Sorry if this is a repost. Check out the link for this article on the MS6 (again taken from test drives on the track in Japan!).
R
http://en.autos.sympatico.msn.ca/vip/kenzie.aspx?modelid=10615&src=vip
2006 Mazda Mazdaspeed6
Auto Reviews
2006*Mazda*Mazdaspeed6
Pros
- Based on one of the top family-car chassis of our time...
- But it's a lot more than just a family car
- A solid performance/utility bargain
Cons
- Bulbous nose
- Turbo engine doesn't have the aural quality or refinement of an inline six
- Does "Mazdaspeed" have the cachet of "M"?
Overall rating is 8.0
Jim Kenzie has flown to France and then Japan to get a first look, and a first taste of the all-new Mazdaspeed6 sedan, a stylish 274-hp, turbocharged, four-wheel drive performance variant of Mazda's award-winning '6' family.
Talk about an ace in the hole - that's what Mazda represents for the Ford Motor Company.
Not only has Mazda righted itself, from building reliable but boring and money-losing cars, to boasting one of the freshest line-ups in the industry with cars like the Mazda3, Mazda6, RX-8 and more to come.
And not only is Mazda poised on the brink of profitability, but it is also contributing platforms and engines for much of the parent company's rest-of-decade portfolio.
No wonder the company is brimming with confidence. And like anyone in that situation, Mazda is getting ready to stretch, to reach and to go after no less than Audi and BMW for the sport sedan market segment, with a turbocharged, four-wheel drive sport sedan called the Mazdaspeed6.
Performance Label
"Mazdaspeed" is the company's in-house performance sub-brand - what "M" is to BMW, "S" is to Audi, "R" is to Honda and "AMG" is to Mercedes-Benz.
Other products with this label include the hot-shot turbocharged version of the now-discontinued Proteg, and the current Mazdaspeed Miata - also a turbo car.
The Mazdaspeed6, as it will be known in North America - it's Mazdaspeed Atenza in Japan and Mazda6 MPS in ROW (Rest Of World) - began life as a concept car, developed by the company's Frankfurt advanced design studio, and shown at the 2002 Paris Auto Show.
That car was based on the Mazda6 hatchback, the most popular body style in Europe. By the time the production version of the car was shown two years later (this past September, also in Paris), the sporty version had migrated to the Mazda6 sedan.
Two main reasons - the sedan body is about 60 kg lighter than the hatchback, and it is considerably stiffer, because the sedan doesn't have that huge cargo-hold opening at the rear. When it comes to cars, stiffer is always better.
Modifications and Design Tweaks
But the engineers didn't stop there. Diagonal braces in the bulkhead behind the rear seat (thereby eliminating the regular Mazda6 sedan's fold-down rear seat back), plus additional stiffening members and reinforcements in the rear bumper mounting bracket, the cross-car dash support beam, the front firewall, and at the junctions of the windshield pillars and the roof, combine to increase rigidity by an amazing fifty percent over the already solid donor car.
The styling closely follows that of the concept car, with one major change - the hood is much more bulbous now, required to clear the intercooler for the turbocharger, about which, more later.
The entire front end differs from the Mazda6, with a deeper air intake and new light clusters. A modest side skirt package, flared fender openings, 18-inch spoke wheels custom-made by Italian race wheel maker Fondmetal shod with 215/45 tires, an aerodynamic rear bumper with diffuser and integrated tail pipe tips, a small deck lid spoiler and an exclusive colour palette which includes a new "moist silver" paint complete the exterior upgrades.
The objective, according to Peter Birtwhistle, head of the Frankfurt studio, was a "sophisticated, high-performance theme", not a rally-oriented boy racer special like Subaru's WRX or Mitsubishi's EVO.
"Those cars have something of a hooligan reputation in Germany," said Birtwhistle. "I'm not knocking them; both of those companies are heavily involved in rallying, and those cars make sense for them. But it's not what we were after."
Hence, no big air scoop on the hood, and no massive strut-mounted wing on the trunk lid.
Inside, the basic Mazda6 dash is retained, but new materials, some sourced from the same suppliers as Audi and BMW, provide a richer look. New seats offer improved lateral support, but they aren't racing buckets - this is a car intended primarily for high-performance street driving, not track work.
Cloth seats will be standard for Canada, as will a Bose seven-speaker sound system. Leather upholstery and a power sunroof are among the very few options available on this car; satellite navigation is on the global menu, but Canada is not likely to offer it.
Turbo Power and Torque
The heart of any car is its engine. While the Mazdaspeed6's is a 2.3 litre twin-cam 16-valve balance-shaft-equipped four-cylinder, just like the Mazda6, "only the nuts and bolts are the same," said Kenichiro Saruwatari, assistant manager of powertrain development.
The block and heads are cast from a different aluminium alloy, the crankshaft and connecting rods are steel rather than cast iron and the pistons now have full-floating wrist pins.
But the two biggest differences are direct injection of gasoline into the combustion chamber instead of into the ports upstream of the valves, and the addition of a Hitachi intercooled turbocharger.
The direct injection generates a bunch of advantages, and enables even more. The cooling effect of the spray of fuel raises the knock threshold, which allows tuning for greater torque at low speeds; and a high-for-a-turbo compression ratio of 9.5:1, to the benefit of fuel efficiency, throttle response and emissions.
Thus, the turbo doesn't have to work as hard as it might otherwise need to, so a smaller, faster-spooling, simpler, single-scroll unit can be used to boost the mid-range, with minimal turbo lag.
North American-spec engines will generate a substantial 274 horsepower at 5500 rpm, and a very flat torque curve which peaks at 280 lb-ft at 3000 rpm, but which is virtually flat at that level from 2000 to 5500 rpm. Mazda promises a 0 - 100 km/h sprint time of 6.6 seconds; quicker than a 2.0 litre Subaru Legacy Turbo or a BMW 330i, two cars Mazda hopes customers will perceive as direct competitors.
A new six-speed manual transmission from Aisin is the only gear-swapping system available. It is extremely compact and lightweight, yet has been engineered both for short shift stroke and light effort. Contrary to typical sporty car practice, it is a wide-ratio box, to take advantage of that broad torque band.
Four-Wheel Drive
A new automatically-engaging four-wheel drive system utilizes a Toyota-sourced electronically-controlled clutch pack located just ahead of the rear differential. It can choose from three different maps - Normal, Sport or Snow - to distribute torque anywhere from 100 percent to the front wheels (in tight, slow corners, or if the parking bake is activated) to 50/50 front/rear, depending on signals from sensors measuring steering angle, yaw rate and throttle position. It does this all by its little old lonesome self; there is no capacity at this point for the driver to manually select the mode.
The objective is to take a front-heavy, front-wheel drive car and add some rear-drive driving character to it. 25 percent stiffer springs, thicker anti-sway bars, and revised damping and suspension mounts deliver crisper yet not race-track-hard handling.
Directional stability control and large four-wheel disc ABS brakes help keep everything under control. It is somewhat ironic that, while the Mazdaspeed6 is intended to be a daily driver, not a race car, I was limited to testing it on a race track. Part of that came from feedback from us journalists at the car's Paris Auto Show debut; we told Mazda that it's hard to adequately evaluate a high-performance car on public roads, so here I am...
Presence and Poise
The TI Aida circuit, located about midway between Osaka and Hiroshima, hosted the Pacific Grand Prix in 1994 and '95, one of two GP races held in those years. The former event was the last race Ayrton Senna finished - he was killed two weeks later at the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy.
The Mazdaspeed6's styling mostly works. The only controversial aspect is that bulbous hood, which has both styling and engineering implications. As noted, it needed to be this big to clear the intercooler, which is mounted directly on top of the engine; this to shorten the path of incoming air for better throttle response.
But the stylists also didn't want a massive air scoop on the hood which would have been needed if the intercooler were buried somewhere else in the engine room.
I think it makes the front end look too chubby - I know, I know; I should talk - but it was deemed the best possible compromise.
Otherwise, the car looks purposeful and determined, yet restrained.
Ditto the interior. A black and white leather upholstery option may be a tad on the bright side for more conservative customers, but there are plenty of other choices.
The most dominant characteristic of the car's performance stems from that beefy torque curve - the car launches solidly, and whooshes right up to about 5000 rpm. The engine will rev well beyond that, but there's not much point - the small turbo can't deliver enough air to keep the urge building, so you might as well upshift and let the turbo work in its most efficient rev range.
Turbo lag is minimal, as long as you keep the engine above about 2200 rpm. Response to the throttle one of Mazda's major goals for this car, is very good - again, for a turbo.
In fairly tight corners where your training would suggest second gear, I found third to be at least equally effective, if not quicker. As multi-time World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart always teaches, a higher gear can often be quicker if for no other reason than that you lose momentum every time you shift.
The shifting itself is a pleasure in the Mazdaspeed6, the Aisin box indeed delivering satisfying shift feel, low effort and better precision than is usually the case with a cable-operated shift mechanism.
Agility and Stability
By the time I got on the track, the morning rain had stopped and the track was predominantly dry. Earlier testers reported that the back end could step out of line under power - that rear-wheel drive effect - but it would only do that in the dry if you invoked it by lifting off on the throttle or with a gentle tap of the left foot on the brake pedal.
Otherwise, adding power coming out of a bend had the car drifting gently towards the outside of the corner. It's always a matter of knowing your car, picking the right apex, and getting the right line.
The car is pointable and controllable through all of this, thanks to light, direct and communicative steering. The track managers had set up a chicane on the 700 metre back straight to theoretically slow us down before entering a fast right-hander. But the car could take this mild deviation flat-out with just a left-right flick of the wheel, so what was the point?
The brakes on the Number Two test car were getting a bit juddery by the time my colleagues had done with them, but new track-oriented brake pads installed over lunch on my Number Three tester worked better. Any race track is a severe test for road-car brakes, but these feel like they'll be more than up to the task of even aggressive public thoroughfare use.
Naturally, a race track is no place to test ride quality, so we'll have to wait for a while to comment definitively on that.
Conclusion
The overall impression of the Mazdaspeed6 is very positive. Of course, it starts from a very good basis - the Mazda6 is one of the finest-handling family sedans you can buy.
Crank up the horsepower, upgrade the suspension and brakes, add significantly better grip and control with four-wheel drive, make it look different enough that your neighbours will notice, price it in the high-$30,000 range, and what's not to like?
The Canadian pricing and final specification were announced during the Montreal Auto Show Press Day on January 13, on same day this article went 'live' on Sympatico / MSN Autos. The car will go on sale later this spring. Mazda Canada expects that somewhere around 1,000 of the 15,000-odd Mazda6s it will sell next year will be Mazdaspeed editions.
Shouldn't be a problem.
R
http://en.autos.sympatico.msn.ca/vip/kenzie.aspx?modelid=10615&src=vip
2006 Mazda Mazdaspeed6
Auto Reviews
2006*Mazda*Mazdaspeed6
Pros
- Based on one of the top family-car chassis of our time...
- But it's a lot more than just a family car
- A solid performance/utility bargain
Cons
- Bulbous nose
- Turbo engine doesn't have the aural quality or refinement of an inline six
- Does "Mazdaspeed" have the cachet of "M"?
Overall rating is 8.0
Jim Kenzie has flown to France and then Japan to get a first look, and a first taste of the all-new Mazdaspeed6 sedan, a stylish 274-hp, turbocharged, four-wheel drive performance variant of Mazda's award-winning '6' family.
Talk about an ace in the hole - that's what Mazda represents for the Ford Motor Company.
Not only has Mazda righted itself, from building reliable but boring and money-losing cars, to boasting one of the freshest line-ups in the industry with cars like the Mazda3, Mazda6, RX-8 and more to come.
And not only is Mazda poised on the brink of profitability, but it is also contributing platforms and engines for much of the parent company's rest-of-decade portfolio.
No wonder the company is brimming with confidence. And like anyone in that situation, Mazda is getting ready to stretch, to reach and to go after no less than Audi and BMW for the sport sedan market segment, with a turbocharged, four-wheel drive sport sedan called the Mazdaspeed6.
Performance Label
"Mazdaspeed" is the company's in-house performance sub-brand - what "M" is to BMW, "S" is to Audi, "R" is to Honda and "AMG" is to Mercedes-Benz.
Other products with this label include the hot-shot turbocharged version of the now-discontinued Proteg, and the current Mazdaspeed Miata - also a turbo car.
The Mazdaspeed6, as it will be known in North America - it's Mazdaspeed Atenza in Japan and Mazda6 MPS in ROW (Rest Of World) - began life as a concept car, developed by the company's Frankfurt advanced design studio, and shown at the 2002 Paris Auto Show.
That car was based on the Mazda6 hatchback, the most popular body style in Europe. By the time the production version of the car was shown two years later (this past September, also in Paris), the sporty version had migrated to the Mazda6 sedan.
Two main reasons - the sedan body is about 60 kg lighter than the hatchback, and it is considerably stiffer, because the sedan doesn't have that huge cargo-hold opening at the rear. When it comes to cars, stiffer is always better.
Modifications and Design Tweaks
But the engineers didn't stop there. Diagonal braces in the bulkhead behind the rear seat (thereby eliminating the regular Mazda6 sedan's fold-down rear seat back), plus additional stiffening members and reinforcements in the rear bumper mounting bracket, the cross-car dash support beam, the front firewall, and at the junctions of the windshield pillars and the roof, combine to increase rigidity by an amazing fifty percent over the already solid donor car.
The styling closely follows that of the concept car, with one major change - the hood is much more bulbous now, required to clear the intercooler for the turbocharger, about which, more later.
The entire front end differs from the Mazda6, with a deeper air intake and new light clusters. A modest side skirt package, flared fender openings, 18-inch spoke wheels custom-made by Italian race wheel maker Fondmetal shod with 215/45 tires, an aerodynamic rear bumper with diffuser and integrated tail pipe tips, a small deck lid spoiler and an exclusive colour palette which includes a new "moist silver" paint complete the exterior upgrades.
The objective, according to Peter Birtwhistle, head of the Frankfurt studio, was a "sophisticated, high-performance theme", not a rally-oriented boy racer special like Subaru's WRX or Mitsubishi's EVO.
"Those cars have something of a hooligan reputation in Germany," said Birtwhistle. "I'm not knocking them; both of those companies are heavily involved in rallying, and those cars make sense for them. But it's not what we were after."
Hence, no big air scoop on the hood, and no massive strut-mounted wing on the trunk lid.
Inside, the basic Mazda6 dash is retained, but new materials, some sourced from the same suppliers as Audi and BMW, provide a richer look. New seats offer improved lateral support, but they aren't racing buckets - this is a car intended primarily for high-performance street driving, not track work.
Cloth seats will be standard for Canada, as will a Bose seven-speaker sound system. Leather upholstery and a power sunroof are among the very few options available on this car; satellite navigation is on the global menu, but Canada is not likely to offer it.
Turbo Power and Torque
The heart of any car is its engine. While the Mazdaspeed6's is a 2.3 litre twin-cam 16-valve balance-shaft-equipped four-cylinder, just like the Mazda6, "only the nuts and bolts are the same," said Kenichiro Saruwatari, assistant manager of powertrain development.
The block and heads are cast from a different aluminium alloy, the crankshaft and connecting rods are steel rather than cast iron and the pistons now have full-floating wrist pins.
But the two biggest differences are direct injection of gasoline into the combustion chamber instead of into the ports upstream of the valves, and the addition of a Hitachi intercooled turbocharger.
The direct injection generates a bunch of advantages, and enables even more. The cooling effect of the spray of fuel raises the knock threshold, which allows tuning for greater torque at low speeds; and a high-for-a-turbo compression ratio of 9.5:1, to the benefit of fuel efficiency, throttle response and emissions.
Thus, the turbo doesn't have to work as hard as it might otherwise need to, so a smaller, faster-spooling, simpler, single-scroll unit can be used to boost the mid-range, with minimal turbo lag.
North American-spec engines will generate a substantial 274 horsepower at 5500 rpm, and a very flat torque curve which peaks at 280 lb-ft at 3000 rpm, but which is virtually flat at that level from 2000 to 5500 rpm. Mazda promises a 0 - 100 km/h sprint time of 6.6 seconds; quicker than a 2.0 litre Subaru Legacy Turbo or a BMW 330i, two cars Mazda hopes customers will perceive as direct competitors.
A new six-speed manual transmission from Aisin is the only gear-swapping system available. It is extremely compact and lightweight, yet has been engineered both for short shift stroke and light effort. Contrary to typical sporty car practice, it is a wide-ratio box, to take advantage of that broad torque band.
Four-Wheel Drive
A new automatically-engaging four-wheel drive system utilizes a Toyota-sourced electronically-controlled clutch pack located just ahead of the rear differential. It can choose from three different maps - Normal, Sport or Snow - to distribute torque anywhere from 100 percent to the front wheels (in tight, slow corners, or if the parking bake is activated) to 50/50 front/rear, depending on signals from sensors measuring steering angle, yaw rate and throttle position. It does this all by its little old lonesome self; there is no capacity at this point for the driver to manually select the mode.
The objective is to take a front-heavy, front-wheel drive car and add some rear-drive driving character to it. 25 percent stiffer springs, thicker anti-sway bars, and revised damping and suspension mounts deliver crisper yet not race-track-hard handling.
Directional stability control and large four-wheel disc ABS brakes help keep everything under control. It is somewhat ironic that, while the Mazdaspeed6 is intended to be a daily driver, not a race car, I was limited to testing it on a race track. Part of that came from feedback from us journalists at the car's Paris Auto Show debut; we told Mazda that it's hard to adequately evaluate a high-performance car on public roads, so here I am...
Presence and Poise
The TI Aida circuit, located about midway between Osaka and Hiroshima, hosted the Pacific Grand Prix in 1994 and '95, one of two GP races held in those years. The former event was the last race Ayrton Senna finished - he was killed two weeks later at the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy.
The Mazdaspeed6's styling mostly works. The only controversial aspect is that bulbous hood, which has both styling and engineering implications. As noted, it needed to be this big to clear the intercooler, which is mounted directly on top of the engine; this to shorten the path of incoming air for better throttle response.
But the stylists also didn't want a massive air scoop on the hood which would have been needed if the intercooler were buried somewhere else in the engine room.
I think it makes the front end look too chubby - I know, I know; I should talk - but it was deemed the best possible compromise.
Otherwise, the car looks purposeful and determined, yet restrained.
Ditto the interior. A black and white leather upholstery option may be a tad on the bright side for more conservative customers, but there are plenty of other choices.
The most dominant characteristic of the car's performance stems from that beefy torque curve - the car launches solidly, and whooshes right up to about 5000 rpm. The engine will rev well beyond that, but there's not much point - the small turbo can't deliver enough air to keep the urge building, so you might as well upshift and let the turbo work in its most efficient rev range.
Turbo lag is minimal, as long as you keep the engine above about 2200 rpm. Response to the throttle one of Mazda's major goals for this car, is very good - again, for a turbo.
In fairly tight corners where your training would suggest second gear, I found third to be at least equally effective, if not quicker. As multi-time World Driving Champion Jackie Stewart always teaches, a higher gear can often be quicker if for no other reason than that you lose momentum every time you shift.
The shifting itself is a pleasure in the Mazdaspeed6, the Aisin box indeed delivering satisfying shift feel, low effort and better precision than is usually the case with a cable-operated shift mechanism.
Agility and Stability
By the time I got on the track, the morning rain had stopped and the track was predominantly dry. Earlier testers reported that the back end could step out of line under power - that rear-wheel drive effect - but it would only do that in the dry if you invoked it by lifting off on the throttle or with a gentle tap of the left foot on the brake pedal.
Otherwise, adding power coming out of a bend had the car drifting gently towards the outside of the corner. It's always a matter of knowing your car, picking the right apex, and getting the right line.
The car is pointable and controllable through all of this, thanks to light, direct and communicative steering. The track managers had set up a chicane on the 700 metre back straight to theoretically slow us down before entering a fast right-hander. But the car could take this mild deviation flat-out with just a left-right flick of the wheel, so what was the point?
The brakes on the Number Two test car were getting a bit juddery by the time my colleagues had done with them, but new track-oriented brake pads installed over lunch on my Number Three tester worked better. Any race track is a severe test for road-car brakes, but these feel like they'll be more than up to the task of even aggressive public thoroughfare use.
Naturally, a race track is no place to test ride quality, so we'll have to wait for a while to comment definitively on that.
Conclusion
The overall impression of the Mazdaspeed6 is very positive. Of course, it starts from a very good basis - the Mazda6 is one of the finest-handling family sedans you can buy.
Crank up the horsepower, upgrade the suspension and brakes, add significantly better grip and control with four-wheel drive, make it look different enough that your neighbours will notice, price it in the high-$30,000 range, and what's not to like?
The Canadian pricing and final specification were announced during the Montreal Auto Show Press Day on January 13, on same day this article went 'live' on Sympatico / MSN Autos. The car will go on sale later this spring. Mazda Canada expects that somewhere around 1,000 of the 15,000-odd Mazda6s it will sell next year will be Mazdaspeed editions.
Shouldn't be a problem.
