As my piece
of my son’s never-ending Mazda Miata story draws to a close I’d like to share a
couple of things that have occurred to me along the way.
1st – I
really like our household name for the car much better: the Mazda Piñata. Sure,
tongue in cheek and maybe slightly irreverent, but due to the mismatched,
multi-hued body panels, it captures the essence of this particular car much
more accurately.
2nd - Although this car is now approaching 25 years
old and is as simple as a sandbox (honest, a great training vehicle for
auto-wrenching!), the vehicles of the period were already showing legislative
obesity.
My son is an
all or nothing sort of guy, so he is now a veritable fount of technical data
related to the Piñata and its peers of that period. It was based on his
continual spewing of facts and figures that I got inspired to look at this
weighty (pun fully intended) topic.
America’s
love affair with cars has always been as fickle as the rest of our cultural
pursuits. WWII GI’s coming back from service in England brought with them the
memory of such classic British cars as Jaguars, Morgans and MGs. The 2-seat
roadsters definitely had their appeal to returning GI’s, likely owing more to
the pipedream of the blonde with blowing hair sitting next to them than the
actual roadster. Regardless of the
reasoning, the interest was there so it wasn’t too long before dealerships here
started importing and selling those same cars.
These cars
were typically more pedestrian versions of factory race cars, so while they
weren’t really equipped to do serious blacktop battle, casual club-sponsored
racing developed around them. They came to be known as sports-cars. The term
sports-car had no firm definition, but the cars all shared a few major attributes.
They were small, low to the ground, built to be very light for quick handling,
but were often otherwise remarkably low-tech. And so America starting driving these gnat sized
cars into the new post-war boom.
Americans
are notorious for wanting too much of a good thing. Going back to the Ford
Model T many barns across the country were filled with disassembled engines and
young men scratching their heads figuring how to get more power. After
Oldsmobile and Cadillac launched their overhead valve V-8’s in 1949, veterans
with government-issue mechanical training were souping these cars up along with
the familiar Ford Flathead V-8.
The newer
engine designs were already more powerful than their pre-war brethren, but they
also responded so well to simple modifications that hot-rodding became a common
term. Detroit, never remiss in capitalizing on a trend, saw opportunity and started
developing factory hotrods. By the late '50's/early 60’s the factory horsepower
wars were well underway. Stock-car racing and eyeball-flattening acceleration where
taking the attention away from the little imported roadsters.
It was Washington
DC that dropped the anchor. Largely as a result of scathing review of the auto
industry's safety engineering by Ralph Nader in his book “Unsafe at any speed”,
the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were implemented in 1967. This act
was followed in 1968 by adopting auto emissions standards. By the early 1970's
cars were impacted with reduced performance, increasing weight and drivability
problems. Tiny imported sports cars were hit particularly hard. What were
marginal engines before this legislation’s impact really couldn’t cut it now.
The buying public noted the poor performance of post emissions sports-cars and
moved on, preferring to enjoy the twilight of domestic performance in the last
of the muscle cars. The little roadsters were left to die a slow, agonizing,
0-60 in one afternoon death.
The 1980’s
saw technology start to develop in a way which made smaller engines and
sporting vehicles viable again. There was a resurgence of interest in the
roadsters too (Nostalgia? Antiestablishmentarianism? Wishful thinking about the
blonde?), so it wasn’t long before a new generation of tiny topless imported 2-seaters
were showing up at the party again. The
Miata arrived late in the trend. It debuted in 1989 and appeared to be a near
plagiaristic visual copy of the early 1960’s Lotus Elan.
The Elan had
been one of the premier giant slayers through the 1960’s. Light, nimble and
quick, the Lotus was one of those cars that consistently won on the track and
could throw a punch way out of its class. Mazda's choice to build an Elan clone
proved very wise, as these little cars flooded the streets, often propelling
50-60 year-olds through mid-life with fond memories (the blonde factor?).
The original
Elan sat on an 84” wheelbase, had a 1.5 liter engine and produced 100HP, which allowed
it to scoot 0-60 in about 7.1 seconds. The 1990 Miata sat on an 89” wheelbase,
had a 1.6 liter engine that made 115 HP and clocked 0-60 in 8.1 seconds. So why
the 1 second lag? Physics. The first generation Miata weighs around 2100 lbs.
while the Elan was a 1500 pounder.
The original
Elan couldn’t be sold today due to the lack of emissions and safety equipment
all cars must wear. Any equipment weighs something; there is no free ride. So
while small cars used to weigh in at 1500-1900lb, it isn’t unusual to see them scale
at 2700-2900lb now. And with this weight comes slower handling, poorer economy
and poorer acceleration than the same platform could deliver without the excess
baggage.
Manufacturers
continue to raise the bar on horsepower, handling, economy and structural
safety. Cars today are very good and can outperform similar cars of the past in
a big way, while still meeting legislative requirements. But this weight factor
only makes me wonder what kind of a rocket an original Lotus Elan could be with
a 252HP 2-liter Ford Ecoboost from a Focus underfoot. Makes my palms sweat to
think about it. No blonde required.
© 2015 D.W. Williams
