Car Culture · The Ones We Undervalued

The Cheapest Car in the Fight Won the Only Part That Mattered

Road & Track put a $18,500 Mazda sedan in a best-handling shootout against a Ferrari 360, a 911 Turbo and a Corvette Z06. Nobody was joking. This is the story of the Protegé MP3, the MazdaSpeed Protegé that followed it, and a polite note to the Mazda of today.

By Diana Chambers · Car Culture · Mazda Protegé MP3 & MazdaSpeed Protegé · 13 min read

There is a specific facial expression that belongs to the driver of an expensive car being kept honest by a cheap one. It starts as amusement in the mirror, passes through disbelief somewhere around the third corner, and arrives at a kind of clenched arithmetic in which the driver silently recalculates what he paid. By the time everyone stops at the top of the road, the expression has resolved into a sentence that begins “well, obviously, on these tires” or “I’ve got the wrong alignment on it at the moment.”

In the early 2000s, the car most likely to produce that expression cost about eighteen and a half thousand dollars, seated four adults, held a dog and a week of groceries, returned sensible fuel economy, and was completely invisible in traffic. It was a Mazda Protegé. It just happened to be a very particular one.

And then, because somebody at Mazda’s American office had a sense of mischief, it got a turbocharger, a limited-slip differential, a paint color called Spicy Orange, and a 450-watt stereo apparently specified by a teenager with access to the corporate checkbook. Which is approximately what had happened.

The Protegé was, by any measure that mattered to an engineer, excellent. It won a pair of national titles in SCCA Showroom Stock road racing. It was structurally rigid in a way its price did not justify, and its controls — steering, brakes, shifter — were light and precise and told you things. Car and Driver once described the last-generation Protegé as doing a fair impersonation of a BMW 2002, which in that magazine’s vocabulary is not a compliment handed out casually.

And it sold to nobody who cared. Through the 1990s, the compact performance scene belonged to the Civic, the Integra, the Focus, the Eclipse and the Celica. Those cars had badges — Si, Type R, GT-S, SE-R — that told a seventeen-year-old which version to want. Mazda never built one. There was no hot Protegé. There was the LX and there was the ES, and the suspension on both was tuned for a comfort that its chassis frankly did not need. The company had built a genuinely talented car and then declined to tell anyone.

In 2001 it finally stopped declining.

The Protegé MP3 was an odd thing to encounter on a dealer lot, because it arrived wearing other companies’ names. Racing Beat did the suspension and the exhaust. Tokico supplied the struts, painted in their own recognizable blue. Nardi supplied the steering wheel. Racing Hart made the wheels, exclusively, for this car. Dunlop supplied the tires, Mazdaspeed the drilled pedals, Kenwood the stereo. Mazda had built what amounted to a factory-assembled tuner car and then let every tuner keep their logo on it, which was either a marketing masterstroke or an admission that the parts really were that good. It was both.

Under the hood, the numbers were modest and everyone knew it. The 2.0-liter twin-cam got revised ignition timing, a reworked intake and that Racing Beat stainless exhaust, and came out at 140 horsepower and 142 pound-feet — ten and seven up on standard. At 2,725 pounds the car was carrying a couple of hundred pounds more than a Sentra SE-R making identical power, and it showed. Car and Driver got 8.2 seconds to sixty and 16.3 through the quarter. In its own words, the engine generated far more sound than fury.

What Mazda spent the money on instead was everything between the tires and your hands. Racing Beat raised spring rates 16 percent at the front and 19 at the rear, fitted a 25 mm front anti-roll bar and a 20 mm rear, and left the ride height alone — the MP3 sits two tenths of an inch lower than a normal Protegé, which is to say, not lowered at all. There was a strut tower brace, stamped-steel reinforcement welded into the tops of the strut towers, and the quicker European-market steering rack. On top sat 205/45ZR17 Dunlop SP Sport 9000s, the best road tire the company made at the time.

The result skidpadded at 0.85 g. A Protegé5 wagon tested the same day on sixteens managed 0.79. And the ride quality, by every account, remained good enough to keep the car in the family-transport business.

Mazda built the econobox equivalent of a battleship hull and then wired it with light, precise, communicative controls. Everything else follows from that.

The car was named after its stereo, which sounds absurd now and was only slightly absurd then. The Kenwood Excelon Z919 head unit was the first factory-fitted MP3 receiver in any car, and it came with a 10-inch subwoofer in the trunk and a screen that, when idle, displayed animated dolphins. When you turned the music on, the dolphins were replaced by something resembling downtown Tokyo at midnight. This was considered extremely futuristic and it genuinely was.

But understand what “playing an MP3 in your car” required in 2001. You did not ask a device for a song. You found the song — on a peer-to-peer network of variable legality, at a download speed measured in minutes per track, from a file that might turn out to be mislabeled, forty seconds long, or the same eight bars looped over a man coughing. You audited it. You built a folder. You dragged that folder into burning software with a name like Nero or Easy CD Creator. You inserted a blank CD-R that cost real money, told the computer to begin, and then did not touch the computer, because moving the mouse too enthusiastically could cause a buffer underrun and turn your disc into a coaster. Twenty minutes later you had either ten hours of music or a small silver frisbee.

Then you carried it to the car, and the whole ritual paid off, because ten hours on one disc meant you could drive all day without touching anything. That was the promise. Mazda understood that this mattered to exactly the same person who wanted a stiffer anti-roll bar, and put both in one car, and named the car after the stereo. In hindsight it is one of the most clear-eyed pieces of product targeting anyone did that decade.

Ask any skier what they are chasing and the honest ones will not say speed. Speed is the by-product. What they are chasing is the carve — the moment the edge bites and the whole world tips and you are held up by nothing but geometry and trust. You are, in a very literal sense, betting your body on physics behaving the way it did last time. It always does. That is precisely why it is thrilling.

Water skiing is the same argument in a different medium. The slalom turn, the one where you come out of the buoy and go weightless, where your body ends up nearly parallel with the water and you pull yourself across the wake on a rope and an edge. Nobody has ever come back from that and described the straight bit.

Football, too. A running back needs speed, but speed is not what makes the highlight reel. Barry Sanders was not the fastest man on the field — he was the one who could change direction faster than eleven other professionals could process it, who turned a two-yard loss into something that ended in the end zone, on a bad team, for a decade. Whether he was the greatest running back who ever played is an argument for a different publication. That he was the most entertaining is barely an argument at all. It was never about how fast he ran. It was about how fast he could stop running that way and start running that way.

And if none of those land, try this one. Nobody has ever looked at a box of dry spaghetti and felt anything. Cook it, and it bends, twists, tangles, and becomes the thing you actually wanted. The straight version is raw material. The curved version is dinner.

Which is what Mazda got right, and why a cheap sedan ended up in some very strange company.

Road & Track ran a cover story called “Great Grip!” to identify the best-handling cars for road and track. The staff started from a list of more than twenty candidates and voted. What made the final field was the BMW M3 Coupe, the Chevrolet Corvette Z06, the Ferrari 360 Modena, the Porsche Boxster S, the Porsche 911 Turbo — and the Mazda Protegé MP3. The Lotus Elise and the Lancer Evolution VII were added as machines about to reach American shores.

Read that list again and note what is missing: any sense that one of these things does not belong.

That last point is the honest one and it deserves stating plainly: the MP3 did not beat a 360 Modena. Nobody claimed it did. What it did was demonstrate that the part of handling that costs money — grip, balance, steering feel, the confidence to lean on a car — is not actually the expensive part. You can buy it for eighteen and a half thousand dollars if the people building the car understand what they are doing.

The other magazine result from that season makes the point even better. Road & Track also ran ten hot cars under $25,000: the RSX Type-S, the Camaro Z28, the Neon R/T, the Mustang GT, the Eclipse GT, the Altima 3.5 SE, the Impreza WRX, the Celica GT-S, the GTI GLX, and the MP3.

You could see the whole verdict in those four rows. Every road tester who drove one wrote the same sentence in the same order: brilliant, and please give it more power.

The MazdaSpeed Protegé arrived for 2003, and the first thing to understand about it is the name, because Mazda did not hand that name out lightly. Mazdaspeed began in 1967 as an independent racing outfit run out of one of Tokyo’s largest Mazda dealerships, became a subsidiary of Mazda Motor Corporation in 1983, and in June 1991 sent a four-rotor 787B to Le Mans and won the thing outright — the first Japanese manufacturer ever to do it, and the only rotary ever to do it. This was the badge Mazda North American Operations then put on the back of a compact sedan built in Irvine, California by a group of company engineers who were, in the words of their own CEO, hard-core enthusiasts.

They called Callaway. Reeves Callaway’s outfit had spent twenty-five years turning ordinary cars into alarming ones, and together with Mazda’s engineers they hung a Garrett T25 ball-bearing turbocharger and an air-to-air intercooler on the 2.0-liter. Output went to 170 horsepower and 160 pound-feet. To get it to the road, Mazda fitted a Tochigi Fuji Sangyo limited-slip differential, thickened the driveshafts from 22 mm to 24, and installed a heavy-duty clutch and pressure plate. Racing Beat came back for the chassis: strut tower brace, higher-rate springs, revalved Tokico dampers, bigger bars front and rear. The wheels grew to 17x7 Racing Harts in a new five-spoke design on 215/45ZR17 Bridgestone Potenzas, and the brakes were upgraded to European-specification four-wheel discs.

Inside were Sparco pedals with rubber inserts for heel-and-toe, a Sparco shift knob on a close-ratio five-speed with shortened throws, a Nardi wheel, silver-faced gauges and suede-like bolsters. And then the stereo, which had gone from 280 watts to 450, from a 10-inch subwoofer in the middle of the trunk to an 8-inch one packaged sensibly under the parcel shelf, and which could be pre-wired for something called Sirius Satellite Radio, beamed down from three satellites, which in 2002 read like science fiction.

Two thousand were built. Seventeen hundred and fifty for the United States, two hundred and fifty for Canada. Two colors: Black Mica, and the one everybody actually wanted, Spicy Orange Mica. Around twenty thousand dollars.

Here is where an honest appreciation has to be honest. The MazdaSpeed Protegé was the quicker car by a comfortable margin — factory figures put it in the low sevens to sixty, more than a second up on the MP3, with a limited-slip differential that finally put the power down instead of lighting up an inside front tire. On an autocross the difference was obvious: the rail-like cornering was still there, and now there was something waiting at the exit.

But Road & Track, driving it at the launch, noticed something. Through the slalom and the tighter sections, the steering had lost a little of the quickness and sharpness they had admired so much in the MP3. Mazda’s own engineers explained why: the revised steering rack, and the limited-slip differential, which by its nature feeds forces back into a front-drive car’s steering.

So the two cars split the honors, and enthusiasts have been arguing about it ever since. The MazdaSpeed is the one you want to own. The MP3 might be the one you want to steer. That both answers exist for a pair of $20,000 Mazda sedans is the entire point of this article.

Mazda still knows how to do this. The MX-5 is proof that somewhere in that company there remains a group of people who understand that a car’s job is not solely to arrive. The chassis engineering in the current lineup is genuinely good, better in most measurable ways than anything in this story.

What is missing is the nerve. The MP3 and the MazdaSpeed Protegé were not the products of a clinic or a segment analysis. They came from a group of enthusiasts inside the American operation who talked the company into letting them build the car they wanted, with the tuners they admired, in a color nobody would have approved of on a spreadsheet, in a quantity so small it can only have been a rounding error. Then they put a Le Mans-winning racing badge on the back of it and dared people to laugh.

Nobody laughed. The magazines put it up against a Ferrari.

Build the cheap one that handles. It is the least expensive thing you make and the only one anyone will still be writing about in twenty years.

The crossover that occupies the same slot in the showroom today is, by every objective measure, a better vehicle. It is safer, quieter, more efficient, more reliable and vastly more comfortable. It is also the exact same shape as everything parked beside it, and no one will ever discover, on a back road, that it was hiding something.

That is the trade the whole industry has made, and mostly it is the right trade. But it costs remarkably little to build two thousand exceptions.

There is a footnote to all of this, and it deserves its own article rather than a paragraph here. Alongside the sedans, Mazda sold a five-door version of the same basic car — the Protegé5 — which took most of the same medicine, added a hatchback and a roofline that still looks right today, and became the quiet enthusiast’s answer to the entire question. It deserves proper treatment, and it is going to get it.

As for the MP3 and the MazdaSpeed: find one. There are not many, they were bought by people who drove them, and most have been modified, crashed, or asked to commute for two decades. But a clean one is still one of the great bargains in enthusiast motoring, for the simple reason that the thing which made it special was never the horsepower, and horsepower is the only thing that ages badly.

The corner is still there. So is the road. And somewhere ahead of you, someone in something expensive is about to start explaining about his tires.