Artist Creates Giant Mazda 787B Mural At Mazda Raceway

Khodrocar - The rotary-powered Mazda 787B is one of the giant achievements in the automaker’s long tenure in motorsports as still the only vehicle from a Japanese company to earn an overall victory in the 1991 24 Hours of Le Mans. To befit the scale of huge achievement, there’s now a massive mural of the important vehicle at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

Artist John Cerney depicts the famous race car on a hunk of plywood that measures a gargantuan 32 feet (9.75 meters) long and 10 feet (3 meters) tall. It shows the Le-Mans-winning number 55 of the Johnny Herbert, Volker Weidler, and Bertrand Gachot driving squad. If you’re traveling to the track, look up at the hill along State Route 68 and see this beastly machine staring down at the lesser vehicles driving by.

The Mazda is the second giant work by Cerney on display at Laguna Seca. In July, the track erected his similarly huge mural that shows motorcycle racing legend Wayne Rainey on a Yamaha.

"The car is huge,” Cerney said in the track’s announcement. "I used 10 sheets to complete this board compared to the six that I used for the Wayne Rainey mural. I strived to get all the little details right from the logos to the body lines. The bright orange and green colors really make it stand out.”

Mazda still races prototypes in the United States, and the company has a new partnership the 16-time Lemans winners at Joest Racing starting with the 2018 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. The first order of business is further development of the RT24-P to fix an issue with a lack of downforce and understeer.

There could be a future for rotary performance from Mazda, too. An evolution of the RX-Vision concept arrives at the Tokyo Motor Show in October, and the automotive world has its collective fingers crossed that vehicle might preview a road-going version.

Source: motor1.com