Mazda Miata is reborn

Automotive Industries, Feb, 1998 by Lindsay Brooke

After nine years, the world's favorite sports car is thoroughly redesigned for '99, retaining every gram of greatness in the process.

"You know, we could have gone upmarket and chased the Europeans," says Martin Leach, contemplating the small, bright red roadster in front of us. "We could've gone up in specification, up in price. I suppose it would've been seductive--but it also would've been crazy."

Leach, the new head of R&D and product planning at Mazda, is no stranger to taking chances. In the early '70s, he was ranked third in the world karting championship, racing against the likes of soon-to-be giants Senna and Prost and later graduating successfully to Formula cars. But Leach is also an engineer, and his practical side is keenly aware that when a vehicle is as right as the original Miata, taking chances with it can be suicide.

Nine years ago Mazda put the sensibly-priced sports car back into circulation, and captured over 450,000 owners worldwide in the process. (Half of all owners are women, and half of the total cars sold are in the U.S.) Now, the Miata is due for a redesign. How to do that? Do you add content, maybe fit a hot V-6, jack up the sticker price by nearly 10-grand and go after BMW Z3? Or do you retain the car's utter simplicity, near-perfect chassis balance, fun-to-drive charm, and refine it?

Mazda didn't mess with what worked so well from the beginning.

"Designing a new Miata was one of the most daunting tasks our engineers have ever faced," recalls Mazda U.S. marketing manager Alan Childers. He notes that the company relied on "books full of owner comments and suggestions." After all, Miata, has spawned the world's largest single marque car owners' club, and one of the most enthusiastic and active, with over 30,000 members. There were diverse demographics to satisfy. For example, Childers says U.S. owners tend to be older, in their 40s and 50s, and more affluent. Most U.S. Miatas stay close to stock. Conversely, Japanese owners are younger, mainly male, and modify their cars far more than owners in other markets.

Design/Engineering

The first styling themes for the reborn Miata were done in 1994. "Each of our four design studios, in California, Europe, Hiroshima and Yokohama, submitted designs," recalls Takeo Kijima, a 30-year Mazda veteran who joined the Miata team as program manager a year later. Mostly, the Hiroshima and California (Irvine) studios synthesized the ideas, he says. Kijima adirdts he realized early on that improving something that was already so good would not be an easy job.

So the first thing he did was ask Mazda management to give him a number of key engineers who had worked on the original car, "particularly body/chassis guys." He also secured the services of Mazda's top sports car test driver, whose ability to translate his seat-of-the pants impressions into use engineering feedback was highly respected in the company.

"We knew some important things the new car had to have," Kijima recalls. "We wanted to improve the liveliness, the `oneness' between man and machine. We wanted a more rigid bodyshell, but without added mass. We didn't feel there was a need to really change the car's size. Cost had to be kept down. And we knew that owners always complained about the small trunk."

Early benchmarks included the mid-engined MGF (which the forward-thinking Rover Group had neglected to design for the U.S.), and the BMW Z3. After preliminary evaluations, the Miata, team decided to benchmark mainly against the first-generation Miata instead. "We found it either very competitive to the others in most areas, or better than them," Kijima, says, "especially in fun-to-drive."

Kijima, 49, came to Miata from the RX-7 program, where he was head of suspension development. "He's the best project leader they could have chosen," observes Bob Hall, one of the original Miata R&D team members and now senior editor of Australia's Wheels magazine. "Mazda badly needs as--load of guys like him."

Kijima, was also aware of looming government standards that had to be met. These included a possible European headlamp beam-angle standard already on the books in France, but expected to spread across the EC, more stringent exhaust emission regs (LEV and ULEV) in the U.S., as well as new impact tests.

The original car's Lotus Elan-influenced front end, with its pop-up headlamps, was seen as a key character feature of the old car, and the idea of changing to fixed headlamps was "a big issue, with lots of discussion," says Kijima. But he realized early on that a stouter body would probably require more mass, so keeping overall weight down meant losing it wherever possible. "The fixed headlamps that the stylists gave us were OK'd very early in the program," Kijima, notes. The new projector-type lamps are 11 pounds lighter (due to losing the old mechanism), improve aerodynamics, and throw a low-angle beam that meets the French regulations.

Body Engineering

All body sheetmetal is new. Aiming to improve overall body rigidity, the Miata team employed MDI, a digital structural analysis element of the company's rapidly expanding CAD/CAM/CAE system, which itself is being integrated into Ford's worldwide C3P network. According to Kijima, MDI showed his body engineers that a cross-car brace used in the rear of the old car had to be removed -- it added vibration to the structure when the other gussets (see illustration p. 82) were added. Those on the A-pillars and side sills are in high-strength steel sheet. The A-pillar gussets helped reduce NVH felt through the steering column and pedals.