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Thirty years ago, in 1989, Mazda brought back the classic two-seat soft-top sports car when it revealed the first generation MX-5 at the Chicago motor show. Now, for the car's 30th birthday, Mazda is coming back to the Chicago show with a special edition MX-5.
The Mazda MX-5 30th Anniversary Edition gets special 'Racing Orange' paint (distantly related to the hue used on Mazda's 1991 Le Mans-winning 787B race car and which Mazda says is "an exclusive body colour that evokes the breaking dawn of an exciting new day."); forged aluminium alloy wheels by Rays, orange brake callipers, supplied by Brembo (there are orange accents on the seats, door trim, dashboard, and gear shift lever too); special Recaro seats; Bilstein suspension dampers (for manual gearbox models only); special rear brake callipers supplied buy Nissin; a Bose sound system with nine speakers; and an updated infotainment system that now comes with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.
Only 3,000 Anniversary Edition models will be made, and each one will come with a dashboard-mounted plaque that carries a unique serial number.
Since that first MX-5 was shown in Chicago in 1989, the car has gone on to become the best-selling sports car of all time, with more than one-million sold worldwide, over four different generations. It was the first Mazda to use the now-famous 'Jinba Ittai' philosophy of man and machine working in perfect harmony (actually the original Japanese phrase refers to horse and rider, but Mazda found that it translates rather nicely to cars) which has since spread out to the rest of the company's lineup.
The Mazda MX-5 30th Anniversary Edition soft top is expected to arrive in Ireland early summer 2019. No word yet on whether there will be a 30th Anniversary version of the RF hardtop convertible version, but it seems likely that there will be at some point.