Mazda have announced a return to the top ranks of sportscar racing using two diesel powered Lolas to mount an attack on the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship.
The two Lolas, built by Multimatic, will be powered by Mazda’s SKYACTIV-D diesel engine – making them the only P2 team in the world using diesel engines to power their charges.
“This is the most significant step Mazda has taken towards returning to the global racing stage since our overall victory at Le Mans in 1991,” said John Doonan, director of Mazda Motorsports. “And thanks to our SKYACTIV-D Mazda6 racecars winning nine of 12 Rolex GRAND-AM GX races and the GRAND-AM GX Manufacturers Championship this year, we’re confident that our two prototype cars will challenge the best North America has to offer.”
Indeed the machines will be run by the same team that ran the GX effort – SpeedSource Race Engineering – with Mazda looking for other customer teams to run both the SKYACTIV-D engine and to further develop the existing Mazda6s in the GT Daytona category in 2014.
Sylvain Tremblay, Owner, SpeedSource Engineering noted; “As a racer, you always want to be in the fastest class. The development of the Mazda SKYACTIV-D was a great deal of work by Mazda and SpeedSource and it will be quite the task to take this to the front of the prototype class in only our second year of competition. Mazda and SpeedSource will have a busy November and December of testing as we prepare for Daytona.”
The driver line ups have yet to be revealed but will be announced at the “Roar Before the 24” at Daytona on January 3-5.
