QUOTE
Sometimes conversations in our office can get bizarre. Take the subject at hand, a hot-rod minivan. Maybe it was a slow news day, but the topic came up because the Mazda 5 is an appealing small van—a minivan in the purest sense—and more fun to drive than pretty much anything else with sliding side doors.
However, driving excitement is hard to appreciate when it’s tempered by an anemic power-to-weight ratio. Even though the Mazda 5 weighs 3358 pounds—that’s pretty mini as far as vans go—its 153-hp, 2.3-liter four doesn’t produce acceleration blisters when asked to propel that much mass.
With that thought in mind, the conversation started getting surreal. And before you could say, “You guys are smoking banana peels,” we were thinking of ways to add some real hustle to the little Mazda’s repertoire. Imagine, we mused, the astonished faces when such an innocent-looking mommymobile lights up its front tires and disappears in a cloud of smoke!
Even more appealing, the solution seemed simple. Since the 5 shares its underpinnings with the 3, we could just acquire a turbocharged Mazdaspeed 3 powertrain and swap it for the stock unit, which would instantly add 110 horsepower. Nothing to it. Guys swap out engines at racetracks in a matter of a couple hours. The result, a one-of-a-kind “Mazdaspeed 5,” would be perhaps the coolest project car yet in our Boss Wagon series [see Boss Wagon History]. And we figured we could do it ourselves.
Uh-huh, that’s what we figured.
However, driving excitement is hard to appreciate when it’s tempered by an anemic power-to-weight ratio. Even though the Mazda 5 weighs 3358 pounds—that’s pretty mini as far as vans go—its 153-hp, 2.3-liter four doesn’t produce acceleration blisters when asked to propel that much mass.
With that thought in mind, the conversation started getting surreal. And before you could say, “You guys are smoking banana peels,” we were thinking of ways to add some real hustle to the little Mazda’s repertoire. Imagine, we mused, the astonished faces when such an innocent-looking mommymobile lights up its front tires and disappears in a cloud of smoke!
Even more appealing, the solution seemed simple. Since the 5 shares its underpinnings with the 3, we could just acquire a turbocharged Mazdaspeed 3 powertrain and swap it for the stock unit, which would instantly add 110 horsepower. Nothing to it. Guys swap out engines at racetracks in a matter of a couple hours. The result, a one-of-a-kind “Mazdaspeed 5,” would be perhaps the coolest project car yet in our Boss Wagon series [see Boss Wagon History]. And we figured we could do it ourselves.
Uh-huh, that’s what we figured.
C&D
