Forget the Batmobile, the Mazda Furai is one of the wildest looking cars of the moment. And we’ve just had one of the wildest rides of our life in this astonishing race car-cum-concept. You can watch the Furai in action in our official video below – and read our first impressions after a few hot laps. Flipping through the Furai’s press guff tells us it’s the latest in Mazda’s family of Nagare ‘flow’ concepts, following on from the Nagare (unveiled at the Los Angeles motor show 2006), Ryuga (Detroit 2007), Hakaze (Geneva 2007) and Taiki (Tokyo 2007). Oh, and Furai is Japanese for ‘sound of the wind’. Wind-passing jibes aside, on looks alone, the Furai is stunning.
Mazda Furai: the design story
It was created at Mazda’s Californian design studio under the leadership of Mazda’s American design boss Franz von Holzhausen (recently poached to head up Tesla’s fledgling design base).
The Furai sits on a C65 Courage Le Mans race car chassis, to which Von Holzhausen and his team added a closed cockpit – and that head-turning composite bodywork. All those organic details that cover every square inch of the car’s body not only look good, but they also play a vital aerodynamic role, smoothing airflow over, under and through the car to boost cooling, high-speed stability and downforce.
And what are the Furai’s performance stats?
With a 460bhp 2.0-litre triple-rotor Mazda engine driving the rear wheels through a close-ratio six-speed paddleshift ‘box, this 998kg ethanol-drinking rocket knows all about high speed.
It will smoke its way to 60mph in just 3.8 seconds and howl like a banshee up to its 172mph maximum. So when I got a call from Mazda asking if I’d like an ride in the Furai, with ex-touring car ace Mark Ticehurst at the wheel, I was at the track and ready to go before they hung up.
Click ‘Next’ below to read about Ben’s amazing experience in the Mazda Furai
Click on the video player below to watch the Mazda Furai in action
Mazda Furai: on the track
Getting into the Furai is a cramped and limb-contorting affair – the two tiny seats are very close together, the roof is head-grazingly low and the panoramic windscreen is almost horizontal.
Ticehurst gets in first and I follow, locking myself in place with the six-point harness. After the Furai’s team of engineers prime the car’s electronics for five minutes, Ticehurst gets the thumbs up.
He punches a sequence of buttons on the Furai’s roof-mounted console and the rotary engines explodes into action, spitting out a three-foot long blue flame through the rotary-shaped exhaust. Dear God. Even through my Arai lid, the car’s wob-wob-wob idle is painfully loud.
And we’re off: a hair-raising lap in the Furai
We sit and wait for the Furai’s innards to warm up and then, with a push from the crew to get the Furai rolling, Ticehurst pops the aggressive clutch and we’re off. And quickly. We do a brisk exploratory lap to try and push some heat into the car’s rubber and warm up its vast composite brake discs.
Then Ticehurst nails it – and the Furai howls its lungs out, instantly piling on speed at a white-knuckle rate. I’ve driven, or been driven in, some very fast cars in this job, but nothing, nothing comes close to the sheer ferocity with which the Furai hurls itself forward. The acceleration is a sustained physical assault – and the noise is just incredible. The engine sounds feral – organic rather than mechanical – as it hurtles through the gears.
Searing, brain-mashing speed!
Flat and fast, there’s absolutely no body movement as Ticehurst spears the Furai through the bends. The Mazda changes direction with that instantaneous and inertia-free agility only focused and ultra-light cars possess. We enter into and depart from corners at speeds that have me frantically pushing at the passenger bulkhead as I try to find a non-existent brake pedal – I just cannot get over how fast and grippy the Furai is as it loses and gains velocity. And this in a concept car!
We pull in after two flat-out laps – it’s only been a few minutes since Ticehurst let rip, but it feels like I have been holding my breath for half an hour. What a palm-sweating, mouth-drying rush! Kudos to Mazda – while most manufacturers create fragile please-don’t-touch static concepts fashioned from bits of styrofoam and plexiglass, the Furai is a balls-out racer – a 170mph moving advert for the company’s bold new design direction.
Now, if only they’d build one for the road…
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Click on the video player below to watch the Mazda Furai in action