1,000,000 th Mazda Miata MX5 Celebration – Video

 

The annual October event drew in more than 900 attendees this year who brought more than 700 MX-5s. Mazda chipped in on the action as well, bringing the one-millionth MX-5 Miata to its final official stop of the 18-stop national “Millionth Miata Celebration Tour” and one of the few 2017 MX-5 RFs in the country.

The two fourth-generation MX-5s led a parade of 296 cars around the 2.238-mile racetrack for one of the few times the one-millionth MX-5 has been driven. Behind the wheel of the one-millionth MX-5was Road & Track journalist Sam Smith alongside Tom Matano, who served as VP of Mazda’s Irvine-based design operations in the 1980s and ‘90s, overseeing the first-generation MX-5.

Matano’s presence was treated like royalty among the sea of MX-5 owners, young and old. He and his wife perused the vendor displays and weaved in and out of the hundreds of cars parked in the Raceway paddock, both dressed in matching black MX-5 hooded sweatshirts.

The cars they saw ranged from original-condition roadsters to modified Miatas with high-horsepower V8 engines shoehorned under their hoods to cars that barely looked like the cars on which they were based. Some used MX-5 underpinnings wit fiberglass tubs—because 2,100-pound sports cars are apparently too heavy. Radical—and radically lightweight—and renamed the Catfish.

 

 

 

The annual October event drew in more than 900 attendees this year who brought more than 700 MX-5s. Mazda chipped in on the action as well, bringing the one-millionth MX-5 Miata to its final official stop of the 18-stop national “Millionth Miata Celebration Tour” and one of the few 2017 MX-5 RFs in the country.