Mazda Route3: Day One

Belarus is infamously known as Europe’s only dictatorship. The man in charge first changed the land-locked nation’s constitution to remove the limit on the number of terms a president could serve. And then he doubled the length of each term.

Elections, as you know, can be so tiresome… Even if they are fixed.

Indeed, at this rate, he who must be obeyed will still be in power when Mazda conducts its fourth or fifth Hiroshima to Frankfurt trek, perhaps to celebrate the seventh or eighth generation Mazda3.

Route3, which kicked off in Japan in late July, is the third time Mazda has driven a new model to its show debut. The 15,000km-plus, five-week trek is from the Japanese marque’s home base to Europe and arguably the world’s most important motor show, IAA at Frankfurt.

The first time Mazda drove a new model to the show was in 1977, when two 323s made the then infinitely harder trek across Siberia and through a massive country that was still in the clutches of Soviet totalitarianism.

The second trip took place in 1990 with four 626s. This time eight Mazda3s are on the long and not so winding road.

We’re two behind Mazda. Motoring.com.au is, ahem, a Route virgin. And we can’t take credit for doing the hard yards either. Yours truly was ‘parachuted’ into the convoy just a comparative stone’s throw from the end. In the next few days we’ll drive barely 2500km. The hard yards have been done in the weeks past.

The eight-Mazda3 convoy (plus CX-9 support ‘jeeps’) is heading from Minsk, Belarus’ capital, to Brest on the Polish border, across a range of roads from super-highway to (barely) formed sand and silt.

Although it’s not the Alps, Belarus’ scenery has a charm all its own.

You can see why the defunct Warsaw Pact nations were so keen on tanks as their choice of prime fighting vehicle. This is gently rolling country covered by a mix of natural and plantation forests and broad, broad acre farms – some still on a huge scale defined by the factory farm collectives of the old Eastern Bloc era.

Save for the very occasional fordable stream, there’s little we saw today that would even slow a tracked vehicle, let alone stop it.

These were in fact the killing fields of the Eastern Front in WWII. Thank God, we’ve learned a little since then… We have learned a little, haven’t we…?

Mazda’s new 3 is a capable cruiser – even in its underpowered 88kW 2.0-litre low-output Euro guise. The new SKYACTIV engine is commendably smooth and coupled to a six-speed manual gearbox, it’s very happy at Aussie highway pace.

At the 125-135km/h cruising speeds we held on more than a few occasions today, it can get a little breathless. No foul -- our higher-output cars coupled (counter-intuitively) with shorter final drive ratios will have a whole lot more in-gear and standing-start urge.

As for handling, there was barely a corner from which we could garner impressions.

What we can vouch for is the improvements in noise, vibration and harshness. Mazda might be using the Route3 to make a big noise about the new 3, but the car itself is tight-lipped…

This writer is on Twitter @petrolhedonist

Route3 with Mazda: From Minsk to Frankfurt