Front-wheel-drive is wrong-wheel-drive. We know this. We have them, and outside of daily-driver status, we aren’t on board. And I speak about that from a performance perspective…you can make a FWD car fast in a straight line, but autocrossing and canyon-carving one…nah, we’ll take rear-wheel drive. But we respect anything fast, be it front, rear or all-wheel-drive. Now…a Mazda MX-3 isn’t a car we normally respect. It’s one of those weird tiny-coupe Japanese cars that were built mainly for the home market but made their way over to the United States. In Japan, they get taxed based upon physical size and engine displacement, so the smaller the engine and smaller the footprint, the less money comes out each year. For Japan, there’s nothing wrong with that…a small coupe like the MX-3 makes perfect sense. In America, they were…well, laughable.
There is no laughing at this one. This is one of the most bat-shit crazy things we’ve seen in quite some time. The recipe: one Mazda MX-3, two V6s like you’d find in a Ford Probe, turbochargers at each end, and enough engineering to not only make everything work together, but to design a method that will allow you to pick and choose your drive type. Want front-wheel-drive? Leave the rear transaxle in neutral and get drifty. For front-wheel-drive, do the opposite. And to screw with heads, stick the front shift lever into 1st, the rear trans into Reverse, and dump the clutch with boost engaged and hope you don’t tear things apart.
