NEW MUSEUM IS DEDICATED TO MAZDA MODELS

IT’S USUALLY premium brands that attract the most fervent fan bases, but one lifelong family of car addicts have set up their own museum in Germany for a very unusual collection. Walter Frey has been collecting Mazdas since 1980, when he bought a Cosmo Sport while in the US. Along with his sons Joachim and Markus, the family also became one of the very first Mazda dealers in Germany and has amassed an extraordinary collection of not only some of the rarest Mazdas, but some of the rarest cars ever sold.

Frey Senior was drawn to the Mazda brand by his own passion for engineering. After the NSU brand was wound up by Volkswagen, Mazda was the only carmaker left producing rotary-engined cars and Frey’s love of engineering was a natural fit with Mazda’s unique selling point.

Over the intervening decades, the Frey family collected rare Mazda models from the USA, Australia and Japan, to build up an even larger collection of road vehicles than that owned by the parent company in Hiroshima. Many of the cars have personal meaning to the Freys too, including an RX-5 that Walter bought in the UK, drove around on a family holiday and then took home to Germany. The collection even includes a Mazda RX-7 once donated by Mazda to Felix Wankel, the inventor of the rotary engine that has become synonymous with the brand, even though Wankel himself had no driving licence!

With such a large stable of cars – more than 120 – it seemed natural to turn the family obsession into a collection available to the public. The Frey family spent years looking for the right place to exhibit the cars and eventually found, with the help of city officials in Augsburg, Germany, a disused tram depot.

The equivalent of a listed building, the Freys had to spend months sensitively renovating the facility, including replacing the entire roof which was in danger of collapse.

With support and sponsorship from Mazda Germany, the tram depot has now been transformed into a museum and events location. Only around 45 cars from the collection can be housed in the museum, and those that are exhibited will be shuffled so that no two visits to Automobil Museum Frey will be the same.

The Freys have more than 120 Mazdas in their collection and their museum rotates which models go on show.