MIATAGO

– by Barbara Beach

“What do you mean $18,000 in medical deductions?” he shrieked, as only an accountant can.
“I bought a Miata: I responded calmly, (as calm as one can while doing their taxes).
“A car is not a medical deduction” the accountant reprimanded.
“A Miata is” I argued. “In fact, I consider it THERAPY!”

It is possible that I may not win my case with the IRS, but anyone who owns a Miata can understand my point. As Will Rogers once said, “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man”. I concur, and contend that the outside of a Miata is good for the inside of anyone! It certainly has been good for me. I have made more new friends and had more freeway “love affairs” (you know…those stolen glances and passionate smiles) window to window. I never had this much fun in my Chevy Van. Never once did I get a marriage proposal while driving it, but in the Miata I have had several (I will, however, have to wait for my suitors to either graduate high school or get a driver’s license). But a proposal is a proposal!

I would only caution you not to make the Miata gods angry. There is a certain unwritten dress code that one must abide by when Miata motoring. My biggest mistake was to make one of those early morning ‘sweat pants, hair in curlers’ run to the dry cleaners. Upon leaving the cleaners I was shocked to find two men sitting in my Miata. While this is not what I would normally consider a crisis, it is when I’m dressed for my Phillis Diller impression. A Miata owner must be dressed to meet people. After all, we do represent an alternate way of motoring and have certain responsibilities!!

Observing my self-imposed rule, I was far more successful in my encounter with a top-down 560SL: Dressed as if he just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren full page ad, the Benz driver looked over as I languished in my Calvin Kleins and offered to trade cars. Tomorrow, lunch? You bring your pink slip, I’ll bring mine…Oh I’m sorry! There seems to be little loyalty left these days!

I was in quite a panic when I questioned my best friend as to what I should wear on an upcoming date with a man I really wanted to impress. “Relax, Barbara”, my friend laughed, “Flash a smile and wear your Miata!” I did and it worked! This car is not just transportation, it is a dating device! I can just see the classifieds now…’OUTRAGEOUSLY FINE FEMALE WITH TWO MASTERS DEGREES, UNTOLD WEALTH, AND A RED MIATA IS LOOKING TO FIND A MAN OF SIMILAR QUALITIES. SEND PHOTO OF YOURSELF AND YOUR CAR…’
I think I have stumbled on to something here…high tech automotive seduction. This car should carry a warning: CAUTION: DRIVING A MIATA CAN CAUSE AN INFLATED EGO, UNABASHED FLIRTATION, AND IN SOME CASES SERIOUS PROPOSALS.

The Miata is by no means a ‘singles only’ car. I do hope that all of you married Miata owners enjoy the car for its original intended purposes; starry nights, top down cruising with your significant other. As for me and my Miata…well, we’re just going out to play.

Barbara Beach (and her Miata) play in Vista, California. Barbara profiles other Miata owners (and an occasional man in a 560SL) in each Miata magazine.

 

Stopping Traffic

– by Peter Egan

On the first morning I drove our Miata test car to work, a black Mustang GT with side-pipes pulled up beside me at a stoplight. The owner, a rather Springsteenish looking fellow with curly hair and rolled-up sleeves on his T-shirt, looked straight ahead and didn’t give the Miata a glance. His girl-friend, however, climbed over his lap for a better look at the Mazda. “That’s it!” she said, shaking him so hard that ash fell off his cigarette. “That’s the car I was telling you about!”

Her boyfriend slowly turned his head and regarded the Miata sullenly from beneath a Gene Vincent spit curl. Then he looked straight ahead and draped his hand over his steering wheel. “I didn’t know they were so small.” he said, loud enough for all of us to hear. The light changed and he roared off in a cloud of rubber and smoke. The g-forces tossed his girlfriend back in her seat. Even in mid-whiplash, however, she managed to look back longingly at the Miata, like a child whose mother has snatched her away from a toy counter.

I grinned and took off in my own mini-snarl of revs and commotion. It’s as sheer flattery, this studied nonchalance of the Mustang driver. An automotive version of the “He ain’t so good” indifference people sometimes use on movie stars in restaurants. The acid test of fame and success.

That small incident, one of many, made it official: The Mazda Miata is the most noticed car I’ve driven in eight years of working at Road &. Track. Not literally official – I haven’t checked with Guinness or hired Price Waterhouse to tabulate the number of stares and shouts-but there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the most publicly popular car we’ve ever had in our test fleet, surpassing even Testarossas and Turbo Esprits.

The first week was really something. I’d be driving the Miata home from work, stop at a light, and the guy behind me would leap out of his car and come running up to ask if Miatas were already in the showroom. While he was talking to me, someone in another lane would be hanging out the window of a delivery van and shouting, “Hey, what kind of car is that?” When traffic started rolling, a Samurai-load of high school girls would roll alongside and one of them would shout, “I want one!” with the sort of swooning intensity that was reserved for Lennon or McCartney 25 years ago.

There’s something happening here, as Mr. Dylan would tell us, and it hasn’t abated, even half a year after the Miata’s introduction. And, frankly, I love all the clamor. It’s nice to see the concept of a small, affordable sports car vindicated by success, and it’s also good to see a car-any car-that generates this kind of loud, general excitement again. It doesn’t happen very often in this business.

Working for a car magazine through the Eighties, I’ve attended dozens of introductions for cars. We normally gather in a hotel conference room, have some coffee and sweet rolls, and then watch a slide show in which alluring portions of the new car are revealed to us in a fan-dancelike photo montage while the engineering goals of the company are explained. Finally We are led into a dark room where the new car sits on a pedestal, the lights come up and the new model is unveiled.

With few pleasant exceptions, most of these unveilings have been fairly disappointing. The crowd gathers around the car, reporters raise their eyebrows or shrug, and finally someone slides up to you and says, “Jeez, with a clean sheet of paper you’d think they could have come up with something more interesting than this….” and someone else says, “Well, the rear end isn’t too ugly….” and a third party says, “The front end kind of reminds you of a Porsche 944, only not quite as clean …” and so on into the morning, damning with faint praise or trying politely to put another lost opportunity in its best light.

The pattern that emerges here, after a near decade of press conferences, is not merely a lack of boldness in design, but a tendency for designers to lose touch with the textures and shapes that the human eye admires in cars. In his critique of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe noted that most architects were so busy impressing one another that they produced a whole generation of buildings in which no one wanted to live or work. The public was supposed to adapt to the taste of the architects, not the other way around, so our cities ended up being a collection of concrete boxes and places based on German worker housing of the Thirties.

That trend seems to be reversing itself in architecture. I’m seeing more new buildings I genuinely admire these days, where some of the more engaging styles from the past are being adapted to a modern vision of space and light.

Car designers-like architects, I think-have been watching one another more than they’ve been watching the customers who have to live in (and with) their cars. As a result, the past decade has brought us too many sports/GT cars that are heavier, wider, longer, vastly more expensive and so lacking in distinctiveness of line as to be anonymous or nearly invisible. Fast, sophisticated and serious, but not much fun.

What Mazda has done with the Miata is not so much reinvent the sports car as fill a huge vacuum, simply by remembering what a sports car is. They’ve built a car with a good power/weight ratio, rather than sheer power, so acceleration feels quick and spritely. They’ve also made it small enough to be nimble in traffic and parkable anywhere, and given it a front-engine/rear-drive layout for easy maintenance, repair and modification. It has a wonderful exhaust note and a convertible top, it doesn’t cost much (temporary gouging aside) and it is as a friend of mine in a Bluegrass band used to say, more fun than half a gallon of red ants.

The Miata also dos something few other cars have been able to do lately: It looks good to a lot of people. It may be derivative in its styling, and of course we have no way of knowing how the design will hold up 10 years down the road. But for right now, it looks good enough to stop traffic, and that alone is fair cause for celebration.

 

Did they ever checked back 4 years later? Nathan would be about 37 now and I wonder if he owns or ever owned a Miata.

Miata Club of America Member Profile

Nathan Hitchcock
Age: 12
Address: Trailway Lane
El Toro, CA 92630
School Activities: Drama, playing keyboards, basketball
Other interests: Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox movies. Also Def Leppard, Steve Winwood.

He doesn’t remember the classic British roadsters of the ’50s and ’60s. He hadn’t been born yet.

When the RX-7 first appeared as Mazda’s entry into the affordable sports car arena he was…two years old.

Ask him what he was doing when the Miata first hit the drawing boards near his home in El Toro, California, and he may not remember. He was in the first grade.

Today Nathan Hitchcock is 12 and the youngest member of the Miata Club of America. We stopped by his home on what was coincidentally his birthday to welcome him personally and to get to know him.

An unassuming and polite gentle-man for his years, he was nevertheless excited to have such a direct response from his original note which read, “I’m very pleased with the Miata and with your club.”
Nathan is much like a typical 12-year old. Cars seem to hold a deep-felt interest. “I like expensive, fast cars,” he told us, “My favorite would have to be a Lamborghini.” The posters on the walls attest to his passions. Countaches, Porsche 911s and the like are a part of this dream gallery. We can identify with him. The exotics are so unreachable that we’re left to appreciate them only as works of art. But then why the interest in the Miata..? “It just caught my eye so fast.” And we can identify with that.

But enough looking. Let’s go for a ride! Better yet, we hand the key to a surprised Lee Hitchcock, Nathan’s father. After a brief familiarization session, (no, Nathan you have to sit on the right side) they’re off.

Next, we get to spend a nice moment with the other two members of the family: Nathan’s mom Lisa (who penned the club membership check that got this all started), and brother Jeremy, 10. We learn that they’re new to southern California, having moved from Austin, Texas, where the boys were raised.

Now that starts to figure. Nathan doesn’t seem the prototypical southern Californian. When we asked about his hobbies, for instance, they didn’t include skateboarding or surfing. (“I don’t go to the beach too much.”) They do include basketball, keyboard playing, and drama, all of which he’s starting to delve into at Serrano Inter-mediate in El Toro where he’s in the seventh grade. He also wants to be a writer someday.

When they do get back they look less like father and son and more like a couple of kids who just got off of Disneyland’s Space Mountain..A little tousled but ready to get back in line and ride again. You can just see Dad’s mind working too. (“Let’s see, we can sell the 280Z…”)

Up till now Nathan’s only knowledge of the Miata has been gained by reading the automotive press. So what does he think now that he’s had a ride? “Let’s see, we can sell the 280Z…”

Any suggestions we can pass on to the Mazda product planners? “I’d really like it to come out in black.”

Thanks, Nathan. It’s been a pleasure meeting you and your family. Oh, and we’ll check back when you turn 16.