Hype: A Quick Look Inside Mazda USA’s Unofficial Museum

A short while ago a group of journalists (including myself) were invited to Mazda USA’s R&D headquarters in sunny industrial Irvine California get a look into their Mazdaspeed motorsports ladder and preview their upcoming season.  We even got to meet a few of their young gun drivers but you’ll get more on that in a later post.  What this post is about is what happened after the presentation.  Once the presentation was over the group was taken into what the staff at Mazda R&D refers to as “The Basement”.  Technically, its more of an underground parking garage but semantics aside, “The Basement” is pretty special.  Why?  Because it is the area in which several historically significant Mazda race cars, production cars, and concept cars are kept.   Want to see a 4-Rotor Le Mans race car?  There are two of them in the basement.  How about a super rare Miata coupe? Not hard top but a true coupe.  Yes, Virginia, it does exist.  There were also vintage race cars, and other show room stock rare production cars like the short lived all wheel drive turbo-charged 323 GTX hatchback.

This place is a candy store for any Mazda enthusiast and the best part is they let me take pictures!  Well, I couldn’t take pictures of everything I saw down there but I shot as much as they’d let me get away with.  Just click on any of the thumbnails in this post to see a few cool pieces of Mazda history.