The Mazda Miata is a big deal – and in SCCA® circles, it’s even bigger. Truth is, you can’t step foot in any SCCA event without tripping over multiple Miatas. From the first-gen NA to the NB, NC, and now ND, the Miata MX-5 is about as potent a nameplate as it comes in motorsports. But there was a time when that wasn’t true – and for those born prior to 1990, you might be equally surprised that there was a time when “Miata” was simply an innocuous word lost amongst others in a dictionary. Norman Garrett is one of many people you have to thank for “Miata” becoming a household word, and thanks to a recent story by Hagerty Motorsports, you can learn more about the Miata’s origins as told by Garrett himself.
“On my first day of work, my supervisor, Shinzo Kubo, asked what I knew about designing a sports car,” Garrett wrote. “I had gone to engineering school specifically to learn how to design race cars, and I had by that point owned, restored, and raced about 20 European sports cars, so I told him I might be able to help. Since 1979, as a sort of foreshadowing of my own career, I had been marking up RX-7 brochures with a black Sharpie, blacking-out the roof to make the car a convertible and sketching in an open ‘mouth’ at the front bumper. Needless to say, I was very much primed.”
Garrett also reveals the Miata’s early origins name. “The new Lightweight Sports (LWS) concept, codename project 729, ignited a fire in Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio,” he wrote. “I was hired as the first American engineer into a small skunk-works team that Mazda Japan had created to develop products for the U.S. market.”
Once a prototype was designed and made, Garrett recounts an adventure cruising the streets of Santa Barbara, inadvertently averting the attention of shoppers in a Porsche dealership that were eyeing a 944.
“It was basically an ad-hoc focus group, and we could not have asked for a better demonstration of our concept’s attractiveness to the people who actually buy sports cars,” Garrett said. “That evening at dinner, R&D director Masataka Matsui said, ‘Maybe we should build this car.’ With that, the ‘Miata’ project was funded for a second clay model.”
Garrett’s story continues in great detail, telling tales that include, among other things, how the Miata got its name. Want to know how? Click the link below and read on.
Image courtesy Norman Garret/Mazda via Hagerty Motorsports
