March 18, 2008
'This is a living, breathing machine, with a language that's perfectly functional'
Feel free to take the Print outs of my March's Blog. I wouldn't blame you, 
and neither would Laurens van den Acker. He's design overlord at Mazda, and the man who in the last two years has overseen the most eye-popping collection of concept cars since Giorgetto Giugiaro and Nuccio Bertone reached their late Seventies psychedelic zenith. The Furai is the fifth and final 'Nagare' car, an unexpected addition to van den Acker's 'natural flow' big idea. Car design doesn't get much more philosophical than this, but at heart it's actually very simple. Says Laurens, "It's really important that we create some cars that end up on an eight-year old kid's bedroom wall. People don't dream enough any more.
The first 'Nagare' car - helpfully called Nagare - appeared at the 2006 Los Angeles show, yet 
despite its wild appearance, it was quickly upstaged by the Ryuga, Hakaze and Taiki (the one with the 'outrider' wheels) that followed. Now the Furai's here. Mazda, purveyor of well-engineered but frequently inoffensive automotive product, has hijacked every major motor show in the last two years. "I inherited a plan that called for four concepts in a year," explains van den Acker, a worldly 42-year-old Dutchman who's fluent in six languages, "and I figured that they had to have a strong philosophy, otherwise we'd be heading off in conflicting directions. "Mazda is about the emotion of motion, so we looked at the movement of wind and water and all that sort of stuff. Then we tried to capture that in sheet metal."
'The Furai is based on a Courage C65 LMP2 chassis and uses a mid-mounted 450bhp rotary engine'
Very successfully, you'd have to say. In fact, some critics reckon that this suite of Mazda
concepts has finally unlocked the idea of pure Japanese car design. Think about it: despite all those great sports cars, quirky J and K cars, and an astonishing aesthetic tradition encompassing Buddhism, Shinto, Samurai, Manga and much besides, not to mention the fact that they know how to make serious money out of manufacturing cars, deconstructing Japanese design is still like nailing jelly to a wall.
It's ironic that a Dutchman managing 300-odd employees in four separate design studios across 
three continents should be the one successfully wielding the jelly hammer. As memorable as they all are, though, it's still tempting to write off the 'Nagare' cars as well-executed pie-in-the-sky. Van den Acker insists otherwise. And, despite being the most extreme of the lot, this is where the Furai comes in. Because it actually works.
Created under the watchful eye of Franz von Holzhausen (great names, guys) at Mazda's
California studio, the Furai is actually based on a three-year-old Courage C65 LMP2 chassis (which ran competitively in the American Le Mans Series), and uses a mid-mounted 450bhp rotary engine modified to run on E100 ethanol. 'Nagare' goes racing, then, partly to promote the impossible-to-verify fact that there are apparently more Mazda and Mazda-powered racing cars in action on American circuits than any other make, partly to bring the pie back down to earth.
"We wanted to raise Mazda's profile in motorsport," von Holzhausen says, "and when we re-
connected the racing angle to our design philosophy we realised that motorsport is obviously very functionally driven. If we can prove that 'Nagare' works in this most extreme environment, then we're proving how real it could become. This isn't just an art thing."
To which end, you will find footage on YouTube of the Furai lapping Laguna Seca, looking and sounding every inch the modern racing car. Furai means 'sound of wind', by the way, but it goes deeper than that.
"This is a living, breathing machine," says von Holzhausen. "You can drive it, it has a rotary
engine, it says everything that Mazda stands for. But it also has this wild form language which just happens to be perfectly functional."
Says von Holzhausen, "We found that some of the elements that looked aerodynamic actually were aerodynamic. Look at the Lockheed SR71 'Blackbird' or F-22 Raptor: they're beautiful, but their beauty comes through in the engineering. I doubt that any designer sat down with a sketch-pad and drew them that way."
'It looks spectacular, morphing "Nagare" elements into something that's pure, predatory endurance racer'
Photography by Joe Windsor-Williams
No comments:
Post a Comment