Intrepid diver

The TV ad for the pillarless Ford B-Max is real. No tricksy photo-shopping. Bobby Holland-Hanton really did go head first through the 1.5metre gap of a suspended B-Max to show Life-Is-An-Open-Door. Viewers see him climbing stairs to the diving board. However he was really suspended from a crane for the stunt proper. Bobby works on Bond movies so, on this occasion, the only shooting was by the camera.

Of course, pillarless 4-doors are by no means new. They were relatively easy to make when any self-respecting Rolls-Royce or Daimler had a stout chassis to keep them from sagging when the doors were open. Their structure had the integrity of a railway carriage and your footman turned a stout handle to latch a door. One did not stoop; one preserved one’s dignity getting in or coming down.
But come cars with unitary bodies it wasn’t easy to make. Doors were getting smaller and not many were able to dispense with the B-pillar. Fiat had the pillarless Ardita in 1934, and persisted with pillarlessness until the 1100 of 1952. Triumph tried it in Britain and Licorne in France, but structures tended to wilt with age. They rattled and leaked; a middle pillar held the roof and floor together. Or apart.
MG K-types (top) came in two wheelbase lengths, 9ft, or 7ft 10-and three-sixteenths of an inch. It was not a monocoque. It had a chassis and bodywork that owed something to the ash-framing and bespoke panel-beating of the coaching era. Rods inside the doors fitted catches in the roof and floor and access was relatively easy, despite the car being barely 4ft 6in tall. A long 6-cylinder engine, even of a modest 1100cc, put a premium on passenger space, so reaching seats without dodging round a middle prop was vital. The engine was a Wolseley-derived cross-flow, you could have a Wilson preselective gearbox instead of a non-synchromesh manual, but suspension was by cart springs.

The Lancia Aprilia of 1937-1939 was a little masterpiece. All-independently sprung (sliding pillars in front, transverse leaf and torsion bar at the back) and a narrow-angle ohv V4 engine, it had hydraulic brakes and was good for 80mph. A striking looking car, some 15,000 were made before the war.
Ford’s B-Max has a rear door that slides. Mazda’s RX7 (below) has a small half rear door with a concealed handle, exact, precise graceful. It’s an ideal formula for a small, perfectly proportioned sporty car barely 4ft tall. Surprising, really, that Cecil Kimber never thought of that dinky back door.

see diver

Anniversary

Press launch 30 years ago this week. We drove the Mazda 626 on a banked test track; a decent enough car but scarcely worth crash helmets and long press conferences. We went everywhere by Bullet train. Here’s Michael Kemp (centre) motoring correspondent of The Daily Mail talking to Australian newcomer Steve Cropley. Behind them is Roy Spicer (Sunday Mirror) and Anthony Curtis (Motor). On the right are Clifford Webb (The Times) and Sue Baker (Evening News). That’s Sue with John Ebenezer, Mazda’s MD, and Hugh Hunston of The Glasgow Herald pretending to be brave. Cliff Webb is by the Bullet train’s speedo reading.

Mazda Most Worthy

It was a toss-up between buying a Mazda MX5 and a BMW Z3. Sometimes I think I made a mistake. BMW offered me a better deal and I love the 6-cylinder engine, but service has been rubbish and reliability disappointing. What Car? finds 96 per cent of MX5s, built after 2005, fault free. Their reliability was the best in its survey. Owners report an average repair bill of £165. I hate to think what I have spent on the BMW.

The MX5 was more like the MGs and Sprites I enjoyed in my youth, but the BMW seemed up-market and premium, carefully made, less likely to wear out. The Mazda was not exactly down-market but didn’t measure up in the status stakes. It was a 4-cylinder, not raucus but scarcely as refined as the BMW. And, back then, a body with lots of aluminium and plastic and galvanised steel was not wholly convincing. Yet MX5s never seem to wear out. Last time I tested one was 2005; it was lithe, nimble, quick, responsive. The Z3 has always been a bit “touring”, which was what I thought I wanted. It seemed superior, I suppose.

I’m not sure now. The MX5 is prettier, younger, better proportioned. I have always thought of the BMW as “the classic in the garage”, and used it rather less than the practical cars getting wet sitting in the drive. I thought Z3s looked the part.

Pretentious? Moi?

MAZDA MX-5

I had one like this once. Austin-Healey Sprite Mark 1. photo: Culzean 2008


Little booklet arrived the other day, a jubilee magazine celebrating 20 years of the Mazda MX-5. Jeffrey H Guyton, President and CEO of Mazda Motor Europe wrote the introduction. He saw his first MX-5 when a graduate student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at about the time, 18 March 1990, that I wrote the attached Sunday Times motoring column, on what he rightly calls an automotive milestone. The MX-5 recreated the delights of the classic British sports car, Austin-Healey Sprite, MG Midget, even the ill-handling Triumph Spitfire, without the unreliability and the aggro that went with owning one. Mazda Motor Europe GmbH has not quite re-written history. I never knew the story, of which it makes much, about an American journalist I never heard of, who gets the credit for inventing the idea, together with Kenichi Yamamoto Mazda’s head of development. It would have been nice for Mazda Motor not to dismiss the role played by the late John Shute, of International Automotive Design (IAD) in Worthing. An MG enthusiast and collector, Shute created prototypes in 1984-1985, which he tested at MIRA, bequeathing a lot of MG style and character into the well proportioned 2-seater that became MX-5. After working with Austin in Australia, Shute set up IAD in 1975 certain that companies in the Far East in particular Japan, which did not have the experience to develop specialist models, such as sports cars would consult him. IAD prospered, at one time it was three times the size of Giugiaro’s Ital Design, it had a turnover of £40million, employed 800 and won two Queen’s Awards to Industry. IAD was consulted by manufacturers in a dozen countries on accessories and equipment, as well as complete cars, up until the 1990s recession. South Korean bankruptcies, notably of Daewoo, led to defaults on major contracts. IAD was consigned to the pages of automotive history, although in the MX-5’s jubilee magazine alas, scarcely even a footnote.