It goes without saying the creation of the original MX5 30 years ago was a team effort. But it's also true to say that without a few key characters the car we know and love wouldn't have come to pass, and one of those guys is head designer Tom Matano. Now a lecturer in car design in San Francisco, the MX5 Owners' Club arranged for Tom to attend the National Rally at Gaydon as guest of honour. The day before we got some time to chat to him about all things MX5, what inspired him and how he feels seeing his dream car made real.
The real MX5 story doesn't start 30 years ago but more like 40, when American journalist Bob Hall sketched a rough outline for a front-engined, rear-wheel drive roadster for then Mazda R&D boss (and later global president) Kenichi Yamamoto. It must have struck a chord because he was then hired by Mazda's new Californian design studio and given the opportunity to make his 'Light Weight Sports' proposal a reality. So, he brought in Tom, a long-standing friend with a shared passion for classic roadsters.
"When I came to the States in 1970 I looked at the sky and said I had to have a convertible," recalls Tom. "I had a Fiat 850 with a broken top, so I never really had a roof on the car for a year and a half. You can do that in LA and once you've lived like that you know you can't beat anything other than a full convertible. But when I got to Mazda there were no cars like that anymore. And we thought if we don't do it the chances are nobody is going to bring it back, and the whole culture will die."
This is a recurring theme in chatting with Tom - he loves convertibles and, hence, the opportunity to design an open-top sports car from scratch was a dream come true. And good fortune and happy coincidence followed the project to that moment in 1989 when the Mk1 was finally shown to the public.
Hearing him speak of design features we now consider part of the MX5 story raises some surprises too, such as the news he never really wanted pop'up lights on the Mk1! "The whole thing is about simplicity and originally the front was only meant to have three elements - the mouth and the two lights," he says, "but the technology wasn't there at the time so we had to have the pop-ups." His original idea was realised to an extent with the Mk2's fixed lights, though even then there were limitations. "I wanted the lights half an inch narrower but it would have cost $900 extra per light and we couldn't justify it," he says, happy that modern lighting technology on the Mk4 finally realises the ambition he had for small, fixed lights.
The Mk2 did help him tidy up a few niggles he had with the Mk1's design though, including the curve on the lower edge of the door. "I wanted the door to be set backward a little to show the front-engine, rear-wheel drive stance," he says. "And on the second-generation we could do this, like we did with the RX-7."
And to all those customising their MX5s good news - that's what Tom and the team always wanted owners to do! "You see on the Mk1 we made the instrument panel in three pieces, which is usually a no-go in terms of cost but we were adamant because we wanted it to be customisable," he says. "We still had that up to the Mk3. On the Mk4 we have new things, like the body colours on the inside, which I wanted to do from the very beginning."
The purity and deceptive simplicity of the original Mk1 shape is what makes it so timeless. But even here Tom was considering how owners might customise it further. "Maybe you want to add a little spoiler or mesh in the grille or something like that," he says, "but a little lower, maybe a little wider in stance, that would be nice too." Which is good to hear, given many designers would sniff at the idea of owners meddling with their work. Not Tom - standard or modified, his passion for MX5s of any generation remains as pure today as it was when he first started sketching his ideas back in the early 80s.
With thanks to www.MX5OC.co.uk for arranging our meeting with Tom Matano
Photos: MX5OC/Andrew Coles
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