The Top Gear DISASTER that destroyed Mazda's rotary supercar forever

[Music] what happened to Mazda's ultimate super car that wowed the world when it first came out but then went up in a ball of flames and was never seen again what has happened to the spellbinding Gob smacking Mazda Fury well I have asked Mazda and they sent me quite a spiky response which you will see later in the video so today is story time and I'm going to do it from the seat of a Mazda RX7 from our friends at torque GT and if you want to buy this car we'll put a link in the description below I like my job this is actually my first time in a rotary engine car and I realize I'm very lucky that it's a pristine RX7 I am an guy and to be honest I'm I'm a bit gutted it's taking me this long to experience a rotary what a beautiful engine yes I know they have their issues with Apex seals cooling this that and the other but wow how freely does it rev just on the clutch now oh God if you want to blip oh it just dances up the rev counter it gives you a little bleep to say you're up past 8,000 RPM maybe think about shifting me what a thing a lot of you will have come across this car before but if you haven't the Furai was a track oriented super car created by Mazda to kick off a new design language at the company and it was a hell of a way to do it on top of how Wild the car looks one of the most striking features are the headlights just one continuous line from one side to the other it's name means sound of the wind and you could either see that as a soft tickling Summer Breeze or a Gil Force North Sea storm up to you the Mazda Furai was one of five concept cars that were designed under a new design language called nagari and all of them were touted to be the embodiment of Zoom Zoom remember those adverts zo Zoom Zo we probably all saw the car for the first time on Top Gear in series 11 where it was showed statically in the studio but the car was then handed over to Top Gear magazine and that was where it met its end more on that in a bit but outside of Top Gear it was also a gaming Legend having featured on Gran Turismo 5 and six CSR Racing Forza and a whole bunch of others it even made it as a Hot Wheels car [Applause] so what is this amazing looking car underneath what engineering is going on well maybe predictively it's a full frontal race car underneath it is a kurage c65 lmp2 car that was a chassis that Mazda had been racing in the previous year of the American Leong Series so think of the Furai as an lmp2 racing car with a bespoke body put on top but it isn't just some artsy fartsy design Creed by some overly artistic Visionary no it looks the way it does because of the top cfd software of the time the real hardcore Mazda bit of the car was the engine a 2 L triple rotor r20b that being the development of the engine found in the 757b endurance racing car now a lot of Publications will say that the fury had the rotary engine out of the 787b or development of it but that thing was a four rotor and it's a car that triggers me beyond belief imagine having a car winning at lall that was 12 seconds off the pace and qualifying yes the 787b sounds [Applause] amazing but compared to the Jaguars or subers of 1991 it was an absolute slug so slow I'm going to get in trouble for saying that but come on the r20b in the fury was putting out 450 brakes horsepower using E100 fuel it was made by a company called Racing Beat if you hop on their website they will still sell you a rebuild kit for a Mazda triple rotor engine to this day come on Mazda PR let's get this car back up and running yes it will be a long road back but with the power of the internet we can do it tarish is nearly done with this flooded McLaren P1 what's a slightly crispy Master how do the wankle rotary engine work then well it's an internal combustion engine still but it's missing a lot of components that you'd find in most other car engines like conrods cam shafts and Inlet and Outlet valves instead you have an eccentric shaft essentially the rotary crankshaft rotors that take the place of pistons and those rotors sit in housings that form the blocks of the engine with an intermediary housing between each chunk they are four stroke engines with those four strokes occurring over one full rotation of a rotor which equates to three rotations of The Eccentric shaft to start the cycle the rotor rotates to allow an intake of air which is mixed with fuel in the Ever Changing chamber of the engine then that concoction is compressed as the rotor presses it into the side of the chamber spark plugs then ignite that mixture with the explosion further spinning the rotor until it exposes the exhaust Port expelling the the excess gases and starting the process all over again so there's no Inlet and Outlet valves the rotor simply exposes and then covers the inlet and exhaust ports allowing them to do their thing what's really cool about a rotary engine is because the way it's sectioned you can add rotors to it imagine being able to add Pistons to a normal engine this RX7 has two rotors as does an RX8 but people on the internet have ated triple rotor even four rotor engines like the racing cars from the '90s you have the rotor housing and then an intermediary housing and then another rotor housing and then you just keep going section after section creating a massive powerful rotary engine if you want to see someone doing that to an unbelievable degree definitely go and check out Rob Dam's Channel his RX7 is unbelievable what makes rotary so great is that in a twin rot there are only three moving Parts the two rotors and The Eccentric shaft through the middle it also has zero reciprocating Mass it's constantly rotating instead of a piston engine that reciprocates up and down and is restricted by how quickly its valves can open and shut this means a rotary can rotate much more freely hence why they can rev so high so easily with very little [Music] vibration the way to compare a rotary engine to a normal piston engine comes down to the quirky combustion cycle of a wankle motor but the basic way to compare them is to double the displacement of the rotary so the 1.3 that's in this RX7 can be compared to a 2.6 L piston engine so the 2 L in the fuy can be more compared to a 4 L engine so a big straight six or a fairly normal V8 and considering the fury put out 450 brake horsepower that pretty much checks out cooling can be an issue in rotaries because there's three combustion events per cycle that's a lot of revs a lot of explosions and therefore a lot of waste heat that you want to Wick Away From the Block so that it doesn't cook itself with all of that in mind having a car that looked like that that sounded like this the fury should have been an alltime grade what happened to the car then well after featuring on the TV show Top Gear magazine took it out for a spin at Raf bentwaters to take some pictures of it on the move a Works driver was behind the wheel and the photographer was ironically focusing on getting flame shots out of the exhaust a fantastically cool trait of a rotary engine car but it seems with all that heat trapped under that tightly packaged body workor especially with open Flames kicking around the car got too hot and caught on fire especially when the car is turning and there's little air flow flushing out any trapped heat you can see why things got a bit flamy the guys on set then heard the engine start to sound very poy indeed but being down the wrong end of the runway from any emergency services the Flames took hold too quickly and before they knew it the fury was gone so this is a 1990s Japanese sports car with a 9,000 RPM engine and 50/50 weight distribution along with rear wheeel drive what a recipe that is do you know what we we're about 2 or 3 weeks from that Skyline R34 drive that I did and check out that video up there if you want to have a look at that I take this over a Skyline as far as the internet is aware the charged remains of the fury were shipped back to Mazda's USA design studio and they've never been seen since so I decided to drop them a line I decided to email the Mazda us press office asking the whereabouts of the fury and the response was fairly abrupt hi Mike thank you for reaching out about the Mazda Fury concept race car we cannot share the current location of the concept and that was it that was the end of the email I've sent many emails to press offices that is by far the most abrupt answer I've ever gotten so for whatever reason be it embarrassment about the fire or maybe there's future plans that they don't want anyone knowing about is quite clear Mazda does not want us to know where the concept car currently is maybe then there's a darker issue going on is there something legal or is there a liability issue with this car surely if the answer is that abrupt there's more to this story maybe one of you guys has some Intel that the rest of the internet doesn't if so comment it down below or send a DM to me on Instagram I reckon this story goes deeper than Mazda are letting on so so what does the future of Mazda look like then well they keep showing us Concepts like the RX vision and the iconic SP recently and how many times have we heard rumors of an rx9 Mazda are steadfast in defending the rotary engine saying that they're going to keep them going but it probably won't be in the way that we want them to be like in this car they will probably use rotaries as has range extenders for hybrid vehicles in the same way that BMW does with the I3 that will mean that you won't be going up and down the revs via a gearbox it will probably be stuck at a single RPM to work most efficiently and charge up a battery to be honest that is disappointing that you're not going to be able to rev up to 9,000 RPM like in this RX7 it revs so freely in this car really the rotary engine is currently circling an emissions plug hold it's gone from powering Sports and super cars but there could be Hope on the horizon Richard Hammond the boss is currently getting stuck in to integrating synthetic fuels over here in the UK if that goes well he could prolong the use of less fuel efficient engines in performance cars potentially forever more could Richard Hammond save the wankle maybe one day we'll travel over to the USA and be allowed to unearth the remnants of the Mazda Furai arguably the greatest bedroom wall poster car of them [Music] all

Channel: DRIVETRIBE

Views: 511,522

Keywords: richard hammond, top gear, the grand tour, drivetribe, the stig, mazda rx-7, rotary engine, wankel engine, donut media, mazda rx7, mazda rotary engine, fd rx7, 4 rotor, 3 rotor engine, mazda rx8, 3 rotor build, top gear special, top gear challenge, mazda, furai, supercar

Id: ufdq7BvdJcw

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2024