3 model families in the catalog.
1989–present
The Journalist Who Talked His Way Into Building a Sports Car
In 1976, Bob Hall was an American motoring journalist working for Motor Trend. He was fluent in Japanese, obsessed with small British roadsters, and, as it happened, sitting across a table from Mazda R&D chief Gai Arai and a rising engineering executive named Kenichi Yamamoto. Asked what kind of car Mazda should build…
1978–2002
The Rotary's Second Act: How the RX-7 Turned a Risky Engine Into a Sports Car Icon
By the mid-1970s, Mazda's rotary engine program was in genuine danger of being shut down. Kenichi Yamamoto had spent the 1960s turning it from a licensed NSU-Wankel curiosity into a production reality in the Cosmo Sport. The 1973 oil crisis had exposed the rotary's poor fuel economy just as Mazda had bet heavily on it…
1967–1972Ancestor
The Long Bet on a Borrowed Engine: Mazda's Cosmo Sport
In 1961, Toyo Kogyo, the company that would eventually rename itself Mazda, was a mid-sized manufacturer facing a real threat of forced consolidation, as Japan's trade ministry pushed the country's smaller automakers to merge into a handful of larger groups. Rather than compete head-on with Toyota and Nissan on the…