Mazda's Zoom-Zoom

Nobody asked me, but . . .

I can count on the index finger of either hand the number of auto execs I know who carry a commercial driver’s license in their wallet. Robert Davis, Senior VP of Product Development & Quality for Mazda is the one. It has nothing to do with a Walter Mitty desire to become a weekend, long-haul, 18-wheel truck driver when he retires from Mazda. But it does have everything to do with one of the major reasons Mazda vehicles introduced these past dozen years or so not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk, or in this instance: drive the drive.

I’m alluding to zoom-zoom, of course, Mazda corporate speak for the company’s passion for creating cars with sharp dynamic focus. You can pay much more for an Ultimate Driving Machine, but these days I defy you to name another auto company building more affordable fun-to-drive vehicles than Mazda.

I have a pretty long history with Mazda in America, going back to the original Mazda Cosmo Sport, that diminutive sports car Toyo Kogyo introduced in the late Sixties that also happens to be powered by Mazda’s very first production rotary engine. The car was never officially exported to America. But this was at the beginnings of the “smog era” in America and the rotary engine, while viewed as a technical curiosity by most, was being evaluated by the Big Three to determine if it had any exhaust emissions advantages versus its conventional piston-engine competition.

I was a Chrysler engineer at the time working in the emissions lab. And one of my jobs every morning was to check the nocturnal emissions of vehicles that had been soaking in hot sheds over night. These evaporative emission sheds were constructed of two-by-fours encased in leak-proof plastic sheeting. I was one of only a few engineers small enough to fit behind the wheel of the right-hand-drive Cosmo.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but those Cosmo “drives” in Chrysler’s Highland Park road test garage were the beginnings of a three-decades-plus connection with the people and cars of TK that includes participating in the launch of the first RX-7 in Hiroshima, racing an RX-3 at Portland International Raceway, co-authoring three books on Mazda with Jack Yamaguchi and sharing baseball war stories and swapping caps with Kenichi Yamamoto, who shares the title “Father of the Rotary,” along with its inventor Felix Wankel, for his willingness to sacrifice everything by refusing to abandon what most others viewed as a hopeless task: creating a production engine from an incredibly crude Wankel prototype. (That’s a very long one-sentence paragraph, but take a deep breath and deal with it!)

In April of 1963 Yamamoto created what he called his “47 rotary warriors,” a handpicked group of TK’s best engineers chosen to work on the rotary engine. Joining this team a few months later was a recent university graduate, Takaharu Kobayakawa, affectionately known as Koby by his American friends.

I first met Koby on a trip to Hiroshima with Road & Track for a sneak preview of the second-generation RX-7. At the time Koby was assigned to public relations, broadening his automotive experiences by working with American journalists and learning first-hand what American enthusiasts wanted in a sports car. Neither of us knew that the other was an engineer. That happened later when Koby “reinvented” himself as the chief engineer for the third-gen RX-7 and I was one of three American journalists invited to Hiroshima to provide feedback on a very early development mule.

Mating that first rotary to the Cosmo Sport proved to be a perfect marriage, but Yamamoto realized that to a skeptical public weaned on piston-engine automobiles the rotary was little more than a curiosity. Yamamoto decided that the best way to overcome this skepticism of this new technology was to go racing, and the perfect venue became the Marathon de la Route, an endurance race that started and finished in Liege, Belgium, driving through mountain roads to the famed Nürburgring, where the cars would race for 84 hours straight. A Cosmo sport finished fourth behind two 911s and a Lancia Fulvia, an amazing result for the unproven rotary and Cosmo.

Twenty-three years later, in 1991, a 4-rotor Mazda 787B became the only rotary-powered car to win the most prestigious of all endurance races, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Overseeing this victory was Koby, the 48th rotary warrior.

Which in a roundabout (also known as a rotary) fashion gets me back to Robert Davis and his need for an 18-wheeler driver’s license. Robert is a weekend warrior, owner of a racing team that campaigns five RX-8s and three Spec Miatas. He’s been racing Mazdas for 11 years and typically runs 8-12 races a year. He’s attended the SCCA Runoffs seven times with a best qualifying of 3rd and a best finish of 7th. He didn’t race last year. Instead Davis managed the team and they went on to finish 1st, 2nd, 4th and 9th. He’ll be back behind the wheel of an RX-8 in Touring 3 this year. And sometimes he assumes truck driving as well as race driving duties. Ergo, the commercial driver’s license.

Davis’s passion for racing directly influences the cars he helps plan and develop at Mazda. Want to know why a Mazda communicates so well with the driver, has such instinctive steering and road feel, has unbreakable brakes and is fitted with supportive seats and great ergonomics? Thank Robert Davis and his band of merry engineers who understand what fun-to-drive is all about.