The NC Mazda MX-5 Superlight Could’ve Been The Ultimate Driver’s Car

How did you celebrate your 20th birthday? If it’s anything like ours, it presumably involved a dingy nightclub with sticky floors, questionably cheap luminous drinks and the safety of knowing you’re still in the years where hangovers are a thing that may affect you for about six minutes the next day.

That’s now how the Mazda MX-5 celebrated its birthday. Largely because it’s a mass-produced car, and therefore is not sentient or capable of experiencing a 3am walk home because you forgot to book a taxi, but it does give us a neat segue to talk about the one-off health kick it went on for its 20th.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at the time, the NC Mazda MX-5 had been seen as a bit too big, a bit too soft, and a little too not-sports car. It had potential clearly though, as the masses of NC track cars you see these days prove, and Mazda really took things to the extreme in 2009.

Revealed at the Frankfurt Motor Show that year, the MX-5 Superlight was – as the name strongly suggests – an MX-5 devoid of pretty much anything that wasn’t necessary for the car to function. Including the roof and windscreen.

The whole point of the car was to emphasise just how much of a driver’s car the MX-5 could be. As such, the core running gear was left untouched, using the entry-point 125bhp, 123lb ft of torque 1.8-litre four-cylinder paired up to the usual five-speed manual gearbox.

Pretty much everything attached to the chassis otherwise was changed though. Panels still remaining on the car were swapped out with aluminium and carbon fibre alternatives, while the lack of any roof allowed Mazda to fit a fixed clamshell across the rear with those utterly beautiful roll hoops.

Track width was increased by 200mm to really push those 17-inch wheels out to each corner, and Eibach-supplied suspension lowered the ride by 20mm and introduced stiffer anti-roll bars.

Mazda really took things to the extreme for the interior. Every piece of trim below was stripped back, leaving a Lotus Exige-esque spartan vibe. Tan leather-trimmed carbon bucket seats are featured, along with a simplified dash with colour-matched fabric. Pretty much the only thing that remained was the original gauge cluster. All-in, the Superlight shaved 160kg off the kerbweight of the regular 1.8 NC.

Reports at the time hinted the Mazda contemplated a limited-production run of the MX-5 Superlight, but there’s no concrete evidence it was under serious consideration. Had that been the case, it may well have been the ultimate driver’s car.