Mazda Furai Le Mans.
Anyone who sees the Mazda Furai knows it is headed for Le Mans.
The Japanese carmaker officially denies any plan to repeat its attack on the French sports car classic, which netted it a win in 1991, but the Furai is much more than just a motor show tease.
It was unveiled at the Detroit motor show this week with plans to race it in the American Le Mans Series, which is just one step away from Le Mans.
The Furai is a combination of racer and design study, but its bodywork is designed for the day — coming soon — when Le Mans moves away from the pure prototype rules, which have produced a long run of wins for Audi, towards a more production-based formula.
That is why the Furai reflects Mazda's latest Nagare design direction — but also has a two-seater body with a 335kW three-rotor engine that runs on ethanol fuel.
“Furai purposely blurs boundaries that have traditionally distinguished street cars from track cars,” says Mazda's design director for North America, Franz von Holzhausen.
“Historically, there has been a gap between single-purpose racecars and street-legal models, commonly called supercars, that emulate the real racers on the road. Furai bridges that gap like no car has ever done before.”
And it also fits the model proposed by the Le Mans organisers, who want carmakers — Porsche and Aston Martin already admit they are interested — with a closer tie to their showroom products.
But Mazda is not talking about racing, even though it admits the Furai is race-bred.
“Track cars are, by their competitive nature, ill-suited for practical highway use, as well as generally far from road-legal,” von Holzhausen says. “While some supercars visit the track on occasion, they are primarily road cars not properly equipped for racing. The aim of Furai is to bridge this gap.”
But could there be a race program in future with Furai?
“Anticipating future rules changes in the ALMS, we created a new closed cockpit which would be more appropriate for a future production model,” von Holzhausen says.
“The major element we did not change is the 450hp [335kW] Renesis-based R20B three-rotor rotary engine that provides the Furai's ample zoom-zoom. The ultimate Mazda in our minds is rotary-powered. As a company, we have no intention of abandoning that valuable asset.
“When people think of the very best production sports cars in the world, the rotary-powered Mazda RX-7 is always on that list.”
So it's a definite maybe.
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