5s are a wonderful example of japanese engineering, no matter how much goes wrong with an MX-5, (as long as it’s not rust) it can be fixed with a 10mm spanner and a Phillips screw driver.

Sadly, rust is the Achilles heel of the MX-5. however, despite the fact the winter salt seems to tan the rear arches and sills, can you drive an MX-5 every day? Yes, you certainly can. Driving an MX-5 24/7 is extremely satisfying. Just think, how many times have you got into your car on your commute and thought “that roundabout looks fun”? Exactly, you may be sat in 3 inches of foam and leather. But, I’m pointing my steering wheel at the apex of a corner; feeling the back end of the car wiggle with excitement and all with a big grin on my face. And this is every day.

MK1 MX-5 in Scotland

The charms of the ol’ Japanese hairdresser’s car (that’s well-known to be underpowered) can only be appreciated when you take it on the kind of road that twists through your dreams. This kind of road is where I found myself recently in the Cairngorms. I can’t say before this moment in my life that I’ve ever had an epiphany. But suddenly, nothing else mattered. Not that there could have been a police officer waiting up the road. Not that my girlfriend in the passenger seat was not going to talk to me for the other 1000 miles of the trip. Or that my coil overs where ‘eBay specials’. In that moment I didn’t feel like I was driving the road. I was knitting it perfectly before my eyes. It was a very special moment, and one I’ll never forget. I owe it all to my very special car.

When you come to the end of a journey like that, you’re eventually dropped back into reality. Sat in traffic with rose tinted day memories of that perfectly executed overtake (where I felt like James Hunt being a maverick, going for gap that was never there) and out-cornering cars to leave them in the dust, all with the roof down. I’ve often wondered if the guy I overtook changed his opinion of the car. If he’d look at the next MX-5 he sees and think about buying one? He probably just called me a rude word… I’ll never know.

But what I do know, is that the MX-5 isn’t just a car you can drive every day. It’s a car you’ll want to drive every single day.

Author: ABD.co.uk