There’s not too many cars that exemplify the ‘second wave’ of Japanese tuning culture in New Zealand quite like the Mazda 323 / Familia Turbo.
Kiwis got their first taste of hopped-up Japanese mumbo in the early ’70s with Datsuns, Toyotas, and even Hondas getting amongst the fray on the circuit, gravel, and streets. But it wasn’t until the economic deregulation of the late 1980s, including the scrapping of vehicle import tariffs, that the floodgates opened to a tidal wave of attainable JDM treats that’d go on to make quite an imprint on Kiwi car culture.
The humble — or not so humble, depending on how you thought the average Friday night should look — Mazda effectively served as a gateway drug for the turbo all-wheel-drive revolution that would soon come to define the ‘tuner’ sphere on Aotearoa’s shores. The wee ‘DOHCA’ packed a potent set of specs for the budding traffic-light Grand Prix (GP) champion.
A compact 1600cc twin-cam 16-valve engine — the B6T — headlined the act. With around 115kW on tap, she was no speed demon by 2023 benchmarks, but the low 1000kg kerb weight coupled with permanent 4WD meant it’d see off mere Corolla FX-GTs and Civic Sis from dead stop. Slap on a period-correct hybrid turbo, extra injector, and crank up the boost, and they hustled even
