I play tennis once a year while on holiday. Though if you happen to be strolling by when I’m on court, you’d be unsure for quite some time that the spectacle has anything to do with what you see at Wimbledon. I’m not very good at it.

In my youth I learnt that the best thing you could do in a game of tennis was develop an almighty serve. Accuracy was irrelevant because if the ball went in it was unreturnable, and if it went out I got a second chance. Either way I didn’t have to run around.

Unfortunately, these days my right arm has lost all its power, which means it no longer fires a furry missile. It just starts a rally, and that’s exhausting, especially when you’re on holiday and it’s hot. It got to the point two years ago when I couldn’t last an hour. My back ached, my eyes were full of sweat, and if I ran to hit a dolly drop I’d need a sit-down to catch my breath. A whale would have been more able out there.

Over the next 12 months, however, and purely for reasons of vanity, I decided to lose some weight. So, by eating fewer chocolate biscuits and limiting my milk intake to just two pints a day, I shed more than two stone. You wouldn’t believe the impact this had on my game the following year. It still wasn’t tennis, as such, but I could at least reach the short balls without coughing my lungs clean into my opponent’s face. It’s not surprising, really, since playing when you’re carrying two unnecessary stone is like playing with a child on your back. And so it goes with cars.

Sadly, market demand for electric seats and other luxuries, along with punitive legislation on crash safety, means that a modern day Golf weighs almost twice as much as the Golf from 1981.

Of course, in a hatchback this flab doesn’t really matter. Especially as the modern day Golf has almost twice as much power as the Golf from 1981. But in a sports car weight does matter. Because if you mask the problem with bigger, more powerful engines, you spoil the essence of the breed.

A sports car should have a smallish engine with bundles of power and to hell with the torque. In a sports car you don’t rely on low-down grunt to get you past the car in front and out of the next bend. You make damn sure you’re in the right gear. You work for a living in a sports car.

So if you can’t have a big torquey engine you can’t have masses of weight. And that’s what makes the new Mazda MX-5 such a remarkable achievement. It’s bigger, just, than the old model, but because they’ve taken the scalpel to just about everything — even shaving 10 grams from the rear-view mirror — it’s only fractionally heavier.

You can feel this when you drive it. You can feel the liveliness, the sense that you’re in a terrier rather than a wolfhound. You know the tyres aren’t having to deal with wasteful fat when you turn the wheel, and that the engine isn’t lugging around a beer belly. You know you’re in a sports car. And for the real driving enthusiast that’s as good as life is going to get.