Mazda B-series (B3 / B6 / BP)

Mazda's small petrol four of the 1980s and 1990s — the B6 and BP — and the engine in the first MX-5, which is most of why it matters here.

The B6ZE in the NA MX-5 is one of the better-documented engines in this catalogue, because the car has an unusually engaged owner base and thirty-five years of accumulated knowledge. Anything about it is findable.

Its recurring items are age rather than design. The crank angle sensor at the back of the cylinder head fails and produces a stall or a no-start that reads as electrical chaos; the timing belt interval is real and the engine is interference; and the short-nose crankshaft of the earliest cars is a known weakness where the pulley works loose and destroys the nose — a wobbling crank pulley on an early NA is urgent, and it is the one fault on this engine that ends it.

The BP is the larger 1.8 and shares the architecture; the turbocharged B6T in the 323 GT-R is a different proposition again and much rarer.

⚑ The B3 is the 1.3 and it is the reason this page matters far outside Japan. 1,324 cc, 71.0 × 83.6 mm, a single overhead camshaft — the engine of the Kia-built Ford Festiva, and therefore of the Kia Pride, and therefore of the Saipa Pride, which Iran has built since 1993 and which is one of the most numerous cars on the road anywhere.

Its English documentation is all filed under B3, and none of it under Pride. That is the practical point: an owner searching the car's name finds Persian-language forums and parts listings, while the same engine's timing figures, tolerances and failure modes sit in Mazda and Ford material under a code the car never wears. Search B3 — or B3-ME for the fuel-injected one — rather than the model.