CAR interactive: your hopes, fears and photos
MYARMS WERE like fire. Burning, screaming, muscles a pile of fizz. They were cramping when I woke up, which makes sense, because they were sore when I went to bed the day before. The car had wrung them dry.
That car. Oof. Undoubtedly the fastest thing I will ever drive. A GTP car, a prototype, the one I will forever think of as my GTP car, because it’s the only one I’ve driven. A 720hp, rotarypowered, 800kg, 10,000-pounds-of-downforce, carbon-tub 1992 Mazda RX-792P.
Me! An ordinary human, who is known by name at his local doughnut shop! In a seat built for men who were also human, but who apparently had arms made of hydraulic cylinders and cocaine. The suede-covered steering wheel was bus-like, a platter. Its size was necessary, because there was no power steering and enough downforce to deorbit the moon. The front tyres looked like 50-gallon drums. The leverage was needed just to coax them into a corner.
I got 15 minutes at the wheel before my arms became porridge in a pile. Below 60mph, inputs just happened, like any other car. Above that, leaning into the tyre was like arm-wrestling a Kelvinator. When my arms went, I began loafing toward apexes, unable to do anything more precise, basking in that dervish of an engine. It was rips and whoops, a buzzsaw shriek-bark that spat the car forward in giddy lunges. Powerband thinner than a sheet of paper. Package like nothing else in history.
Perhaps you have not heard of the RX-792P. This is fair. They made exactly two of them, and those cars raced for just one season, only in America. In 2018, only one RX-792P is left running. It belongs to Mazda. The other example, I’m told, sits on the roof of a bar-and-grill restaurant somewhere in the American South. Decoration. If ground-effect tunnels and an R26B four-rotor – the latter borrowed from Mazda’s Le Mans-winning 787B – forever silenced, could be called decorous. Instead of sacrilege.
But I digress. I stood next to the running 792 last summer, in the paddock at Laguna Seca. I thought about the history. In 1992, Mazda entered the International Motor Sport Association’s top class, GTP, the closest we’ve come to a modern-day Can-Am. Some GTP cars made more downforce than period F1 cars – more than current F1 cars. Mazda went racing there because the FIA had banished the marque’s rotaries from the World Sportscar Championship. The RX-792P was built for IMSA’s sprint races, a 787 gone Incredible Downforce Hulk.
Toyota, which came to dominate the series, reportedly had a $20 million budget. Mazda’s spend was a quarter of that, but the car was designed by Lee Dykstra, a bona-fide genius. The 792 was thus such a potential weapon that Dan Gurney, Toyota’s programme head, told reporters, ‘The Mazdas are coming for us.’
Then, after the first season, funding evaporated. Few remember the cars.
No matter. I remember them now. That day at Laguna, ‘my’ 792 was there as candy, an unrequested bonus. I drove one of Mazda’s house-owned 787s – a similar brand of ridiculous – and then they trotted out the 792. Laps were offered. My brain vapour-locked at the chance. I was reminded of those scenes in
Family Guy where Peter Griffin falls down, face-first, in a single frame. Pulling myself out of the car after, I tripped and almost did the same, exhausted to a husk. It was all oddly inspirational, like losing a fight. Life affirmation via personal fragility.
That drive took place a year ago this month. I thought about that anniversary this morning, wondering if racing, as a sport, was ever going to sort itself and get brassy and absurd again. Mazda no longer plays with racing rotaries, though the company still experiments with the technology. F1 is perpetually too blinded by its own hype to fix its flaws and play engineering jazz again. Though it’s not all bad: I may never drive a GTP car again, but at least I wake up in the morning with full use of my arms.
Who am I kidding? I’d sell them on the black market for just one more lap. That’s a thing, yes? The arm black market? Don’t tell me if it’s not. Not that I have any plans. That would be silly. Brassy. Absurd.