1981 Mazda 626 Coupe: “A Driver’s Delight”

Mazda’s new (and first) 626 that arrived for 1979 was a pleasant surprise in a number of ways.  Unlike the rotary-engine RX-3 and RX-4 it replaced , the 626’s styling was cleaner and its suspension and steering were significantly better. Did these offset the loss of the zingy rotary engine for a rather prosaic 2 liter piston four? The answer is yes, inasmuch as the 626 was such a better all-round car. And contrary to what might be expected, it wasn’t actually much slower than the RX-4, never mind its engine being vastly more durable. The new 626 was a genuine enthusiast’s car as well as a rugged one.

My older son Ted had a red sedan just like this coupe I found recently in Portland, and he would very much agree with that. As would CC’s Jim Klein who had one as his first car.

 

And they weren’t the only ones. Road and Track tested one and raved about it, calling it a “Driver’s delight”.

Every so often a new car arrives at the R&T editorial offices that evokes unanimous enthusiasm; the Honda Accord, BMW 528i and the Mazda RX-7 are three that come to mind. It has happened again, this time with the coupe version of Mazda’s third new car in two years: the 626.

I had good company as I remember feeling quite enthusiastic myself at the time. It was all-too obvious that the rotary era for mainstream Mazda sedans and coupes was ending and the new 626 made that transition very painless. The RX-7/8 would carry the rotary banner by itself for decades to come, where it actually made the most sense: in a light sports car.

The new 626 had quite decent aerodynamic numbers for the time (Cd 0.39), and its design and styling details were at a very high level for Japan, which had gone a bit overboard with its styling excesses in the 1970s. This especially applies to the coupe, whose greenhouse was a visual delight; airy, clean and well proportioned.

The 4-door sedan didn’t come off quite as well (this is a non-US post-facelift version); the greenhouse just isn’t as attractive and airy as the coupe, but then that’s what coupes are, or should be all about. Still, it was a decent looking sedan.

The interior also deserves high praise, with comfortable and well-adjustable front seats and the fabrics. This coupe is a Luxury edition, which has a higher level of upholstery and a few other tidbits than the base version, and of course has an automatic (3 speed Jaytco). The sporty four-spoke steering wheel is the same as the one used in the RX-7. It’s not the only thing it shared with the beloved RX-7, like aspects of the suspension and steering, which of course explains why the 626 acquitted itself well in those areas.

The interior had all sorts of handy little storage areas, something the Japanese had a knack for. Marie Kondo would have approved. Not surprisingly, the back seat was a bit cozy. For that matter, the sedan was none too generous back there either, but that was a bit of a penalty for having RWD. But the rear seat backs had a 40/60 split and flipped down, making the 626 very ski-friendly.

Looking at that dashboard gives me the willies as I had to take the one in my son’s car totally apart to replace the heater core. This was in the pre-Youtube era and I had to just plunge in. Brain surgery…not my specialty, but it all worked again after I got it back together again.

As to what was under the hood, it was a very classic hemi-head inline four, a direct development of the 1500cc version first seen in the exceptionally attractive Luce from 1966. We have one of Don Andreina’s superb deep dives on the Luce’s styling origins at Bertone, where it started out be an Alfa Romeo. I bring it up not just because of its engine but also in that it seems quite obvious that Mazda was eager to get back to the fundamental goodness and clean lines of the Luce’s styling in the new 626. That was a laudable goal and one fulfilled reasonably well, even if it wasn’t quite to the Luce’s high standards for its time.

I use and donate to Wikipedia, and they are a rare exception to the widespread decline in the web, but naturally they don’t always get it right. They claim that the 1.8 and 2.0L VC/MAF  engines as used in the 626 were “all new in 1975”. I’ve always known them to be direct descendants of the  1,490cc UB engine in the 1966 Luce 1500, which was increased to 1.6 L in 1970, and then to 1.8 and ultimately to 2.0 L. The image above on the left is from a Luce 1500, it all-too obviously has almost the exact same valve cover and other key visible features as the 2.0 as used in the 626 (right).  This was not “all new” in 1975. In fact, it’s quite obvious that the 2.0 was intrinsically a somewhat older design.

When it was designed in the early sixties, this aluminum hemi-head SOHC four—that happens to look a bit like the classic BMW four—Mazda obviously did not foresee it being expanded much in displacement, hence the rather limited the bore spacing which required rather heroic increases in its stroke in order to expand displacement. The original 1500 had a 78 mm (3.07″) bore and stroke. The 2.0 had only a slight increase in bore to 80 mm (3.15″) but the stroke was increased all the way to 98 mm (3.86″) which made it very undersquare. That explains its fat low-end torque characteristics as well as its somewhat limited peak power output, 80 net hp at a rather modest 4500 rpm.  So yes, this engine had lots of grunt down low (105 lb.ft @2500 rpm), and R&T noted that for maximum acceleration runs, shifting was best done at 5,750 rpm instead of 6,000 (redline). Quite the contrast to the rev-happy, torque-poor Mazda rotaries. These tough fours were also used in the Mazda-built Ford Courier pickup as well as Mazda’s own.

Performance was quite decent for the times, with R&T measuring the 0-60 sprint at 10.7 seconds and the 1/4 mile 18.3 @75.5 mph. Brisk enough to keep up with the likes of a Toyota Celica and to easily outrun a Honda Accord (0-60 in 13.8 secs.). Quicker too than the four-barrel V8 four-speed manual 1979 Pontiac GP that we posted here the other day. As a point of comparison, R&T’s test of a 1974 RX-4 yielded a 0-60 time of 9.7 seconds and a 1976 Cosmo rotary managed it in 11.2 seconds, slower than the 626.

I bought this red Luxury edition sedan from the Saint Vinny’s donation lot for a couple of hundred bucks. This was back in 2003 or so, when older son Ted was in college and also had a part time job working in a group home for adults with developmental disabilities. It needed one or two minor things and then I taught Ted how to drive a stick shift. He was soon exploring the limits of what a stick shift RWD car is capable of, which fortunately wasn’t all that much due to the limitations of 80 hp. But yes, he enjoyed driving.

One day I was up in my upstairs office which looks down on the little cottage in the lot behind our house where he lived. I looked at the Mazda and suddenly wondered if Ted had been keeping an eye on the engine oil level. I went down, popped the hood and pulled out the dipstick: totally dry. It took three quarts to get it back to “full”; total capacity was four quarts. No apparent impact.

The 626’s improved handling was largely the result of ditching the previous leaf spring suspended ear axle for a four link coils sprung live axle controlled laterally by a Panhard rod. The coils themselves were variable rate, and the shocks were gas-type, and there was an anti-roll bar (on the coupe, not the sedan). The front suspension, also very similar to the one on the RX-7, was via the increasingly common struts and an anti-roll bar. Mazda worked hard on this set up, to achieve a balance between ride and handling.

R&T took their coupe on an extended drive down California’s coastal Hwy1, and were most happy with the results. It was balanced, handled transitions well, and you can throw the car around with confidence. Yes, I’m sure Ted and Jim would agree with that.

Brakes were the typical front disc/rear drum combination, and they received a “very good” rating by R&T. Ultimately that’s what did in Ted’s 626. He told me one day that the brakes were very noisy and didn’t work well. I pulled off the front wheels and the discs had deep grooves from where the steel of the pads or calipers had become the friction material: steel-on-steel.  I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with it and so I co-signed a note on a red stripper Ford Focus (no a/c and manual windows). It was a stick too, and was that ever a fun car to drive.

If it had been a coupe, I might have been more motivated to fix it and keep it on the road. And in retrospect, it was a bad decision to not fix it and have him buy that Focus, as it didn’t have a happy ending. But it’s nice to know someone has found and or kept this coupe in such nice condition all these decades. It’s an exceptionally fine looking car for the times, certainly one of the best to come out of Japan. Mazda was entering a new era with this and the GLC (Familia/323), RX-7 and the 626. This generation would be fairly short-lived, as it was replaced by the all-new FWD 626 in 1983. And yes, that really did have an “all-new” engine, and yes that too was a terrific car. The Germans took a particular shine to Mazda’s 626, and it was the best selling Japanese car there for some time. It’s not hard to see why, and its sterling reliability was icing on the cake.

 

Related CC reading:

COAL: 1979 Mazda 626 Coupe – The First Of Forty-Five Cars And Bikes  by Jim Klein

Automotive History: 1966 Mazda Luce, Bertone And The Alfa That Wasn’t by Don Andreina