104 may 2019 whichcar.com.au/motor
N MAY, 1989, a compact, lightweight, affordable sports car
hit the road, one the world had not seen before. It was called
the Mazda MX-5 and as you read this, it will have been on
continuous sale for almost exactly 30 years.
To mark this momentous occasion, we sat down with Bob
Hall, the man credited with dreaming up the original MX-5
concept – although he is quick to clarify that conceptualising
the car is not the same task as that of turning it into a reality.
As Hall himself is a former motoring journalist, at none other
than Wheels Magazine, there’s no better person to tell the
fascinating story of the MX-5’s conception.I JOINED MAZDA North America on October 21, 1981. But it
all began a few years earlier, rooted in a conversation I had
with Kenichi Yamamoto, then Mazda’s chief engineer. Of
course, it was all made easier by the fact I spoke Japanese.
I just assumed I was going to be in Public Relations,
because when you’re a journalist and you go to work for a big
carmaker, you go into PR. But they put me in design. I doubled
the non-managerial staff count of the design department
in California – meaning it went from one to two. When they
expanded product development they put me in there, which
has chased me around my whole career. I really rankle at the
‘father of the Miata’ title I’m too often given, because today
there really are no single fathers of any car; it takes a team anda village to develop a vehicle from scratch.
[In the foreword for Thomas L. Bryant’s excellent book,
Mazda MX-5 Miata: Twenty Five Years, Hall begins with
Toshihiko Hirai.] Remember that name. When something is
successful everyone wants to find the creator. I guess that’s
just part of the fixation people have with stuff. And now that
the Mazda MX-5 has had its [30th] birthday, and [more than]
one million have been built, lots of well-meaning individuals
are either calling it Tom Matano’s car or are praising me as the
father of it. It is not Tom Matano’s car, nor
am I the father of the MX-5. The father of
the car is the aforementioned gentleman,
Toshihiko Hirai. It is his car if ownership
must be attributed to a single individual.
Think of a film; there is a director,
and there are producers, plus countless
designers, writers, cinematographers,
editors, sound and lighting techs, and
others, not to mention the cast. All too
often, history gets rewritten, and the guys
who put in the hours and years and really
crack their arses hard, giving up anything
like a normal life, get left out or forgotten.
I’ll take full credit for coming up with
the concept, or at least the idea that the
concept of the classic British roadster still
had some legs. My dad had this endless
run of British open sports cars. I remember
us driving together in his Austin-Healey
to the Vista Del Mar concours in Los
Angeles, and we were driving down
Olympic Boulevard in LA and the car just
stopped dead in tracks due to a failed SU
fuel pump. Once I got my driver’s licence,
I drove my mother’s Volvo, my dad’s later
Healey, then Datsun 510s and all kinds
of things, and I remember thinking how
solid and reliable and neat the Japanese
cars were, but why didn’t they have cool,
fun sports roadsters like my dad’s Healey?
That stuck with me forever and, a few
years later, a day figured prominently regarding my first
meeting with Yamamoto and Mazda’s PR chief Bunzo Suzuki.
I always felt that there was something left in that idea. I
continued to run into Mr Yamamoto once or twice a year, and
we’d meet and talk cars, baseball, whatever. We met shortly
after the launch of the first Mazda RX-7 and he asked me what
Mazda should do next after that car.
So I did this horrible chalkboard scribble, suggesting that
Mazda should build an affordable, open, rear-drive sports
car. He asked “why?” and I replied “because there aren’t any
more left.” Austin-Healey was gone, as was the MGB. The Alfa
Spyder was something a little different.
He seemed to understand, but I didn’t think anything would
come of it. He excused himself for a moment, and I was about
to erase the chalkboard before Suzuki said “let’s take a photo
of that” which he did and then I erased it. Something like two
years later, I got a call from Kishimoto-san, Mazda’s main PR
guy in North America, asking me to come down for a meeting,
which turned into the design job offer.
One day I was in the studio working on the B2000 pickup
truck and felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Yamamoto, who
asked what I was doing. I told him “I’m working on the pickup
truck” and he said, “not important right now, you should
be working on your lightweight, two-seat sports car”. I’dOPPOSITE
Naturally, Hall has an NA
of his own – a mint example
in a special, non-production
paint code➜