What is Mazda hiding in its basement?
Friday, 15 December 2017
In Irvine, Orange County in the US, there's a building that serves as the home of Mazda North America Operations (MNAO) design and engineering. A lot of the design work for the original MX-5 took place within these walls.
It's a big facility, with two studios and a secret courtyard for viewing cars in natural light that can't been seen from outside (or above by drones, since it's on the flight path to John Wayne Airport).
Basements are pretty rare in Irvine, apparently. It's mostly flat. But MNAO has one of those too. And it's got some amazing stuff in it.
It's where MNAO's heritage collection is stored: between 50-70 cars at any given time.
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It's not a museum. It's a functional workplace and storage facility, which makes it all the more special because (a) very few people outside of Mazda get to come down here and (b) the somewhat random order of cars means you're always stumbling across something unexpected and exciting.
There is some semblance of order: classic racing cars near the door, an incredible number of MX-5s in the back corner and concepts opposite.
Racing treasures include the first rotary to win on track in the US, in 1978: an RX-2 first used as a long-term test car by Car and Driver magazine, then converted to racing specification. There's also a stunning Katayama Racing RX-7 from 1979 that won the Daytona 24 Hours. Katayama himself worked on the Le Mans-winning 787B.
Two of my personal favourites are alongside: the 1969 Luce coupe, a styling inspiration for the latest Vision Coupe concept, and the Cosmo 110S - Mazda's first production rotary. Sat in both; well, kind of posted myself through the door apertures. The Cosmo in particular is tiny.
They do love their MX-5s in Irvine. The basement contains every car used at the Chicago Auto Show for the model's launch in 1989, including VINs 14, 15 and 17. One was almost immediately turned into a racing car and was the first MX-5 to compete in the US.
Chief designer Tom Matano also wanted to show American tuning culture what a hotted-up MX-5 would look like. The result didn't go down that well with the Japanese, who did (and still do) see the car as a purist sports model.
Others of significance: a prototype for the second-gen NB MX-5 that's asymmetrical (just trying out a few ideas), the 500,000th MX-5 built (there are actually two in existence, one in LHD and one in RHD), the 700,000th and other celebratory models like the Super20 and Super25. Look closely and the yellow Super20 appears in the open credits of the first season of Grand Tour.
There's a lot of MPS/Mazdaspeed stuff too - which shouldn't surprise because it was a MNAO concept from the start.
The first was the 1999 Protege (323), essentially created as an aftermarket special; there's one in the garage. The concept was carried through to other models and picked up by the Mazda factory as an official programme in its second generation.
Among the collection is a prototype for an RX-8 MPS, canned because the arrangement of the exhaust ports on the Renesis rotary made it too hard to turbocharge.
Tucked in the back is the Taiki concept car from 2007 - a Nagare design exercise carried out under then styling-boss Fran von Holzhausen. Remember Nagare? It was all about flowing lines and nature. It was also ditched by Mazda pretty quickly after he left, in favour of Kodo. Mazda only made one Nagare production car: the Mazda5 MPV.
Von Holzhausen went to Tesla and designed the Model S.
Racing cars: impossibly muscular IMSA machines like the MX-6 GTU of 1989 and the RX-7 GTO from 1991.
Amazing also to see spare parts for the iconic 787B racing car lying around. Or perhaps not so amazing given what else is here.
More treasures elsewhere. Sitting in the Mazda fleet service-garage we find a Miata M Coupe - a fixed-roof version of the MX-5 created by the California studio in 1992.
And in a quiet carpark-corner, out in the sun, is the RX-8 driven by Wolverine in X2 (2003). It's officially a prototype so can't be sold and Mazda has been trying to find a home for it in a museum; it was most recently rejected by the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Failing that, it might be bound for the crusher. If Logan didn't make you feel sorry for Wolverine, surely this does.