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The 1980s band Duran Duran sings at the launch of the 2016 Mazda MX-5.Jeremy Cato/The Globe and Mail

In a hangar on the grounds of a small airport where private planes come and go, a British synthpop band from the 1980s serenaded a new roadster from Japan. An American designer provided the introductions as an Internet audience in the tens of thousands watched the live stream around the world.

This was the global unveiling of the fourth-generation Mazda MX-5 (Miata) that will go on sale in Canada and the United States next year. It's going to be a hit when it rolls into showrooms. Call it the open-top car you buy if you cannot afford a Jaguar F-Type convertible.

The band was Duran Duran featuring lead singer Simon Le Bon and they looked and sounded very good. Le Bon managed to hit some very high notes without even the slightest crack in his middle-age voice. They rolled out song after from their 1989 album Decade: Greatest Hits.

for The Globe and Mail Jeremy Cato for The Globe and Mail

Mazda's top U.S. designer, Derek Jenkins, confessed to being a Duran Duran fan, but the more important point is that in the summer of 1989, Mazda's launch of the first-generation Miata created a sensation. Frenzied buyers were paying thousands over sticker that summer for a small, two-seat, open-air car with a puny 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine that made for a leisurely 0-60 miles per hour time of 9.0 seconds.

for The Globe and Mail Jeremy Cato for The Globe and Mail

To its worldwide audience, Mazda nicely made the link from past to present. Duran Duran played the tunes, but it was Jenkins the designer who was left to describe this new Mazda roadster with its impossibly low front end. After the music, Jenkins walked through the design details to a roomful of slightly deaf, mostly middle-age journalists who were clubbing in 1989 when Duran Duran was pumping out hits and the Miata took the automotive world by storm.

Jenkins talked about lines and shapes, but he didn't reveal any engineering details, other than to say the next-generation MX-5 will lose about 100 kg versus the current and outgoing one. But it's quite the achievement for Mazda's designers and engineers to come up with a roadster that is lower and wider than the car it replaces, all the while meeting safety standards for crash tests and such all around the world.

Duran Duran might want to write a song about it, in fact.

If you have questions for Jason Tchir about driving or car maintenance, please write to globedrive@globeandmail.com.

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