Words by: Adam Allen
The holiday season has come and gone. Bills and credit card statements are still arriving in mailboxes, no doubt heralding bad news. Waistlines are bulging after indulging in onslaughts of calorie laden decadence. 2026 may be just beginning, but it’s starting out on a tenuous note.
Lucky for us, the Mazda MX-5 is paying the Carpages Garage a visit. This time around, it’s the RF model, meaning it trades the familiar soft top for a metal power folding roof that should be a better bet in the throes of a Canadian winter. As a perennial darling of automotive enthusiasts, the week ahead is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome, perfect for chasing away those post-holiday blues. Figuring out how to shed those new few extra pounds and worrying about having enough money to cover the furnace repairs are a problem for next week’s versions of us.
Not so fast, you might be thinking. Isn’t a diminutive convertible sports car with rear-wheel drive a recipe for more misery, not joy?
We’ve heard a similar refrain over the years from naysayers and nervous nellies alike. They declare driving sports cars in anything but a warm summer’s day as a fool’s errand. That may have been true decades ago without the benefit of modern winter tire technology and the latest iterations of traction and stability control systems. In fact, with all this kit on the menu coupled with the sublime balance of Mazda’s beloved little funster, winter driving can be a source of pleasure, not pain.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Despite its many redeeming qualities, to say the MX-5 is perfect would be a stretch- not many are going to look at this car as their one size fits all solution to transportation, at least outside enthusiast circles. As we’re currently in February, you should know that if the forecast is calling for a winter storm that promises to dump a lot of snow on the ground, the MX-5 is not the best choice to navigate such a fraught commute. It is low and doesn’t weigh much, so deep drifts that pose no threat to your neighbor’s AWD Mazda3 will flummox the MX-5. On cold mornings, the chassis emits some arthritic groaning and feels a bit fragile until everything comes up to temperature. The piercing glow of snowplow auxiliary lighting and most SUVs equipped with LED headlighting will cause temporary blindness since those lights are aimed directly into your retinas. And don’t get us started on the dude in the next lane over who threatens to come dangerously close to driving on top of you as they try to maintain control of their wayward car amidst bootfulls of throttle and a concerning lack of winter tires. Also, you’ll need to doff your George Kostanza-esque puffer jacket off when you set off on any drive so you can get the range of motion needed to do just that- the cockpit isn’t exactly what you’d call grand. Lastly, you had better come packing the smallest sized ice scraper you can find because there’s not much space to put anything, anywhere.
But once you accept these compromises, magic ensues.
The ingredients that make the MX-5 such a blast to drive in the warmer moths turn out to be just as virtuous as when Jack Frost is running amok. We think that the razor sharp steering, suspension that telegraphs what blend of aggregate the paving guys were using the day the road you’re on was resurfaced and the whole light weight/perfect balance theme turn out to be better safety features than all the electronic nannies on board simply because they turn the MX-5 into an extension of its driver.
These levels of driving nirvana aren’t hard to achieve like they can be in cars that offer an endless degree of customization. There’s no Sport Mode to select, no suspension settings to ponder over, nor is there umpteen settings for the traction and stability control systems. All there is is a car that was designed perfectly from the engineers who worked tirelessly to make sure that the reason people flock to the MX-5 is still very much intact- fun. As we have proved here, that fun can be at your fingertips 365 days a year. Since its debut in 1989 the MX-5 has been mainlining pharmaceutical grade driving nirvana straight to the pleasure centers of its driver’s brain; driving the MX-5 through an arctic blast only serves to underscore that the joy it imparts is not exclusively the domain of sunshine and mild temps. Full disclosure- we are not kidding when we tell you that since we view driving a roadster with its top up is a crime, we lowered it on more than one occasion, much to the exasperation of our fellow motorists. Was that a good idea with the mercury flirting with the minus thirty mark? No, it was not. But was it fun as heck? Yes, it was.
A funny thing happened just before we were due to return the MX-5 to Mazda HQ (a necessary task performed with intense reluctance, but we digress.) While waiting in line for our morning caffeine fix, a friend came over to say hello. As the conversation inevitably moved towards cars as it usually does when we’re involved, they asked what we were driving and we happily gestured to the MX-5 collecting flurries in the parking lot nearby. Their jovial smile faded as they asked if something was wrong with us. Not at all, said we, since we loved driving the thing as you have no doubt understood at this point in our review. We repeated what we said here- that driving a sports car in the winter can be revelatory, provided it’s the right sports car. We winced as they scoffed at the notion (and also when they claimed that the Audi SQ5 they were piloting was ‘way more of a true sports car.’) Bemused, we parted ways, chuckling inwardly at the notion that the SQ5 is a sports car, and not a weak-kneed, V6 powered/Haldex all-wheel drive conveyance that is no doubt the pride of middle management everywhere.
After a week of therapeutic driving nirvana and with the winter blues successfully kept at bay, we wondered what the availability of the MX-5 would be like for a summer sojourn in the Carpages Garage- maybe we’d even have as much fun as we did this winter.
2026 Mazda MX-5 RF GS-P - Specifications
- Price as tested: $45,545
- Body Type: 2-door, 2 passenger roadster
- Powertrain Layout: Front engine/rear wheel drive
- Engine: 2.0-litre inline four, DOHC, 16 valves
- Horsepower: 181 @ 7,000 rpm
- Torque (lb-ft.): 151 @ 4,000 rpm
- Transmission: 6-speed manual
- Curb weight: 1,118 kg (2,465 lbs)
- Observed Fuel consumption: 8.5L/100km (28 mpg)