Mazda Furai Concept & New RX-8 to Make World Debut at NAIAS '08!
- Thread starter Antoine
- Start date
See what happens when I just scan a post.
Antoine
Administrator
Wow...I'm totally ecstatic after seeing these updated pics and getting more info on this beast....3 rotor running E85 and a possible return to Le Mans!!!
That would be nothing less than F'in AWESOME!
That car is going to turn so many heads...(rockon)
Go Furai! Go 3 Rotor! Go Mazda! (drive)
That would be nothing less than F'in AWESOME!
That car is going to turn so many heads...(rockon)
Go Furai! Go 3 Rotor! Go Mazda! (drive)
thepepperman
Member
^^ actually, it runs on E100!
- :
- 96 Miata M-Edition, 2015 Mazda 3 Hatch
holy hell.. wouldn't that be nuts if they turned that thing into a lemans car?
- :
- '13 CWP MS3 & '16 Mazda6 GT
lol thats what its for 
- :
- 96 Miata M-Edition, 2015 Mazda 3 Hatch
well s***.. looks like I got my wish already 
- :
- '13 CWP MS3 & '16 Mazda6 GT
now lets just pray they make it an ALMS car and we'll get to se it at petit lol
- :
- 96 Miata M-Edition, 2015 Mazda 3 Hatch
lets also pray that I get enough cash from my wedding to afford airplane tickets to atlanta
Yeah, seriously.
I want to see this car in action though I'd hate to see what Le Mans' prohibitive rules for rotaries would do to this car. It's the reason why they switched to the MZR-R this past season.
BTW, Jamie Bach kicks ass.
On that note:
Marlon and I will be making announcements soon with regard to working with Mazdaspeed Motorsports and the Mazda community with regard to organizing Mazdaspeed corrals this season.
Being Mazda 6 guys we follow SWC TC and organize corrals following their schedule. Every now and then SWC and ALMS series schedules intersect (ie Sebring, Petit Le Mans, Mid-Ohio, etc. so our corral members not only get to see the SWC cars but the ALMS cars as well.
So stay tuned and I hope to see you guys at the races.
Zoom freaking Zoom!
- :
- '13 CWP MS3 & '16 Mazda6 GT
wewt! We'll def be at petit...perhaps this time w'll get to do our parade lap lol
(mswerd) hopefully I can coordinate better w/ the folks this time........... (bang) I'm still pissed I missed this year's.
On a side note:
me=> (butthump) <=furai
That thing just screams GTFO of my way, ho!
Mazda Furai Concept: The Fast and the Furai-ious
By Edward Loh
It's called Furai, and designer Franz von Holzhausen says it's supposed to look like streamers fluttering in the wind. It's the fifth concept in Mazda's Nagare (flow) series and the visual realization of zoom zoom. If you say so, Franz.
But then the car comes roaring down Laguna Seca's pit lane. I can't find the words. It looks so...so...bitchin! I've regressed to sputtering seventh-grade superlatives.
Wicked. Sick. Badass, yo.
Furai's a concept that's breathtakingly simple on paper, yet fiendishly complicated in execution: "Let's take a full race chassis and drop a concept-car body on top."
Of course, there's more to it than that -- you need an engine, in this case a 458-horsepower, triple-rotor race-ready unit running on pure ethanol (E100) -- the first rotary to do so. Mazda refers to the rotary/ethanol combo as sustainable zoom zoom -- not that flowing fields of corn will spring to mind when the Furai hits the stand at the rapidly approaching 2008 Detroit auto show.
Furai was developed in an exceptionally short amount of time for a concept. It was birthed in the early summer of 2007 and since then von Holzhausen's team has run the gauntlet at a Furai-ous pace (couldn't resist) to get the car in running condition. With no time to test around the busy design-department schedule, everyone from the clay modelers to the MazdaSpeed engineers were basically crawling over one another to get the car done. For the powertrain guys, that meant getting up at 5 a.m. to be at the track so they could start and run the car for the first time -- this morning.
Thank goodness it's an open-decibel day at Laguna, where we're summoned to check out the Furai in all its flowing glory. Still, I bet the track guys got some calls -- if not about Furai's furious phwooooaaaaarr, then about the chopper buzzing low around the track grabbing video.
In addition to the aerial assault, the video team also brought along a Porsche 911 GT3 as a camera car. Mounted to the hood in a complicated arrangement of gaffers' tape and suction cups is a massive HD camera. Off the back bumper is a duplicate camera mount for lead/follow footage. It's an impressive setup that manages to raise eyebrows even amongst the jaded crew of journalists in attendance. As the Furai starts to flow over Laguna's twists and turns, it's clear the GT3 will be doing a lot of following today, with the Porsche arriving in the pits some 5-10 seconds after the Furai during its shakedown laps. And from what we're told, the Furai's driver is taking it easy.
Time for my ride-along. The crazies at Mazda originally had the idea of letting guys like me drive the car. Then someone reminded them that a million-dollar concept car + hack journalists = unemployment + lawsuit. So, instead, I gingerly shoehorn myself into the narrow two-man cockpit. I'm practically on the lap of my driver, American Le Mans Series (ALMS) pro Jamie Bach. For homologation purposes, Le Mans cars are supposed have room for two, even though they're never raced that way. Clearly, Mazda has followed the letter of the law here and not the spirit. There's just enough room for one race car driver and a quadruple amputee co-driver -- me.
I manage to wedge my feet between the firewall and fire extinguisher as a friendly Mazda engineer straps me into the six-point harness with double crotch straps! Bach and I are shoulder-to-shoulder, so it's a good thing the X-trac six-speed transmission has paddle shifters. If he wants to change gears the traditional way, we'll have to stop at San Francisco City Hall first. We nearly bump visors as he turns to see if I'm ready to go. Am I ready for some hot laps in an unproven concept car running on an invisible, highly flammable race fuel? You bet your ass!
This is first day the car has been run. Period. This is also the first time Mazda North America Operations (MNAO) has designed and built a full "dynamic running" concept car. Normally, concept cars can only run at speeds of a few miles an hour -- just enough to get them off the trailer and into the convention hall. From the looks of things, Furai is ready for the next 24 Hours of Le Mans, in a skin that says 2018 more than 2008.
Bach hits the starter, and after a split second of metallic rasp, the rotary behind us roars to life. At idle, there's only a fraction of the vibration you'd expect from a race car that makes noises so large -- a credit to the simplicity and smoothness of a rotary, even one that's been peripherally ported and prepped for ALMS circuit racing.
The MazdaSpeed R&D Advanced Technology arm of MNAO is the outfit responsible for Furai's powertrain and making it run as well as it does. But they can't take all the credit. To get to this stage, partners including BP (ethanol race fuel), Motec (engine management), Swift (aerodynamics), and Brembo (brakes) -- over a dozen in all -- were enlisted to help with the car's development.
We get two laps -- an out and then a flyer -- and Bach is clearly intent on making the most of them. Down pit lane, he hits the rev limiter, creating an awful mechanical whine that raises the hair on my neck. A quick ka-chunking upshift and we're roaring towards the braking cones of turn two.
As Bach slices through turns three and four, he takes a fast, classic racing line, using up as much of the track as possible, but carefully avoiding the raised humps at each apex. It's his ass if the car's carefully sculpted bodywork gets damaged.
The sound emanating from Furai's tailpipes is one of pure pain and fury. It's the shriek of millions of ethanol molecules crying out in unison, as they're brutally compressed and set afire. At wide-open throttle, Furai sends up a bone-chilling howl. Apparently, the name is Japanese for the "sound of wind." Wind emanating from where, the depths of hell?
Each time Bach nails the brakes, I can feel the cabin temperature rise incrementally. My toes notice it first. A bit of brake dust swirls in the cockpit as well; the outside of the car may be fit for the Museum of Martian Art, but underneath the flowing, alien curves is a Le Mans Prototype 2 chassis built by French constructor Courage Competition.
A Mazda underpinned by the Courage C65 chassis was campaigned in the 2006 ALMS season in which Mazda placed third in the manufacturers' championship.
It certainly feels like a top tier race-car setup as I'm first lifted at the entrance of Laguna Seca's famous corkscrew and then immediately flattened by the gs exiting turn nine. The only thing bending and compressing in this car appears to be my spine.
We're quickly through turn 10 and more dust is kicked up as Bach goes hard on the Brembos. As he blips through the gears and we go zooming down the straight for the flying lap, a thought runs through my head just before it's pinned against the cockpit once again: Why can't all concept cars be this exciting?
By Edward Loh
It's called Furai, and designer Franz von Holzhausen says it's supposed to look like streamers fluttering in the wind. It's the fifth concept in Mazda's Nagare (flow) series and the visual realization of zoom zoom. If you say so, Franz.
But then the car comes roaring down Laguna Seca's pit lane. I can't find the words. It looks so...so...bitchin! I've regressed to sputtering seventh-grade superlatives.
Wicked. Sick. Badass, yo.
Furai's a concept that's breathtakingly simple on paper, yet fiendishly complicated in execution: "Let's take a full race chassis and drop a concept-car body on top."
Of course, there's more to it than that -- you need an engine, in this case a 458-horsepower, triple-rotor race-ready unit running on pure ethanol (E100) -- the first rotary to do so. Mazda refers to the rotary/ethanol combo as sustainable zoom zoom -- not that flowing fields of corn will spring to mind when the Furai hits the stand at the rapidly approaching 2008 Detroit auto show.
Furai was developed in an exceptionally short amount of time for a concept. It was birthed in the early summer of 2007 and since then von Holzhausen's team has run the gauntlet at a Furai-ous pace (couldn't resist) to get the car in running condition. With no time to test around the busy design-department schedule, everyone from the clay modelers to the MazdaSpeed engineers were basically crawling over one another to get the car done. For the powertrain guys, that meant getting up at 5 a.m. to be at the track so they could start and run the car for the first time -- this morning.
Thank goodness it's an open-decibel day at Laguna, where we're summoned to check out the Furai in all its flowing glory. Still, I bet the track guys got some calls -- if not about Furai's furious phwooooaaaaarr, then about the chopper buzzing low around the track grabbing video.
In addition to the aerial assault, the video team also brought along a Porsche 911 GT3 as a camera car. Mounted to the hood in a complicated arrangement of gaffers' tape and suction cups is a massive HD camera. Off the back bumper is a duplicate camera mount for lead/follow footage. It's an impressive setup that manages to raise eyebrows even amongst the jaded crew of journalists in attendance. As the Furai starts to flow over Laguna's twists and turns, it's clear the GT3 will be doing a lot of following today, with the Porsche arriving in the pits some 5-10 seconds after the Furai during its shakedown laps. And from what we're told, the Furai's driver is taking it easy.
Time for my ride-along. The crazies at Mazda originally had the idea of letting guys like me drive the car. Then someone reminded them that a million-dollar concept car + hack journalists = unemployment + lawsuit. So, instead, I gingerly shoehorn myself into the narrow two-man cockpit. I'm practically on the lap of my driver, American Le Mans Series (ALMS) pro Jamie Bach. For homologation purposes, Le Mans cars are supposed have room for two, even though they're never raced that way. Clearly, Mazda has followed the letter of the law here and not the spirit. There's just enough room for one race car driver and a quadruple amputee co-driver -- me.
I manage to wedge my feet between the firewall and fire extinguisher as a friendly Mazda engineer straps me into the six-point harness with double crotch straps! Bach and I are shoulder-to-shoulder, so it's a good thing the X-trac six-speed transmission has paddle shifters. If he wants to change gears the traditional way, we'll have to stop at San Francisco City Hall first. We nearly bump visors as he turns to see if I'm ready to go. Am I ready for some hot laps in an unproven concept car running on an invisible, highly flammable race fuel? You bet your ass!
This is first day the car has been run. Period. This is also the first time Mazda North America Operations (MNAO) has designed and built a full "dynamic running" concept car. Normally, concept cars can only run at speeds of a few miles an hour -- just enough to get them off the trailer and into the convention hall. From the looks of things, Furai is ready for the next 24 Hours of Le Mans, in a skin that says 2018 more than 2008.
Bach hits the starter, and after a split second of metallic rasp, the rotary behind us roars to life. At idle, there's only a fraction of the vibration you'd expect from a race car that makes noises so large -- a credit to the simplicity and smoothness of a rotary, even one that's been peripherally ported and prepped for ALMS circuit racing.
The MazdaSpeed R&D Advanced Technology arm of MNAO is the outfit responsible for Furai's powertrain and making it run as well as it does. But they can't take all the credit. To get to this stage, partners including BP (ethanol race fuel), Motec (engine management), Swift (aerodynamics), and Brembo (brakes) -- over a dozen in all -- were enlisted to help with the car's development.
We get two laps -- an out and then a flyer -- and Bach is clearly intent on making the most of them. Down pit lane, he hits the rev limiter, creating an awful mechanical whine that raises the hair on my neck. A quick ka-chunking upshift and we're roaring towards the braking cones of turn two.
As Bach slices through turns three and four, he takes a fast, classic racing line, using up as much of the track as possible, but carefully avoiding the raised humps at each apex. It's his ass if the car's carefully sculpted bodywork gets damaged.
The sound emanating from Furai's tailpipes is one of pure pain and fury. It's the shriek of millions of ethanol molecules crying out in unison, as they're brutally compressed and set afire. At wide-open throttle, Furai sends up a bone-chilling howl. Apparently, the name is Japanese for the "sound of wind." Wind emanating from where, the depths of hell?
Each time Bach nails the brakes, I can feel the cabin temperature rise incrementally. My toes notice it first. A bit of brake dust swirls in the cockpit as well; the outside of the car may be fit for the Museum of Martian Art, but underneath the flowing, alien curves is a Le Mans Prototype 2 chassis built by French constructor Courage Competition.
A Mazda underpinned by the Courage C65 chassis was campaigned in the 2006 ALMS season in which Mazda placed third in the manufacturers' championship.
It certainly feels like a top tier race-car setup as I'm first lifted at the entrance of Laguna Seca's famous corkscrew and then immediately flattened by the gs exiting turn nine. The only thing bending and compressing in this car appears to be my spine.
We're quickly through turn 10 and more dust is kicked up as Bach goes hard on the Brembos. As he blips through the gears and we go zooming down the straight for the flying lap, a thought runs through my head just before it's pinned against the cockpit once again: Why can't all concept cars be this exciting?
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