Mazda MX-5 Cup

Global racer touches down on local soil.

- Loius Cordony

RACK days are fun. But there’s one sure way to inject more thrills into the experience. And that’s to add competition.

This brings us to what Mazda’s dusted off for us at TAFE Wodonga’s race track. It’s a Mazda MX-5, but a little different from our long-termer.

It’s lower, stiffer and lighter. It has numbers slapped on its sides and a monkey-cage approved by every race sanctioning body in the known universe, while peeking from behind its wheel guards are smooth sticky strips of race rubber. This, folks, is a race car.

It’s standard issue for American drivers looking to carve a name for themselves in Mazda’s one make series known as the Global MX-5 Cup. But while it’s called a ‘global’ series, at the moment it’s held entirely in the United States. So Mazda Australia shipped a few here to sniff out interest in perhaps a local run of the game.

The Cup cars are native to the series’ origin. An outfit known as Long Road Racing in Virginia takes a factory fresh ‘Miata’ and bins the factory seats, strips it of all plastics except for the centre console and dash, plugs it with said roll-cage then swaps in an Alcantara racing wheel and AIM dash display.