How the Mazda MX-5 was inspired by a pair of British roadsters

| 16 Dec 2025

We can all see that the first-generation Mazda MX-5 looks a lot like the original Type 26 Lotus Elan, but it was a whole pantheon of British roadsters that helped form this Japanese-made car in the mind of Bob Hall, the Californian motoring journalist turned Mazda product planner.

Although it was built on the other side of the world, Bob is clear that the MX-5 was the latest entry in the lineage of lightweight, fizzing British two-seaters.

It all started with his father’s posting in Britain during the Second World War, flying bombing raids aboard North American B-25 Mitchells.

Former Mazda product planner Bob Hall tells the very personal story of the British roadsters that inspired the most successful sports car of all time

Bob’s dad took his Cord Sportsman with him to the UK, where he swapped it for a 2-litre Alta he later brought back to the United States.

Finding spare parts for the Alta proved a challenge, however, so before long it was exchanged for a Morris Minor Tourer.

“This guy in a red MG TD pulled up next to him in the Morris at a stop light and yelled, ‘Want to trade cars?’,” says Bob.

“My dad thought he was crazy, but he did it at the next two sets of lights, so he pulled over and the guy said he’d been given an ultimatum by his wife to get rid of the two-seater for anything.”

The Mazda MX-5’s visual similarities to the Lotus Elan weren’t planned

Some of Bob’s earliest memories are being driven around Los Angeles by his mother in that car, squeezed under the tonneau cover with his brother on the passenger seat whenever it rained.

It’s possible that the Mazda MX-5 might never have existed without that chance swap with the MG owner.

The TD gave the Hall family a taste for British sports cars, and they later moved to a Triumph TR2 while Bob was still small enough to fit into the space behind the seats.

That was the first car he drove, sitting on his dad’s lap, driving loops around the car park of Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium after his father went fishing in the nearby river.

The Mazda MX-5’s large, clear dials

Once Bob had outgrown that car, it was swapped for an Austin-Healey 100/6 equipped with back seats.

As with all of his sports cars, his father fitted rear seatbelts to the Healey.

“My dad was working for American Airlines,” recalls Bob, “so he got American Airlines seatbelts for it, front and rear, with ‘AA’ logos on them.”

Formatively, and despite the obvious lack of practicality, Bob was raised on the idea that a sports car could be used every day, even as the owner’s only car.

The lively and responsive MGA Twin Cam rolls in corners, but feels well balanced and easy to exploit

The 100/6 then made way for a longstanding Austin-Healey 3000, the car in which Bob would learn to drive and take his test.

It was the juxtaposition between the heavy, six-cylinder Healey and an MGA Twin Cam he almost bought that confirmed to Bob what a sports car was – or should be.

“My dad once referred to the 3000 as a ‘boulevard car’, which was an interesting concept,” he remembers.

“The Twin Cam was compact, lightweight and fun to drive, with a revvy engine that was just as enthusiastic as the driver.”

The MGA Twin Cam’s high-compression B-series engine is boosted to 108bhp

It’s remarkable just how much the MG’s twin-cam, crossflow, high-compression aluminium cylinder head transforms the humble B-series engine, and indeed the MGA.

Power jumped by 35% from the contemporary MGA 1600, to 108bhp, but the whole car somehow feels lighter and more lively, not just faster.

Throttle response is electric in Colin Manley’s lovely 1959 example, while the engine note trumpets more proudly than a pushrod-actuated MGA.

Like its T-series predecessors, this is still a reasonably softly sprung car; it rolls in the corners a fair amount, too – but, crucially, it remains balanced and composed.

The MGA’s 7000rpm redline hints at the twin-cam engine’s nature

No one, today as in 1958, has ever been amazed by what an MGA can do, not even a Twin Cam, but it’s the way the MG delivers the experience that impresses.

This is a cheerleader of a car, always fun and encouraging its driver to push it that bit harder, but never biting back in the manner that contemporary roadsters from Triumph or Mercedes-Benz are prone to do.

For Bob, this was the dream – especially when he found one of the rare Coupé variants (complete with the luxury of wind-up windows) for sale in the late 1960s.

The Twin Cam’s compact, classic lines were a break with MG tradition

“Coming from the 3000, I got used to the proper windows, whereas the TD, TR2 and MGA roadster all had side-curtains,” he says. “They were just a pain in the ass.”

A Facel Vega Facellia on a neighbouring car lot distracted him for a few days before he found the French car had a horrendous oil leak, but by the time he got back to the vendor of the MG, the car had been sold.

“I was so p*ssed off at myself,” Bob says. “I told myself: ‘That’s the last time I get pulled away by a pretty face.’”

The MGA Twin Cam has a relatively large, four-spoke steering wheel

Bob bought a Datsun 510 instead, a car that amazed him with its reliability – even by the late 1960s, Japanese automobiles had earned
a cast-iron reputation on America’s West Coast for their build quality.

The MGA’s notoriety was, of course, the opposite. “We used to joke that MGA Twin Cams existed to make Alfa Romeos look reliable,” recalls Bob.

“And that’s when I started thinking about what became the Miata [the US name for the MX-5].”

The Mazda MX-5 (closest) extends an engineering lineage, albeit now one on an international scale, that continues to this day

A decade later, Bob, by then working as a motoring journalist, discussed that idea with Kenichi Yamamoto, Mazda’s chief engineer, at the launch of the first RX-7.

Two and a half years after that, in 1981, Yamamoto hired Bob into Mazda’s new Californian design department, with a brief to develop the MX-5 concept as a side project alongside his day-to-day work on Mazda saloons and trucks.

Initially the sports car project was a slow burn, and it wasn’t until 1984 that West Sussex firm International Automotive Design was commissioned to assemble a proof-of-concept vehicle, based on a mixture of 323, 929 and RX-7 running gear.

The Mazda MX-5’s windscreen pillars shake over bumpy roads

At the same time, Japanese teams back in Hiroshima were working on two further sports car proposals: a front-engined, front-wheel-drive option and a mid-engined two-seater.

The former would become the MX-3, while the latter foundered in the wake of Toyota’s launch of the MR2 in 1985.

As development on the rear-drive roadster became more intense, Toshihiko Hirai – the man Bob whom says should be credited as the creator of the MX-5, beyond either himself or designer Tom Matano – called him to ask how the car should sound.

Bob promised to get back to him with some samples, then he fired up his tape recorder and went through his Betamax video collection of The Avengers episodes.

The Lotus Elan S2 is low, poised and agile – and impressively supple

“I took every sequence I could find with Emma Peel driving the Elan where there wasn’t music, and I put together an audio tape with all of the noises that car made,” he says.

“Upshifts, downshifts, everything, and I sent it to Hirai. He said ‘this sounds great, what is it?’, and I replied: ‘It’s the best possible sound.’”

Driving Gordon Morrison’s 1965 Elan S2 confirms that verdict.

The Lotus Twin Cam is perhaps the best-sounding four-cylinder engine of all time. It is guttural yet refined, loud but not booming, and it finishes its snarls with a delightful rasp after every gearshift.

The Lotus Elan S2’s three-spoke wheel adorns a cabin that was luxurious in its day

It is also extraordinary just how rigid the little Type 26 Elan feels: there’s not a hint of scuttle shake on this 60-plus-year-old convertible.

It tracks through corners like a skateboard, so low and perfectly tied together, yet it remains supple.

The Lotus magic of superbly judged damping is already here, in what was only founder Colin Chapman’s second proper road car.

The Lotus Elan’s gearshift is a delight

Both Bob and Mazda noticed the talents of the Lotus chassis while developing the MX-5, and he explains how the company funded the purchase and restoration of an Elan to Emma Peel-replica specification: “The budget plan at Mazda was ‘you use it or lose it’.

“Here’s your $2million for competitor cars; if you only spend $1.7million, next year you get $1.7million.

“My boss comes in and says: ‘We have a problem. This year there’s nothing, next year we’ve got a ton of cars, so we’ve got to spend the money. How about your cheap sports car project?’”

The Lotus Elan’s Twin Cam provided sonic inspiration for the Mazda MX-5

The plan was for the Elan to be Bob’s company car for two years, after which he could bid to buy it.

“We used it for the engineering evaluations,” he says. “We did a lot of driving and let others drive it to get an understanding of what the feel of the car had to be.”

Bob’s team was trying to convince Mazda’s research-and-development department back in Japan to use a backbone chassis like the Lotus, with a perimeter frame for improved safety.

Hiroshima still led things technically, and Bob had found it was best to convince the team there gently rather than try to dictate.

The Lotus Elan was only Colin Chapman’s second ‘proper’ road car

He and his group of engineers found the slightest-framed person they had access to – one of the engineers’ girlfriends – and filmed her driving the car around Los Angeles in a bikini as a way of exaggerating just how spacious the Elan’s interior was in spite of the backbone frame, and proving its relative lack of vibration.

“We sent the video to Japan and I’m told they made a lot of copies,” says Bob, “and one or two of them got to the engineers! Then my boss got a fax saying they wanted the car in Japan.”

Bob never got his The Avengers-spec Lotus; the last he heard of it from a retiring colleague was that it was sitting in a storage shed in Japan underneath a thick layer of dust.

The Lotus Elan is remarkably free from scuttle shake

Eventually Mazda decided against a backbone chassis, too.

The problem was crash protection: giving the car enough side-impact resilience required such strong body panels that the shell saved little weight over a monocoque; once the backbone chassis was added to the scales, the car would weigh more than an RX-7.

“Hirai was dead serious about weight, that’s one thing that he was really brilliant with,” says Bob.

The production car’s Power Plant Frame, a bracing structure that tied the end of the gearbox to the rear axle to eliminate tramp, was directly inspired by the Elan, however.

The Mazda MX-5 NA is a classic car in the making

There is clear evidence of the Elan’s DNA in Will Williams’ 1992 Mk1 MX-5.

Its lightness is obvious in everything it does well: its cornering agility, supple ride and peppy throttle response.

It shares the Lotus’ ergonomic rightness, too: every control, be it the pedals, steering wheel or gearshift, is perfectly honed.

Mazda even added a metal end-stop to the gearchange to give it the satisfying mechanical feel of an old British roadster.

The Mazda MX-5’s cabin is a Japanese take on sporting simplicity

The relative lack of rigidity in comparison with the Lotus is noticeable, though.

On smooth Japanese or Continental Tarmac you’d barely notice, but Britain’s poorly surfaced roads shake the dashboard and windscreen pillars from side to side.

While Bob happily admits to such significant stimulus from the Elan, however, he refutes the idea that either the Mazda’s twin-cam engine (beyond its sound) or even the design of the body was inspired by the seminal Lotus.

He says of the Mazda B-series engine: “Before the Miata was even an idea, the Japanese were already twin-cam and four-valve nutcases.”

The Mazda MX-5’s 1.6-litre, fuel-injected, twin-cam ‘four’ makes 114bhp

He also argues that the visual similarity to the Lotus was a case of convergence rather than imitation.

“I can tell you it wasn’t intentional,” he insists. “Now people might not believe that, but you have to remember that a lot of the guys who did the day-to-day work on the car – the engineers and such – had never seen an Elan.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if half of the engineers didn’t drive to work but took the train.”

Californian headlight-height regulations necessitated the MX-5’s pop-up headlamps, for example, while the Elan-like grille was not present on early designs.

The Mazda MX-5 NA’s pop-up lights were forced by Californian safety regulations

“When you saw some of Mark Jordan’s sketches, they were very Ferrari-like, make no bones about it,” says Bob.

“He really liked the 250GTO character in the front, and we were playing with that.”

Frontal-impact regulations forced the grille down from the nose to under the bumper: “That’s where the Miata picked up some of the Elan-ness; maybe it was because it was a great solution to the same equation. Maybe that was it.”

Bob argues, therefore, that the one way in which everyone thinks the Lotus Elan influenced the MX-5 is in fact the one way it didn’t.

The winning Mazda Miata proposal (left) and one of the unsuccessful designs

The MG TD, Triumph TR2 and Austin-Healey 100/6 laid down the early groundwork, while the MGA Twin Cam was the car that demonstrated to Bob what a British sports car could be at its best.

The Healey 3000, meanwhile, had shown him what a difference features such as wind-up windows and a simple-to-use roof – a luxury previously denied to such roadsters – made to daily usability.

Finally, the Elan demonstrated what a sports car should sound like and the heights of how it could handle.

Like the Lotus Elan, the Mazda MX-5 is supple, agile and responsive – although notably not as stiff

People often assume that the Mazda MX-5 was successful ‘just’ because it added proper reliability to the sports-car recipe and appeared after the British manufacturers had faded.

That it’s the MX-5, however, and not the BMW Z3 or countless other imitators, that has sold in excess of a million units, suggests it’s more than that.

Bob is not too proud to acknowledge that the Mazda MX-5 stood on the shoulders of some automotive giants, and the result is a car that has channelled the MGA Twin Cam, the Lotus Elan and others for decades since.

Words: Charlie Calderwood/Simon Fox

Images: Jack Harrison

Thanks to: Bob Hall, Colin Manley, Gordon Morrison, Will Williams, Paul Matty

Factfiles

MGA Twin Cam

Sold/number built 1958-’60/2111
Construction steel box-section chassis, steel body
Engine iron-block, alloy-head, dohc 1588cc ‘four’, twin 1¾in SU H6 carburettors
Max power 108bhp @ 6700rpm
Max torque 104lb ft @ 4500rpm
Transmission four-speed manual, RWD
Suspension: front independent, by wishbones, coil springs rear live axle, semi-elliptic leaf springs; lever-arm dampers f/r
Steering rack and pinion
Brakes discs
Length 13ft (3962mm)
Width 4ft 10in (1473mm)
Height 4ft 2in (1270mm)
Wheelbase 7ft 10in (2388mm)
Weight 2156lb (977kg)
0-60mph 13.3 secs
Top speed 115mph
Mpg 21.8
Price new £1027 (1959)
Price now £30-60,000*

Lotus Elan S2

Sold/number built 1962-’73/c8650 (all Type 26 Elans)
Construction folded steel backbone chassis, glassfibre body
Engine iron-block, alloy-head, dohc 1558cc ‘four’, twin Weber carburettors
Max power 105bhp @ 5500rpm
Max torque 108lb ft @ 4000rpm
Transmission four-speed manual, RWD
Suspension independent, at front by wishbones, coil springs, telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar rear lower wishbones, coil spring/damper struts
Steering rack and pinion
Brakes discs
Length 12ft 1in (3683mm)
Width 4ft 8in (1422mm)
Height 3ft 9in (1143mm)
Wheelbase 7ft (2134mm)
Weight 1210lb (549kg)
0-60mph 8.7 secs
Top speed 115mph
Mpg 27.9
Price new £1436 (1965)
Price now £25-45,000*

Mazda MX-5 1.6i

Sold/no built 1989-’97/431,506 (all Mk1 MX-5s)
Construction steel monocoque
Engine iron-block, alloy-head, dohc 1598cc ‘four’, Bosch L-Jetronic injection
Max power 114bhp @ 6500rpm
Max torque 100lb ft @ 5500rpm
Transmission five-speed manual, RWD
Suspension independent, by wishbones, coil springs, telescopic dampers, anti-roll bar f/r
Steering rack and pinion, optional power assistance
Brakes discs, with servo
Length 12ft 11in (3950mm)
Width 5ft 6in (1675mm)
Height 4ft 1in (1225mm)
Wheelbase 7ft 5¼in (2265mm)
Weight 2105lb (955kg)
0-60mph 9.1 secs
Top speed 114mph
Mpg 29
Price new £14,429 (1990)
Price now £6-15,000*