Mazda's Unique Furai is Half Racecar and Half Design Exercise:

The car I most ache to drive from the North American International Auto Show is by far the Mazda Furai. I mean, just look at the thing. It's an animal! This is the type of car that I would most often find myself sketching while daydreaming in school. Why can't racecars look this good? The answer, of course, is that in the racing world form following function isn't just a marketing tag line like it so often is in the production car world. Racecars sometimes do end up looking quite good, but it's usually in a purposeful and functional way rather than in an aesthetically beautiful sense.

The Mazda Furai is more than your average concept car. Most show cars look the part, but are dynamic disasters due to their cobbled together chassis and the weight of one-off, custom-made parts. The Furai uses a real chassis. And we're not talking about just any ol' production car chassis, but a chassis from an American Le Mans Series Courage prototype racecar. So my dream of driving the Furai isn't so far-fetched after all. Actually, before this car was put in a container and shipped off to Detroit, Mazda put a couple of its ALMS regulars behind the wheel and had them stretch Furai's legs at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

But beyond the promise of a racing chassis as its base, the Furai is a stunning example of Mazda's current Nagare design language (meaning "flow" in Japanese). Mazda will tell you that the Furai is an attempt at blurring the line between production-car design and racing-car design. But it really seems more like an exercise in pushing the Nagare design language beyond the limiting factors of production cars. Think of it as a hall-pass to the designers at Mazda -- a chance to have some fun while creating a concept car that draws attention to Mazda's design mission. That this car will never see competition on a racetrack is inconsequential. (Although, if looks were speed it would be breaking track records everywhere it went.) But there aren't any racing trophies in the Furai's future, and that's just fine. Because in its mission as a stunning concept car that pushes the limits of Mazda's design language, the Furai is already a winner.