Mazda Furai Concept Laps Buttonwillow

Mazda ALMS driver Ben Devlin takes Mazda designer Ken Saward for a few laps around Buttonwillow in the Mazda Furai Concept Car, which made its debut at the 2009 North American International Auto Show in Detroit this past January. Keep in mind that this is a concept car.



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2008 Mazda Furai Concept

(from Mazda Press Release) As the latest in Mazda’s award-winning and highly acclaimed series of Nagare concept cars, the Furai P2 concept vehicle celebrates 40 years of rotary engine and international motorsports heritage with the raciest interpretation of NAGARE design language to-date.

Furai is the sort of car that could only come from a company that incorporates the “Soul of a Sports Car” into everything it builds, but with an eye toward the future and the environment through the use of renewable fuels. Driving toward sustainability, Furai was initially tuned to operate on 100 percent ethanol fuel, the first time a racing three-rotor rotary engine has been fueled by ethanol. Research continues in earnest with partner BP into other renewable and future fuels, including ethanol gasoline blends like E10.

The Furai concept serves as a turning point in the Nagare developmental process. While the four previous concept cars explored different ways to express Mazda’s emerging design philosophy and to explore an aesthetic, this one is all about function – every last texture and detail serves some functional purpose. In essence, the Furai creative process boiled down to guiding air over and through the body in fruitful ways. To prove that this concept goes far beyond static aerodynamic analysis, Mazda’s design, motorsports and R&D teams worked together to construct Furai as a 180-mph rolling laboratory to demonstrate its functional capabilities on demand.

Furai not only probes future design possibilities, it also ventures ahead with alternative renewable fuels. Consistent with Mazda’s recently announced “Sustainable Zoom-Zoom” initiatives, Furai’s three-rotor powerplant has been tuned to run powerfully on ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and ethanol gasoline blends. There are exciting advances being made in renewable fuels, from current blends like E10 (10% ethanol and 90% gasoline) with research ongoing in making Ethanol from cellulostic materials, to future renewable gasoline components like Butanol, a higher order alcohol which is fungible with gasoline. The addition of these renewable components improves Mazda’s understanding of how these fuels work with the company’s technology. and reduces the consumption of fossil hydrocarbons and the emission of harmful greenhouse gasses.

© Source: seriouswheels
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Detroit Auto Show: Mazda Furai

So we were all teased with the Mazda Furai teaser photo a few weeks back -- that's the concept car we'll be seeing from the brand all about the "Zoom-Zoom" in two weeks at the Detroit Auto Show. Now we can be teased with the full press shots thanks to Automobile letting the cat out of the bag a wee bit early (and thanks to Edmunds dropping the veil completely). So take a gander at the press shots below and hit the jump to again find out what we know about this concept car cum Courage C65 chassis.

"Furai takes Mazda's unique Nagare (Japanese for "flow") design language a step further as it is translated into a concept car based on an American Le Mans Series (ALMS) racing car. The car utilizes the Courage C65 chassis the company campaigned in the ALMS series only two seasons ago, and the 450-hp three-rotor rotary engine that distinguishes it from anything else on the track."

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