THE MAZDA MIATA COUPE THAT ALMOST WAS

In 1996, Mazda previewed an alternate future for the Miata with the M Coupe. We drove it, and its modern counterpart.

Tom Matano never intended the Miata to be available only as a convertible. As the Miata’s designer, Matano had big ambitions for the two-seater.

As he began working on the first-generation Miata alongside product planner Bob in the early-to-mid 1980s, Matano went to bookstores looking for histories on Japanese sports cars. He only found literature on the Datsun Fairlady and 240Z.

Matano decided to change that. “I wrote the three-generation story as if somebody 20 years later bought A Collector’s Guide to Miata,” he recently told me. In this “book” he laid out out his ideal Miata evolution, even down to which colors would be offered each year.

“The whole story for the Miata was that I wanted to make a historic legend in the sports car field,” he said. “So, I wrote the concept to say, if we get more Miata books in the bookstore, that’s a good indication we’re hitting a target.”

Modern safety standards meant Matano’s vision couldn’t become a reality, but he made sure “the spirit was there” with the Miata. Once the Miata proved to be a massive hit, Matano revived his idea for a coupe offering more luggage space, increased rigidity, better aerodynamics, and less weight. It would be a better long-distance cruiser and a more focused sports car in one package.

Matano and his California-based design team built a full-size clay model of a Miata coupe and sent it to Japan for company execs to consider around 1992. Sadly, the execs didn’t share in Matano’s enthusiasm for additional Miata variants.

“They were toying with the idea, but they were so afraid of losing the purity of the convertible,” he told me. “So, they didn’t go for it.”

That could’ve been the end of this story. We might have never seen the top-secret Miata M Coupe Concept. But Mazda decided—apparently at the last minute—that it wanted something special for the 1996 New York Auto Show. Matano, then head of R&D at Mazda USA, stepped up to revive the Miata coupe for the occasion.

“At the time there was a lot of red tape to make a show car,” Matano said. He told Mazda executives, “I don’t want you guys to go through committee or anything. Trust me, I’ll make it in time.”

Given the green light, Matano and a team of five or six people got to work. They started with a regular production Miata roadster, making all of the coupe body panels out of fiberglass. This makes the M Coupe heavier than the production roadster, since Matano and his team didn’t want to modify the underlying structure to create a one-off show car.

This lack of freedom to play with the Miata’s platform also meant Matano couldn’t quite make the M Coupe Concept into the Grand Tourer he envisioned.

“I wanted to cut out the firewall behind the seats to make more luggage space, but unfortunately, we didn’t have enough engineering support,” he said. “That’s a major structure area for the Miata, so if we designed the Coupe from the onset, we may not have needed the firewall to be that tall.”

Still, Matano made the most of the extra space afforded by removing the Miata’s folding roof, building what he calls a “romantic luggage rack” on the rear parcel shelf.

There were some other little touches added to the M Coupe too, like Momo pedals and shifter, a carbon-tipped Remus exhaust, slimmer pop-up headlights, 16-inch wheels, and suede trim on the doors.

Matano doesn’t cite any specific car he used as an inspiration for the M Coupe design, instead saying it was Mazda through and through.

“We had a good Mazda vocabulary established, so that was more an extension of the designs we’d been doing,” he said. “The [FD] RX-7 came after the initial Miata, so a lot of the language we developed for the RX-7 was put on the Miata Coupe.”

Matano told me he had a Ferrari 275 GTB parked in Mazda’s Irvine, California design center when he was working on the RX-7. There’s a spirit that connects the 275 with the RX-7 and the M Coupe, but you’d never call Matano’s designs derivative or retro.

Also of note, the rear fender on the M Coupe is about a half-inch taller than that on the roadster, something Matano did to help even out the visual weight of the sloping roofline and wrap-around rear window.

“It’s subtle, nobody will see it, but you feel something,” Matano said. “It’s really a maturity of design.”

Earlier this month, Mazda generously gave me the keys to the M Coupe Concept to take to Radwood, a gathering of 1980s and 1990s cars. So what’s it like to drive today, more than 20 years after it made its debut? Well, once you get over the initial excitement and fear of driving this true one-of-one—”It’s irreplaceable,” a kind Mazda spokesman reminded me, “be gentle”—you’ll find a very nice Miata.

The first thing that strikes you is just how airy it feels inside. Typically sitting with the roof up in a first-generation Miata is a somewhat claustrophobic experience for even someone like myself, at a proud five-foot seven. The M Coupe isn’t like that. While the door opening and roof height are pretty much the same as a Miata roadster, Matano agrees that the Coupe feels more open.

Credit goes to the M Coupe’s big, wraparound rear window, which lets lots of light into the cabin. You notice the panoramic view it offers as soon as you adjust the mirror. It’s a startling contrast to the small rear window of the NA Miata’s soft top, or even that of the new Miata RF’s retractable hardtop.

Out on the road, the M Coupe feels—surprise, surprise—like a well-sorted Miata of the era, but stiffer thank to the fixed roof. It doesn’t seem to alter the car too much dynamically, since what’s beneath is effectively the same as a regular Miata roadster.

The flourishes Matano added only make the Miata better. The Momo pedals are perfectly spaced for heel-toeing. The Remus exhaust provides a snarl that’s absent from the stock setup, though it’s boomy at highway speeds, the space under that big glass rear window acting as a resonator.

The 1.8- liter engine is lovely and zingy, you just need to work it—third gear is often necessary to keep up with traffic on the highway. That’s not a bad thing, because it’s an excuse to play with the five-speed gearbox, which is as slick as any other NA Miata.

Ultimately, the M Coupe is a ton of fun to drive. But it’s more than that: It’s what could’ve been an incredible sports car. It’s hard not to wonder what it would be like as a production model with a steel roof, and without all the extra weight required to keep the roadster stiff.

It’s easy to look at today’s Miata RF as being the ultimate realization of Matano’s dreams. After talking with him, I’m not fully convinced that’s the case.

Philosophically, these cars are quite different. The US market was at the fore of Matano’s mind when he conceived the NA Miata. For him, that meant it needed to be suited to the country’s wide expanses of highway. Yes, the original Miata was a sports car very much in the mold of the Lotus Elan, but it was also something you could spend a lot of time in. Matano wanted the M Coupe to be an even better long-distance tourer than the original roadster. Even though I only had a brief time behind the wheel, I can see what he intended.

The ND Miata is more finely honed than the NA. “The third-generation Miata went away a little bit,” Matano said. “So that’s why we had to come back on the fourth one to be more pure, like the original statement. And they really tuned it to be such a delight to drive—even more so than the first-gen.”

Ultimately, the RF broadens the Miata’s appeal by offering the perceived security of a hardtop and its own aesthetics. It doesn’t push the Miata forward in any meaningful way, however. It’s a very pretty, but it’s a step sideways.

Matano had much bigger ambitions for the M Coupe. He wanted a car that was better to drive than the Miata roadster in all situations. Whether you wanted a track car or a long-distance cruiser, the M Coupe would’ve provided tangible improvements over the regular Miata. It would’ve been a real step forward.

I couldn’t help getting sentimental when I handed back the keys to the M Coupe. In this line of work, it’s hard to give back any great car. But this was different. Driving the M Coupe, I got a glimpse of an alternate future from 1996. A future that I wish had come true.

I got to drive a car that doesn’t exist. In 2003, Mazda did build a handful of Miata Coupes for the Japanese market; like the M Coupe, these were just heavily-modified roadsters.

Ultimately, though, we didn’t get Matano’s vision for a family of Miatas.

When we first drove the M Coupe back in 1996, Mazda officials told us that there was a “strong possibility” it’d reach production. But Matano tells me he knew it would never happen.

“I have a bad habit of not presenting the same idea twice,” he said. Mazda rejected the Miata coupe proposal in 1992; he figured company execs wouldn’t consider it again.

“At least we could show to the public what we designed,” he said. “If somebody wrote the book, History of Miata, then those pictures are gonna show up in the book, and that would complete our philosophy and our concept from the very onset.”

Even though they never made it past the concept stage, Matano still was able to achieve his goal of creating a family of Miata concepts, including a Monoposto, a Speedster, a Club Racer, and of course, a Coupe.

His only regret? “Had I known there’d only be just one [Miata Coupe], I would have made an extra casting for my own collection to keep.”