Tom Matano was a little shocked when he first visited Mazda’s design studio in Hiroshima. He joined the company in 1983 to head up the California design studio at the newly formed Mazda Research of America (MRA). At the time, his colleagues in Japan were working on the second-generation FC RX-7 and the studio might as well have been a shrine to the Porsche 944, with posters, magazines, and an actual car parked inside.
The logic went something like this: The RX-7 was to be a 944 competitor, so the design team should benchmark that car.
“I think the mindset of the Japanese—similar to the Chinese—is they’re not thinking, they’re copying,” Matano says. “The mentality of the West is that this is plagiarism or copying somebody’s effort. [The Japanese] think, ‘We admire it, so we’ll take it in and make it our own.’ It’s not a creative process.”
It’s no surprise that the FC RX-7 has more than a passing resemblance to the 944. For the third-generation RX-7, the FD, Matano took a very different approach, and along with his team, created arguably the most beautiful Japanese car ever built. They had no 944 parked in the studio for inspiration. They had a Ferrari.
Matano was born and raised in Japan, but his first jobs as a designer were with GM in Detroit and Australia, and BMW in Munich. He puts a strong emphasis on not copying the work of others, and on honoring the creative process.
Design work on the FD RX-7 began in 1987, with a competition between Mazda’s Hiroshima and Yokohama studios, an independent firm in the UK, and Matano’s studio at MRA. Mazda whittled down eight proposals made into scale models to two, one from Hiroshima, one from MRA. (Jack Yamaguchi and John Dinkel’s excellent The Mazda RX-7: Mazda’s Legendary Sports Car has a ton of great photos and information on the original design proposals. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in diving deeper into the RX-7.)
The Hiroshima design was quite modern, with cab-forward proportions inspired by Mazda’s sports prototype race cars. MRA’s design was quite different.
“Pretty much, my personal wish or goal was to make it a timeless design,” Matano recalls. He thought it might be the last time Mazda ever made a car like this. The FD RX-7 was to use a similar mechanical layout as its predecessor, the FC RX-7 Turbo II. A turbocharged twin-rotor engine mounted behind the front axle, two-seat cabin—with the option of vestigial rear seats in the home market—rear-wheel drive. With the Miata arriving soon, he figured that the RX-7 that came after the FD would be mid-engined, with something like a three-rotor engine.
It seems a crazy thought, a mid-engine RX-7, but this was also the height of Japan’s asset-price bubble, when a booming economy led automakers to sink huge development resources into technically radical cars. Despite being much smaller than Toyota, Honda, and Nissan, Mazda was also going out on a limb with the Miata, the three-rotor Eunos Cosmo, the gullwing-doored Autozam AZ-1, and a full-on luxury brand in the form of Amati. While a mid-engine RX-7 seems fanciful now, decades after the bubble burst, it wasn’t then.
Matano also felt he had something to prove. “I wanted to show Mazda how a timeless design can be done,” he says. “It’s a process, not just a designer’s vision, but it’s a process that was a little bit different than what they were doing.”
Of the two final proposals, Mazda executives chose MRA’s, which was borne from a sketch done by Wu-Huang Chin, a young Taiwanese designer. (Chin declined to be interviewed for this story.) Matano’s own proposal owed more to earlier Mazda’ rotary sports cars, with the distinctive B-pillar of the original FB RX-7 and the segmented semi-circle taillights of the Cosmo Sport.
Matano suspects that the California team had some advantages in the competition. Hiroshima is cold and overcast; Orange County is the opposite. The final choice between MC and MRA proposals was also held at the grand opening of Mazda’s new Irvine, California R&D facility in May, 1988.
“The choice would have been even more difficult to make, had the review taken place in Hiroshima,” Shigenori Fukuda, Mazda’s design director at the time, said in The Mazda RX-7. “Southern California is one of the sports car meccas of the world. The sun is brighter there: every line and surface speaks more eloquently.”
There, the appeal of the MRA concept was obvious to Mazda executives.
Chin’s design reflected his preference towards larger GT cars, like his beloved Jaguar E-Type. Matano’s was a bit more lithe, more athletic. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool sports car guy, responsible for the final design of the original Miata. Takaharu “Koby” Kobyakawa, the program manager for the FD, was clear in his ambitions to make a true sports car. Per Brian Long’s RX-7 Mazda’s Rotary Engine Sports Car, Koby’s team adopted the phrase “RE Best Pure Sports” as a guiding principle. “In the end, [we had] the fluidity of Chin’s body surfacing with the agility and proportion of my design,” Matano says.
With direction set, Mazda sent Chin to Hiroshima to work with the team there while designer Yoichi Sato was appointed chief designer of the FD and decamped to California with other members of his team. It was around this time that the Ferrari showed up.
“My idea was since this was timeless, it should have the essence of staying power or the presence of the 275 GTB, a car that’s proven to have stood the test of time,” Matano says.
Better to use a classic Ferrari as inspiration than a contemporary competitor, which could age poorly. In the late 1980s, the 275 GTB had proven to be an all-time looker.
Fortuitous timing played into Matano’s hands. He wasn’t specifically looking for a 275, but he had a friend with a yellow one who needed a place to keep the car while it awaited restoration. Matano offered the Mazda design studio as storage, where it could also serve as inspiration for the team working on the RX-7. A win-win.
Other cars came in as well, like Chin’s E-Type and Matano’s De Tomaso Vallelunga. Mazda in America also had earlier RX-7s and a Cosmo Sport. The friend with the yellow Ferrari also brought over a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing.
“Because he’s a good friend, and he’s trustworthy, every once in a while, I had him come in and take a look at our cars, Matano recalls. “When the RX-7 was taking shape and we colored it silver, we said ‘This looks like a Gullwing!’” On a weekend, the friend brought over the Gullwing and parked it in a courtyard with the RX-7.
Taking the RX-7 outdoors with the 275 had some interesting effects, too.
“When we had it in the studio, and we were comparing it to our clay models and stuff, we thought we had pretty good presence against that car,” Matano says. “Then one day we took it out to the courtyard, and that 275 gained more muscle and power, 20-30% more than what we were looking at inside.”
Ever the philosopher, Matano suspects that Pininfarina, the design house responsible for the 275, innately understood how to make cars look good outdoors. “When you put it into open air their bodies kind of tense up to support the pressure around them, as opposed to indoors with limited airspace.”
Still, he’s quick to note the mechanical differences between a 275 GTB and an RX-7. Namely that the Ferrari has a big V-12 under its hood, whereas the RX-7 sports a super compact twin-rotor. And Mazda didn’t want the RX-7 to be disingenuous. It wanted an ultra-light, ultra-pure car, with bodywork shrink wrapped around the mechanical components.
Throughout 1988, Mazda designers refined the FD’s design. A later change saw Mazda increasing the originally specified width of the car when it decided it didn’t want to fit Japan’s small-car class, allowing for wider tires. By the end of 1989, what we now recognize as the FD RX-7 was basically complete.
The car launched as a 1993 model just a few months after Mazda’s triumphant 1991 Le Mans win, the first and only for a rotary-powered car. It was, in every way, a stunner. Its beauty matched only by superb driving dynamics, thanks to the work of Koby and his expert team.
Not for reasons he expected, Matano was right about the FD—it was the last of its kind. The bubble burst and Mazda never made another RX-7. Its next and final rotary sports car, the RX-8, was to be cheaper and more usable than the high-tech, uncompromising FD. In the U.S., the FD RX-7 was only on sale for three model years, 1993-1995. It soldiered on in Japan until 2002, at which point production topped 68,589 units, just 8.5% of the total for the RX-7.
Yet, the FD has been redeemed. Values have skyrocketed in the U.S. as interest around 1990s Japanese performance cars has grown and attrition has eaten into the few that were sold here. And as a design, the FD RX-7 is unquestionable.
“Overall, I think we did what we wanted to do, and proved our point after 30 years,” Matano says.
An enormous thank you to Mazda North American Operations for providing its RX-7, Bruce Meyer for providing his Ferrari 275 GTB/4, and to the Petersen Automotive Museum for providing a location and helping facilitate this whole shoot.
