2001 Mazda Protege; It takes over where Honda once led.

Hey, anyone remember the Mazda Protege? It sits down there in the subcompact category, dutifully selling in the 50,000-to-60,000-a-year range, doing battle with big-time stalwarts like Civic and Corolla. Well, it's still there and it has a few new tweaks. But those tweaks, combined with the blanding-down of the segment, mean the little old Protege could have big things in its future.

The Protege sedan gets something between a face-lift and a remake for 2001, with a powerful new 2.0-liter engine, a stiffened body and revised front end styl-ing. We'll get to that in a minute.

The bigger Protege news might be the wagon version due in Mazda showrooms in mid-May. But don't call it a wagon. And don't call it a hatchback, either. Anything called a hatchback in the U.S. market is doomed. So Mazda wants you to call it a five-door, and to that end they named it the Protege 5. Who are they kidding? It's a wagon, people, but it's a good-looking performance wagon. Rather than go the four-wheel-drive, faux-SUV route that's so popular now (Subaru Outback), Mazda boldly charted its own course with this wagon, er, hatchback, er, five-door.

The Protege 5 comes with all the aerodynamic bodywork, spoiler and skirts from the MPS sedan show car unveiled at SEMA.

Even the sedan will be a more obvious performance car soon when the MPS version arrives in showrooms sometime after the Protege 5. It will use a 150-horsepower version of the new 2.0-liter engine tuned by the Mazda specialist Racing Beat, and it will have most of the aero and performance goodies from the SEMA MPS show car. But it will not be called the MPS. The name has not been figured out yet, but the character has.

Meanwhile, the ...