Don't Stop Me Now by Jeremy Clarkson Page A

just not interested in the bread and butter; only the jam.
    So you’ll probably be jolly angry this morning to find I’m wasting your time with a 1.6-litre five-door family hatchback called the Mazda3. But look at it this way: I’m only wasting 10 of your minutes. It wasted a whole week for me.
    I honestly thought it would be good. I thought it would stand head, shoulders and torso above all the competition and that we could draw a line under this hatchback malarkey once and for all. I thought I’d conclude by saying it’s the best of them all, and then next week we could get back to the thin air out there beyond Mach 1.
    Mazda has always been a left-field choice for those wanting a Jap-o-box. They were just as reliable as the equivalent Toyotas and Nissans, but somehow they were never quite as dreary. Maybe this is because they’re made in Hiroshima. Maybe there’s something in the water there.
    Mazda may have been nothing more than a division of Ford for the past 25 years, but they’re the only ones to have persevered with Wankel rotary engines. They were the ones who reintroduced the sports car in the shape of the still-marvellous MX-5, and they were responsible for what I think is the best-looking Japanese car of them all – the old RX-7.
    In recent months, though, they’ve gone berserk. First of all there was the Mazda6, which is certainly the most handsome and possibly the best driving mid-range four-door saloon money can buy. Then there was the Mazda2, which I’m told is pretty good. And sitting above them all, like a golden halo, was the RX-8.
    It’s not perfect. It’s not as powerful as the initial projections led us to believe, and the Wankel engine uses oil and petrol in equal measure. But you have to love those backward-opening rear doors, and the price, the smoothness and the perfect front-engine, rear-drive balance. And then there’s the styling which, according to my daughter, is ‘way cool’.
    So all the evidence suggested the Mazda3 would be
les genoux de la bee
. And there’s more good omen too, becauseit’s based on the next-generation Ford Focus. Quite a pedigree when you remember the current Ford Focus is quite simply the best-handling hatchback of them all. The Mazda3, I figured, would be the biggest blast to come out of Hiroshima for nearly 60 years.
    Well, it isn’t. And that means I have to use the strongest word in the English language: ‘disappointing’.
    When I was younger, my bank manager would write from time to time saying he was ‘saddened’ to note that I hadn’t done anything about my overdraft. This was no big deal. And nor would it have mattered if he’d said he was ‘angry’, ‘livid’ or ‘incandescent with rage’.
    He could have been whatever he liked, but it still wouldn’t have altered the fact that I had three thousand of his bank’s pounds and no intention of doing anything about it.
    But then one day he wrote to say he was ‘disappointed’, and that changed everything.
    That meant he’d had high hopes for me and that I had let him down. Suddenly it was all my fault.
    Try this with your kids. Tell them you’re really cross and I guarantee it won’t make a ha’porth of difference. Tell them you’re disappointed, and they’ll immediately clean their room and take up the cello.
    I’m no stranger to the concept of disappointment. There was Bob Seger’s last album, for a kick-off. And then there’s my yew hedge, which is six years old and still only six inches high. But the Mazda was something new. It’s not just worse than I was expecting, it’s worse than I’d have expected even if I wasn’t expecting anything.
    I mean, why, for instance, base a car on the Ford Focus – which has independent rear suspension – and then not fit independent rear suspension? Yes, Mazda saves a pound, but I end up disappointed.
    And why do the brakes have to be operated with a switch? Sometimes you just want to slow down a bit, but the Mazda can’t do that.