I feel less than zero shame in proclaiming to the world that I am a Mazda fanboy. I would --BLEEP--ing --BLEEP-- the --BLEEP--est of their --BLEEP--s while saying the --BLEEP--est things if it meant that I could work there someday, but one of the dirty and untrue things I'd have extreme difficulty saying is, "I like the RX-VISION".
The story dates back to 2015, when I was bored in a barely painted box doing security as a slave. Not that I was supposed to, but being on my phone helps to salvage some of my sanity and lets me feel like you've some semblance of free will left in my rapidly decaying soul. It was then that I saw a news article about Mazda unveiling the most dizzying concept car since the Furai, the RX-Vision. Following Mazda's breakthrough and jaw dropping "Kodo" design philosophy and bathed in its trademark Soul Red Premium Metallic paint, the RX-Vision not only got me excited about the future for the first time in a long while, but it also had very obvious and strong callbacks to the past as well! The front position lights were explicitly stated to mimic the panel gaps of the svelte pop up headlights that every RX-7 generation had, and the rear end is more an evolution of the FD RX-7's than it was its own thing. There are many that feel that Mazda hasn't made a splash in the performance car market ever since the RX-7 went out of production, and I do feel that Mazda has lost a big part of its identity ever since the RX-8 was discontinued in 2012 as well. Beaten to death and annoyed at clickbait "news" sites that propagate rumours endlessly ever since I could read, the fact that Mazda themselves have come out with a "new RX" made me make the most high–pitched squeal in that prison of toxic masculinity and brain dead slaves.
Though, once the shock wore off and some rational thought began to reoccupy my brain, I began to slip back into my jaded, cynical, and miserable self, and that attitude sept way too easily into the pictures of the RX-Vision. For starters... no one at the time ever explicitly stated that the RX-Vision was powered by a Rotary Engine. I mean, yeah, it seems stupidly obvious from the name, as Mazda hasn't ever used the "RX" prefix on anything other that didn't pack their pièce de résistance, the Rotary Engine. But then again, I'm sure no Corolla owner ever thought their beloved car would become FF, nor did Mustang or Eclipse fans think that the names would be used on SUVs. Names are just a marketing thing. And besides, look at how long the front end of the car is! It looks like it could swallow a longitudinally mounted V12 up front! You don't
need that kind of space for a 2 or 4 Rotor—that's the whole point of a Rotary Engine: it's compact size and lightness! And even if it did come with a Rotary Engine, how is that unnecessarily long wheelbase going to affect its handling? It's weight distribution? One of the traits that is common among sports cars I like is that they are simple—that everything on the car is out of necessity, towards a cause. Mazda traditionally hasn't been a very showy company, with none of that stupid fake chrome exhaust tips or piping in bogus engine noises into the cabin nonsense. And so this long bonnet of the RX-Vision just seems so odd, so
un–Mazda like, even, because it makes the car appear to be just a styling exercise and nothing else. What it proclaims to be and what it appears to do is at such an odd conflict with each other. There isn't that sense of cohesion I love so much in my sports cars, which the FD RX-7 effortlessly flaunts. I may yearn with all my soul and every fibre of my being for Mazda to put into production a no compromise, all thrills, no frills, all out sports car in the vein of the FD RX-7 again, but I don't think I want the RX-Vision to be that car.
Any speculation of the RX-Vision's powerplant would be entirely quelled when, out of the blue, the RX-Vision appeared in Gran Turismo Sport in GT3 trim some five years later in 2020. That meant that the engine, at least in race trim, would be laid bare for the world to run, hear, and geek out over the specs: a
Naturally Aspirated Inline 4 Rotor displacing 2,600cc, making peak power of
562HP (419kW) at 9,000rpm and peak torque of 541.2Nm (399.2lbf⋅ft) at 7,000rpm (the game specs and the specs Mazda gives differ slightly for some reason). Aside from the lower peak figures, you might be thinking that all those specs and numbers seem awfully familiar, especially if you're familiar with those of the 787B's. To help ease that feeling of doubt, allow me to present to you a comparison of the torque curves and sounds of the two side by side:
Mm hmm. The engine of the RX-Vision GT3 Concept is simply a heavily crippled R26B of the 787B's, and it's
not like Polyphony Digital got the sound of that right, either. "Next generation Rotary Engine, "SkyActiv-R"", my ass! And here I thought GT3 cars and engines are supposed to be based on what's (been) in production. Well Mazda, what say you? Feel like selling me a Roadster loaded with a NA 4 Rotor engine that can somehow pass emissions tests?
787B liveries on Mazda cars may be sickeningly abundant, but in the RX-Vision's case, the livery is more apropos than one might initially think, given the source of its cheaply recycled engine. You know how Yamauchi Kazunori said that "
(Gran Turismo 7) will be a combination of the past, present, and future"? Yeah, I just wasn't ready or expecting the RX-Vision to be representative of the past on the cover art of the game.
If I sound like a jilted lover who has had their hopes and feelings played with and outright lied to, that's probably because it's not too far from the truth. And here I thought we were actually going to have a new Rotary Engine before ICEs go extinct! Mazda doesn't even have anything resembling production ready to put into their shiny new concept car, instead having to rely on something that is well over 30 years old at this point, the in–game sound of which had to rely on an aftermarket specialist in Defined Autoworks for! I mean,
come on! Even someone who has written
a raving review for a Diesel Demio in a racing game can't describe this whole situation as anything other than "utterly pathetic".
With the addition of this shiny new toy into Mazda's imaginary arsenal in Gran Turismo Sport, unseemly politics began to spring into action on PD's side as well: first, they slowly but surely crippled the Atenza Gr.3 out of contention with "Balance" of Performance, when the only track it had ever shone at was in Interlagos. For years, the Atenza had been stuck at 107% power and 104% mass, but with the addition of the RX-Vision, the Atenza gained 1% in mass twice in the next two updates to the game and with no accompanying compensation in power. The Atenza Gr.3 being a car I'm intricately familiar with, having ran it exclusively for years in Sport Mode and having done one of my only three racing liveries for, it felt like an old friend of mine was getting shafted right before my eyes, with me being unable to do a damn thing about it, and IT SUCKS. Then, out of nowhere, PD decided to drastically lengthen the pit stop time to de–incentivise pitting, which at first glance might seem to target only Miyazono Takuma and his insane pit strategies, until you realise that the RX-Vision's biggest selling point is that it's really good at holding onto tyres and fuel in a race. At the same time, the abysmal Atenza Gr.4, Mazda's only car in Gr.4, was buffed to become the third most powerful car in Gr.4 behind the hopeless GT-R Gr.4 and the completely irrelevant Veyron Gr.4, and even got a helpful mass drop! I mean, yeah, the Atenza Gr.4 still sucks and no amount of BoP can possibly save it, but at least Mazda can seemingly salvage some points in Gr.4 races now to vie for an overall Manufacturers' win with how competitive the RX-Vision GT3 is. While Mazda has yet to win a Manufacturer's Championship overall, they can at least make it onto the grid now... via a guaranteed placement granted by PD, costing one other more deserving manufacturer to lose out.
Honestly? As a fanboy, I really wouldn't mind all these politics, but that's only IF the RX-V was a real car that people can buy. I know it makes little to no sense to say this in the context of a video game, wherein nothing is real, but... I don't know, fictional cars just disproportionately bother me, especially if they prove to be dominant in races. It feels like a cheap cop out for manufacturers to not need to try to actually build something better, something real, that drivers on both sides of the virtual divide can enjoy. At this point, the RX-V almost feels like Mazda telling people like me, fans of the Rotary Engine, "shut up, we hear you, suck on this and leave us alone".
It's phony. It's political. It's two of the things I despise the most in anything, be it a car or a person. Can the way it drives redeem it, though?
The RX-V is noteworthy for being one of the very few, if not only car in Gr.3 that doesn't simply adopt the thoughtless default suspension setup of Gr.3, with it coming in MUCH lower than the standard 70mm (2.76in) front and 80mm (3.15in) rear ride height of Gr.3 cars, being set instead at
60mm (2.36in) front and 70mm (2.76in) rear, better balancing out its rather odd 48/52 F/R weight distribution. However, that just makes it so much more uncontrollable over kerbs, and it's horrendously afflicted by microscopic road imperfections that I never knew were there when driving other racing cars, almost as if the suspension doesn't have enough stroke to absorb the ebbs and flows of a cleanly paved racing circuit. Despite having bespoke ride height settings, everything else, from spring rates, dampers, camber, toe, differentials, and downforce, are straight copies and pastes from the Gr.3 defaults, making me think the ride height adjustment is for visuals only and nothing else—just like the 2015 Concept Car on which it's based. That means it also suffers from the sudden snappiness of many maladjusted real world racecars in this game, with its limits very suddenly coming to the driver instead of the driver gradually approaching the limits of the car. The rear weight bias also makes the car rather tail happy, even after a handling adjustment made to settle the car after its inception, and the long wheelbase of the car really doesn't seem to help that at all.
Maybe because the Atenza Gr.3 fits like an old glove I've grown into, but I personally find the big boi Atenza with its unbalanced and suboptimal sedan silhouette powered by a 2.2L Inline 4 boosted to high heaven to be an easier drive than the NA, bespoke, svelte sports car that doesn't even have to bear the burden of existence. And remember, with the Atenza being bopped out of contention to make way for this, doesn't that just make Mazda a weaker brand as a whole? How does anyone defend this?
While RMR cars can use that oversteer to tactically slide and rotate into the apex of a corner, the front engined, long wheelbase Mazda finds that task a lot more daunting and unintuitive. Ask anyone who's driven a RMR car, and I'm sure they'll tell you that there is simply no replicating the way an RMR car rotates into a corner. Having a slight rearward weight bias then, seems to me to distill the worst of an RMR layout without obtaining any of its strengths. And it puzzles me
so much as to why the proportions and resultant weight distribution of the car are designed as such from a blank slate with no restrictions in reality!
I've been wondering about the RX-Vision's perplexing proportions ever since I first saw it in 2015, but seven years or so later, I think I may finally have a plausible explanation for it: the RX-Vision was never meant to
be a Mazda to begin with, let alone house a compact Rotary Engine. When Toyota unveiled their GT3 car during this year's Tokyo Auto Salon, not based on any model in their current lineup, many quickly connected the dots and
saw the RX-Vision underneath the generically named Toyota. Hell, it might even be a full EV sold under the Lexus brand! Quite a departure from a lightweight, nimble, pure sports car as Mazda had seemingly led us to believe the RX-Vision to be. Letting Ford own 33.4% stake in your company just to survive? Please do! Platform sharing with the second biggest car manufacturer in the world to cut costs? Go right ahead! But a Rotary Engine sports car? That's your
identity, right there! That'd be like sharing a diary with a friend in school—you just don't do that. Nobody does that!
I just find it in such bad taste for Mazda themselves to fan the flames of hope for a Rotary revival, only to be so completely let down as a fan. Maybe the RX-Vision is a sexy car to most. Maybe most people won't notice or mind that its sound and power curves are recycled from the 787B's. But as someone who deeply loves the brand and especially their Rotary Engined sports cars, the RX-Vision is a bad tease at best and insulting at worst.
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