Mazda Motorsports is ready for a busy weekend in Houston and Watkins Glen - Speedway Digest

At this stage last year, Mazda had scored three of their nine wins with the SKYACTIV-D Mazda6 in the Grand-Am GX class on their way to the manufacturers’ championship. For 2014, however, the team has made a massive step up to the highest level, with Mazda now racing in the top prototype class of the new TUDOR United SportsCar Championship.

“As racers, we won’t be happy until we win races and challenge for championships,” noted John Doonan, Director of Motorsports for Mazda North American Operations. “As a car company, developing new technology in the harshest of environments, we couldn’t be happier with how the season has progressed. This is year two of a five year plan, and we have lived up to the Mazda standard of Courage, Creativity, and Conviction. After the sprint races, it will be great to return to a true endurance race, one where our SKYACTIV efficiency has an opportunity to pay off in terms of fewer pitstops. We knew that coming to a new series with the smallest engine would be a challenge, but that’s why we race – to build better cars. We are asking our race engine to do three times the workload of the production engine – a huge task. We are now within a few percentage points of the lap speeds of the fastest cars while beating everyone on fuel economy. Our collective efforts will be rewarded.”

While the team is still chasing their first win of the season, the progress has been dramatic with significant gains made at each race. Since the opening race, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, the Mazda SpeedSource team has been operating on an almost 24/7 level developing the powertrain and chassis. At each race, the team has brought new hardware to test in real world race conditions. Since the first race, there has only been one mechanical DNF, and both cars ran flawlessly at Detroit. The latest improvements, focused on cooling, include:

The additional of a cooling fan on the high pressure intercooler
The addition of radiator extraction louvers on the top of the sidepods
A change from a single pass to a dual pass radiator
Ongoing optimization of engine mapping for efficient shifting

For Watkins Glen, the regular driver lineups of Sylvain Tremblay and Tom Long in the #70 and Joel Miller and Tristan Nunez in the #07 will be supplemented by Ben Devlin and Tristan Vautier. Miller and Nunez scored the GX class win in 2013 in their Mazda6. To make the racing as accessible as possible, Mazda will once again be offering a live ‘second screen’ during the race. Fans watching the race live on FOX Sports1 can simultaneously ride along in the Mazda cars via the Mazda YouTube channel.

In addition to the TUDOR Championship race, the Watkins Glen weekend will also feature round six of the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge and a doubleheader for the Cooper Tires IMSA Prototype Lites Powered by Mazda.

Mazda leads the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge Street Tuner Manufacturers’ Championship thanks to three straight wins. Freedom Autosport and CJ Wilson Racing will both have their MX-5’s ready to do battle with BMW, Porsche, Honda, Nissan, and Hyundai. This race will be on Saturday morning.

MX-5 fans will also want to follow the action from the streets of Houston where rounds five and six of the SCCA Pro Racing Mazda MX-5 Cup Presented by BFGoodrich Tires will take place. John Dean II and Kenton Koch have each scored a pair of wins in the first four races.

With Mazda being a leading player in all aspects of sports car racing with an emphasis on endurance road racing, every weekend provides a new challenge for the brand in various levels of motorsports. Mazda is the number-one brand for road-racers across North America among both club racers and professionals, and thousands of Mazda-powered grassroots racers compete in various classes with the SCCA and NASA highlighted by Spec Miata, the world’s largest spec class with over 2,500 cars built.

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Adam Sinclair

NHRA, IHRA, Motocross and other forms of motorsports Staff writer
About Me: Adam has been a race fan since the first time he went through the tunnel under the Daytona International Speedway almost 30 years ago. He has had the privilege of travelling to races all across the state of Florida (as well as one race in Ohio), watching nearly everything with a motor compete for fame and glory, as well as participating in various racing schools to get the feel of what racecar drivers go through every week. Adam has spent the last three years covering motorsports for Examiner.com., where he had the opportunity to see the racing world from behind the scenes as well as the grandstands. He invites everyone to follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, and looks forward to sharing his enthusiasm for all things racing with the readers of SpeedwayDigest.com.Be sure to tune in for his weekly sports talk program, Thursday Night Thunder, where he discusses the latest in motorsports news with drivers, crew members, and fans. The show takes place every Thursday at 8:00 pm EST on the Speedway Digest Radio Network.