The Beginning

Club 323F originally started life as www.maz323f.co.uk which was created by Craig Cummings on the 16th October 2002. It was created after seeing the need to have a dedicated UK-based web site for the BA version of the Mazda 323F, as at the time the only other UK based site for the BA 323F was a Yahoo group, which was not up to the job.

After a reasonable start www.maz323f.co.uk grew very rapidly and on the 23rd May 2003, “Club 323F” was formed and the club’s first meet was at the Japanese Auto Extravaganza in July 2003, where 9 BAs were in attendance. The club then continued to grow and one year later we attended Japanese Auto Extravaganza for the second time and had over doubled in size and unbelievably had more cars than a larger majority of other well established clubs.

JAE 2004

Expansion

In the meantime, a dedicated BG site “www.popuplights.co.uk” had been started by Joe Mitchell, and was growing at a healthy rate. By 12th January 2005 maz323f.co.uk and popuplights.co.uk joined forces and Club 323F expanded to include the BA, BG and BJ variants of the Mazda 323F. Soon after the domain www.club323f.com was registered so that the club had an official home and could be used to link each of the sub divisions.

On the 28th February 2005 the club ownership was handed over to Mark Tanner, who proved himself to be a worthy leader. After performing most of the club duties well on his own, the impending addition to the family prompted him to think about sourcing help from trusted members of the forum to perform some of the club’s duties for him and reduce the large workload. So some time around September 2006, the “steering committee”, consisting of administrators, forum moderators and other organisers was created and has been functioning successfully ever since. Sadly www.popuplights.co.uk is no longer available but most of the content is included in the club website and forum.

With a new, more modern website design, a JAE 2007 attendance list of over 60 cars, a rapidly growing number of forum members and 323Fs that were being modified further than ever before, the club continued to grow and gain recognition.

On January 31st 2009 the club presidency was handed over to Neil Farmer, who has been with us as a trusted forum moderator for quite some time.