13 Oct 06
Hot hatches have come a long way since their original heyday in the 80s, when they were very simple and highly effective. All you needed was some tin foil for body panels, a revvy 16-valve engine producing about 130bhp, some red carpets, a set of lightweight alloys and - hey presto - you had a tarmac terrier that would dispatch urban yuppies into rural hedgerows with gleeful abandon.
Nowadays with pesky things like crash cells, airbags, anti-lock brakes, emissions targets and pedestrian safety legislation all making fun rather harder to come by, building a properly sorted hot hatch is more of a challenge. But it's a challenge that carmakers have in the past few years been rising to, with VW, Ford and Vauxhall foremost among those turbocharging family hatches with often dramatic results.
Now Mazda wants in on the action with the 3 MPS.
Having arrived late at the party, Mazda needed to ensure it brought something pretty special. It has, in the form of the most powerful engine currently offered in a car of this type: a 2.3-litre turbocharged four producing 256bhp.
Getting 256bhp through the front wheels without turning the Bridgestone tyres into clouds of smoke is no easy task, but a vital one for Mazda to get right if the 3 MPS is going to stand any chance of selling well when the ST, VXR and GTI competition is so very good.
There's no doubting the power of the 3 MPS - a 0-62mph time of 6.1 seconds is not to be sniffed at, and neither is the 155mph limited top speed. Those figures make it the fastest front-wheel drive hot hatch out there. But power is nothing without control.
