Time To Enjoy The Sun

By Antony Ingram

Antony Ingram

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Time To Enjoy The Sun
It could be argued that England is the spiritual home of the sports car. Of course, England is a... Read More

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2007 Mazda MX-5 Miata SV

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It could be argued that England is the spiritual home of the sports car.

Of course, England is a completely ridiculous place to actually own a sports car, because our climate is entirely un-suited to the traditional sports car's unique selling point, which is a removable roof. Opportunities to drop the top are limited if you don't want your pride and joy to become an over-engineered garden pond. And generally, when an old British company would make a sports car you'd end up with a garden pond anyway because the badly assembled roof would let in almost as much weather when closed as it would when open.

Despite mother nature's attempts to deter us though, we have an unrivalled love for a good sports car. A long and illustrious line of Lotus, MGs, Triumphs, Austin Healeys and other marques has inspired manufacturers around the world to build cars with the same ethos, with varying success.

It's widely known that Mazda's MX-5--or Miata if you hail from the States--was inspired by the great British sportsters. The shape was pure Elan, as was the look of the twin-cam engine. The gearbox had a designed-in whine to mimic old MGs and the exhaust note was finely honed until it sounded British enough. In a move akin to selling coals to Newcastle, this remarkable piece of tracing-paper engineering has been a massive success in the UK.

I'm lucky enough to own an early MX-5 myself and after owning a dreary hatchback in my formative years of driving, the Mazda is a back-to-basics lesson in what makes cars great. It's a car in a near-pure form, still providing basic transport yet offering that rare commodity: genuine fun, whatever the journey. Hell, it doesn't even leak, despite being twenty years old.

The steering whispers its intentions like a lover in your ear, never hiding any secrets it learns from the road. It makes the process of changing direction so much more involving. The pedals, too, offer tactility that few regular cars can match. Neither brakes nor throttle are particularly powerful but they respond instantly and with as much accuracy as you require.

The term "rifle bolt" is vastly over-used when describing the MX-5's gearchange. I'd go far further. Changing gear with the stubby lever and satisfying *snak* sound is as positive and firm as you'd expect when shaking hands with God. It offers mechanical interaction so wonderful you wish that more of your life could be controlled by something similar. Sure, your television would only have five channels (plus a "rewind") but you'd spend your whole evening flicking between them just to enjoy the experience.

Yet we haven't even got to the sports car's killer app yet--the moment when a sliver of the sun peeks out from behind a wall of grey and you can finally drop the roof. All of a sudden, the world is open to you. You have a million miles of headroom and the wind rushing around you, like it used to when you were a child riding a bike for the first time. You can hear things other than just the engine--birds in the trees, other cars, people conversing on the pavement, and all of it seems so much more vivid than it would were you just walking around, because at any time you can push pedal towards bulkhead and bring the horizon that little bit closer.

If you don't own a sports car, you should. You should buy one now, before we get into the swing of summer, and experience driving in a new way. Really experience it.

The sun is coming out. Time to enjoy it. Especially if you live in the home of the sports car.