I have a 2002 Protege with about 155k miles - I am the original owner, and this was the last car I bought new! It is hands down the most reliable car i have ever owned, but at 20 years old now things are finally wearing out.

A few years ago (pre-pandemic) I started to have some shifting trouble (5 speed manual), classic clutch hydraulic symptoms. I had a GREAT Mazda mechanic who was just about the only person who ever worked on the car, and he replaced the master and slave cylinders. Shortly after that we moved, the pandemic hit, and the car wasn't driven much for a while. When we started using it again we had a recurrence of the same clutch hydraulic symptoms. I'm sure my old mechanic would have made good on a new repair but we were now too far away for that to be practical. I took it to my new guy where we live now - good mechanic but small town so he has to work on anything that rolls in - and he again replaced the master and slave cylinders and i chalked it up to a fluke. Car was great for about 6 months then - yep, same symptoms again. My new mechanic took it back in immediately (despite the typical 7 WEEK wait for an appt, small town and not enough mechanics!) and found the new slave cylinder had failed. WTH? He replaced it again for free but said if it happens again we will need to investigate further. I'll say!

My opinion is that it may be bad parts, and that for some parts it may not be possible to get quality replacements any more for a Mazda this old- but i would love some opinions here. This same mechanic had trouble getting some parts for this car earlier, the electronic door latch for the driver's door took a couple of months to track down. He said he didn't think he could get OEM brake parts anymore and only knew of two suppliers where he could get the slave cylinder, and one of them he knew had a bad rep. The only other hypothesis he offered up was the pressure plate was maybe going out and causing slave cylinder failure, but i have no other clutch symptoms (everything is perfect at present) so I highly doubt that theory, and i would hate to do a full clutch replacement on a 20 year old car and find that didn't fix the problem. Hopefully this doesn't happen again but i have a feeling.....

Opinions and suggestions welcome, thanks!

 

I have a 02 P5 that I replaced the Master and slave on, didn't fix so replaced the clutch, master and throw out bearing. It took 15 or 16 times bleeding ( and about 5 bench bleeding before it finally worked. It was good until last week. That was in May. This is August and here we are again. Already replaced clutch slave. No fix going to pick up master this morning. Hope this fixes.