How Our Little Shrunken Mazda Race Car Won Monterey Car Week

I know that, technically, the winner of Monterey Car Week is probably thought to be the Best of Show winner at the Concurs d’Elegance, which in the case of this year was a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster, a stunning car with an estimated value of nearly $24,000. Wait, that can’t be right? Can it? It has to be more than that. Screw it, I don’t care, and sure, that Dusenberg is lovely machine, but the idea that it somehow “won” car week is reductive and silly and, look, just wrong.

I know this because we, The Autopian, won Car Week. With an Autozam AZ-1 dressed up to look like a Ferrari F40 with XPEL’s color PPF and then dressed up on top of that to look like a Mazda Le Mans car.

I know you’re probably thinking that I’m biased, that there’s no way I can reasonably make such a claim, but I would emplore you to hear me out, because I saw, with my very own eyebones, just how this little car made people react and feel, all over the area, all week. People – all sorts of people, from the most wealthy of car-collecting bluebloods to the young car-addled teens who were swarming all over the place – were delighted when this little monster burbled on by.

 

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I’m not kidding! From the moment we first loaded this thing onto its trailer – pulled by a livery-matching Mazda CX-90 to make a perfect set – people were stopping and staring and smiling, giving thumbs up freely, a very different finger from what I’m used to seeing gestured my way.

 

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Was it a pain to get on and off the trailer? Hell yeah it was. It was so narrow it barely was able to straddle the ramps of the trailer, and it rides so low we had to remove the whole front clip every time, and use wood planks to keep it from high centering as it drove onto the trailer. So once we got it to Monterey, we decided we’d just be sure to drive it everywhere, and that was by far the best choice, because, again, everyone who saw the 787bb loved it.

 

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Incredibly, thanks to Mazda, we were able to park it next to the real 787b race car, the first Japanese car to win at Le Mans, and the first (and still only) rotary-powered car to accomplish that incredible feat.

I was mostly surprised by how not-small the tiny Kei-class Autozam AZ-1 seemed next to the real 787b Le Mans car. I think I forgot just how low those race cars are. In my head, I imagined the race car absolutely dwarfing the little Autozam, but while it was definitely bigger, the size differential was a lot more minor than I would have guessed.

 

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While the 787bb may not have looked especially diminutive next to the real 787b, it looked pretty damn tiny everywhere else in the world, which is part of what made it so appealing to everyone. Influencers with followings larger than the city I grew up in wanted to drive the car, and sometimes, we let them:

 

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It really was a treat to drive: it handles like a go-kart, it’s surprisingly quick for having only (allegedly) 64 hp, and it makes a fantastic symphony of sounds, burbles and growls and hisses from the wastegate and pops and warbles – it sounds so much better than a 660cc engine has any right to sound.

 

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There’s something freeing about driving a car that is, essentially, an elaborate joke. All claims of pretension are gone, and you can just enjoy the car for all of its silly glory, openly and unashamedly.

 

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Driving a car that you can actually see making people happy everywhere you go is a genuine joy. It’s intoxicating, really, because as you drive around you feel like you’re radiating this sphere of happiness, and as people get engulfed by this sphere, you can actually watch their moods change, their eyes light up, their glum and dreary day get eliminated by the little rolling wad of delight that you’re piloting around. It feels incredible, and I think everyone should experience it at some point.

Somehow, this absurd little pretend racecar made everywhere it went a little better, a little happier, and a lot more fun. That includes on the carpet at Motorlux or in a random parking lot or on the grass at the Concurs D’Lemons. Anywhere.

 

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The little 787bb ended up in countless social media posts, reels, videos, personal snapshots, Polaroids, and who knows what else. Matt, our publisher, wants me to give actual hard numbers about how many posts or clicks or views or likes it got, but I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like doing all that math. It’s a lot.

This was all sort of Matt’s idea, anyway, to wrap the Ferarri F40-bodykitted Autozam in Mazda 787b livery. I wasn’t sure people would get such a deep cut, but I not only underestimated the Car Week crowd, but also didn’t realize that the real 787b would be such a big part of Car Week.

I’m very happy to have been wrong.

This little car was such a hit, and that makes me so happy. I’m just not sure how we’ll top it next year?

[Ed note: I’d just add that this was a group effort. David mentioned to XPEL–our sponsor of the Murano CrossCab last year–that we had an AZ-1. I had the crazy idea to wrap it after I saw how well the orange matched. Beau then reached out to Mazda who said they were bringing the actual 787b and it all sort of fell into place after that. Thank you to everyone who helped with this project, including the folks at Galpin Auto Sports who had to put this together in basically no time. – MH]