You know that horrible feeling of tedious inevitability you get when you just know something is going to be an absolute waste of your life and time? That's how I felt when I first pressed the accelerator in the Mazda 323 Sedan. I was still recovering from a hangover, so it's possible that alcohol was still clouding my judgement, but other than that I'm struggling for reasons why I looked at the humble Mazda and thought 'hmm, I'll review that'. Because let's be honest here, which cretinous bonehead would pick up their controller, start a new game on GT2 and think to buy this punit of snot and tedium as a first car?
Sorry for rather spoiling this review in the first paragraph, but seriously, take one look at this car and tell me it has potential. Really? Does it? It even looks breathtakingly mediocre. One of many plain boxes on wheels built in the late-80s, it looks like the sort of thing a five-year-old would draw when told to draw a car. Whether or not the lead designer at Mazda sketched out this car on 'bring your children to work' day 1989 is unknown, but it would be a convenient excuse otherwise. I mean seriously, even ugly cars have a place in car design history, even as a lesson in how not to build cars. You could show a picture of this car to someone, then ask them to describe how it looks 30 seconds later, and they'd be struggling. These are the sort of cars I despise the most, because they just don't even try. They're blisteringly mediocre without an ounce of personality or uniqueness at all. This is the car equivalent of Will Ferrell's character in Stranger than Fiction - an epic nonentity with no personality beyond being able to recount the amount of brushstrokes he gave his teeth that morning. If it were asked to describe itself, it would list numbers - 109hp, 93lb/ft of torque, 1.5l 4-cylinder, front wheel drive - as monotonously as it would read the shopping list from the corduroy carpet sellers.
So before I've even gotten in the car, I've lowered my expectations to the pathetic level of an obese kid in the 100m sprint on sports day, but even then I was disappointed. I changed my location of proving ground/test track to Laguna Seca, and I couldn't have picked a worse test car for my maiden proving session. It was begging for a break and a skinny latté at the mearest sight of a hill (and as you know at Laguna, there's a few of those), it coughed pathetically through the corners with bucketfuls of understeer, and damn-near had a panic attack upon being confronted with the Corkscrew. Like an introverted nerd confronted with the girl next door with her bra undone, it wobbled and gibbered uncontrollably before emerging on the other side in a cold sweat, a slap round the face and worryingly moist trousers. It didn't so much take the Corkscrew as it did blither straight across it. And when I tried to induce a bit of aggressive driving to proceedings, it merely understeered off into the grass placidly. Some cars throw tantrums and hissy fits when I drive them hard - this car, still in boring character, just shrugs and says 'no, I'd rather not'. Ditto, Mazda 323 - I'd rather not be driving you full stop, as it goes.
I approached the test races with dread - I mean Christ, if the flabby CRX struggled with them, what's the Mazda Accountant-Mobile going to make of them? At least the CRX won, just about. I survived major embarrassment in the Sunday Cup, although the anorexic rats in the engine bay were struggling to keep it ahead of the Kei brigade on the straights. But it was in the Japanese Cup that the final nails were ruthlessly banged into the grey coffin. For at least half a lap, the office worker woke up, undid his top button, loosened his tie and got stuck in, biting surprisingly well into the corners in the middle section of the Midfield Raceway circuit, but then it collapsed in a pile of sweat patches and mid-life crises before the end of lap 1. Already well beaten by a Suzuki Alto Works (you know, that bastion of performance), the final insult came as a Mazda AZ-1 barged past on the inside at the hairpin, and I fought a desperate rearguard to even protect 3rd place and any lingering elements of my honour. That I did was scant consolation.
The only tenuous recommendation I could give it is that it's so cheap, one can buy one and stick a stage 1 Turbo kit on, but even so, a jump from 109hp to 164hp is not enough to cure the massive limitations it has. It's akin to giving the self-imposed loner geek kid at school a mowhawk and shoving him into a frat party - he's still gonna get laughed at for being a virgin and fantasising about Dungeons and Dragons characters. Interplay? No amount of foreplay can get this pile of tedium going.
Rating: 24/100
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