The Mazda MX-5 is a truly great driver’s car | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Anticipating we’d come last I almost turned it down, but free racing is free racing, a couple of my journo co-drivers were mates and it sounded like a laugh. Then I discovered the car was to be run for Mazda by Jota Sport, the same company that earlier this year won outright a WEC round with its privately entered Porsche 963, beating both the Porsche and the works Ferraris, Toyotas and many others. Therefore, I was confident the car would be well prepped, safe and reliable.

And so it proved: we qualified 49^th out of 59 runners, and by the flag had wriggled our way up to 16^th, partly through attrition it is true, but also thanks to the car’s dependability and (though I say it myself) not one of its drivers putting so much as a tyre out of place from start to finish. The only thing that went wrong was a wheel bearing, almost certainly as a result of someone being a bit ambitious with a kerb. It cost us seven minutes and three places by the end.

I remember everything about the car being as good on the last lap as it had been on the first, which, when you consider we managed exactly 500 laps of the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit, is going some for what was little more than a hollowed out road car with some race suspension, brakes and slicks. I also remember that despite approximately 5000 visits to the rev-limiter in those 24 hours, by the end the amount of oil its engine had consumed was literally not possible to measure.

Spool forward a baker’s dozen years to yesterday, when I found myself gambolling around the Welsh hillsides in another MX-5 from the same series. Although this was a pure road car, the moment I climbed aboard and felt my legs slip down towards the pedals and the relationship to me of all the major controls, I was transported back to Silverstone and that excellent weekend.

But really, what I thought most was just how under-rated these cars have always been. This might seem a curious thing to say about the most consistently popular sports car of the last 30 something years, but I’m not talking about those who bought them because they were quite affordable, exuded a sporting image yet were vanishingly unlikely to go wrong. I’m talking about proper car people, those who buy cars for the way they drive first, second, and third. And I think they (or should I say we?) have on occasion been somewhat sniffy about the MX-5, I expect precisely because most are probably not bought by people who think the same way as us.

And that is a mistake. Just because it can do all those other things does not therefore mean it is unable to also be a joy to drive on the right road. Consider this: here is a car which, through all four of its generations has never grown fat or heavy. The one made today is stunningly similar in both size and weight to that first seen here in 1990. All of them have had peppy twin-cam straight-four engines mounted as far back under the bonnet as possible. All have been available with fantastic five and six-speed gearboxes driving the rear wheels alone. All have properly located double wishbone suspension. All, therefore, have the ingredients required to make a truly great driver’s car.

Which is what it is. No, they’re not that rapid, and certainly not in the least bit exclusive, but who would ever mistake fast for fun? And who’d hold a grudge against others enjoying theirs, too. All I can tell you is that on the right road, these cars are poised, playful, endlessly forgiving and, as a result, really good fun, too.

Of course, you could go steaming over the same road in a Caterham or Lotus Elise and plaster an even broader grin across your face, but then you’d pay a lot more for either. And should you want or need to raise the roof, you’d need to indulge in a spot of all-in wrestling with a sheet of uncooperative canvas and various bits of ironmongery. In an MX-5, there’s really very little more required than to lift the roof from where you find it and bang shut one or two latches – a process you can complete comfortably under 10 seconds.

Reasonable examples of the Mk3 MX-5 on which our race car was based now cost from about £5,000, complete with a 167PS (123kW), 2-litre motor. Given all it provides, I reckon that’s one of the best value propositions out there at present.