Mazda Route3: Day Five

Like those long-suffering neddies at trail riding set-ups right around the nation, as the Route3 Mazda3s started to get the scent of home, the pace crept up.

Actually, it more than crept -- the convoy basically put the hammer down…

Kicking off from Germany’s biggest party town, Berlin, it was an autobahn-only day that brought Mazda Route3 to a close.

Breakfast, photos and an appearance for local television at Germany’s amazing Reichstag parliament was the first task on the agenda. Alas, though we were able to attract Lech Walesa in Warsaw, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was busy in Berlin… With an election in two weeks we let her off lightly…

For the half-dozen or so Mazda Europe staff and contractors that covered every kilometre of Mazda Route3 it was obviously an emotional day. For the Mazda3s themselves it was business as usual – not a beat missed.

Motoring.com.au’s regular co-driver and Mazda Europe engineer Florian Callies was back in the right seat. As we got closer to the finish line at the brand’s European design centre and engineering base at Oberursel, he was able to point out the general area of some of his favourite secret test roads. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t even get him to confirm (or deny) whether he’d driven any of them in the all-new MX-5.

For the day our #4 Mazda3 averaged close to 140km/h – and that’s including driving out of Berlin and a few kilometres off the autobahn for our lunch stop. For the same period it returned average fuel consumption of 7.2L/100km.

In its low-power 120ps (88kW) form, the 2.0-litre manual Mazda3 simply wouldn’t work Down Under. It needs too much work from the driver to generate extra decent overtaking performance and step-off acceleration is less than lively. Wound up on the autobahn, however, it was remarkably settled at 175-185km/h, although the key to keep the speed up was planning ahead and preserving the momentum.

When baulked by a slower car, it often required a change to fourth gear to generate the acceleration to get the 2.0-litre 3 back up to cruising pace. And almost every hill required a drop back to fifth.

Florian says official top speed for the variant is around 195km/h. We managed 212 with the help of a long run-up (and a hill!), only to be comprehensively beaten by our Italian rivals in car #8. A protest ensued, photographic evidence was supplied, the judges ruled (Spaniards and Portugese, so hardly impartial!) and therefore at the finish, the pro secco was on the Aussie.

Jokes aside, the durability of the 3s proved impressive. Sent straight from the production line in Hiroshima, the only mechanical change to the cars was substitution of 16-inch alloys (a Mazda Europe accessory part usually used with winter tyres) and the use of Finnish Nokian brand reinforced radials.

Each car carried a full-size spare which ate into the luggage space, but with a little pushing and pulling we still managed to get two largish suitcases into the luggage area.

Alas I can’t even offer an opinion on handling. In an early update I said we’d have to wait for a corner to make a judgement on that. It never came – the closest was a couple of the autobahn sweepers but even at 180km/h these were open and easily traversed by the 3… Oh well, it wasn’t really a test drive anyway…

Mazda is still to confirm the key statistics of the trip. Exactly how many kilometres were driven (our car logged 16,176km), how many litres of fuel were consumed and how many cans of Red Bull guzzled... If the last week’s performance was anything to go by, the latter may be the larger number.

Of more importance is another statistic. As part of the Mazda Route3 initiative the company donated 3.50 Euros per kilometre driven to charity via German television network RTL. The interim cheque was for over 52,000 Euros… One suspects the publicity the company will milk from the Mazda Route3 adventure might equate to something substantially north of that…

This writer is on Twitter @petrolhedonist

Route3 with Mazda: From Minsk to Frankfurt

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