2020 may have marked the end of the world as we knew it, but for a Hikikomori like me, something much bigger to me ended—my nonexistent racing career. It just so happens that the Mazda LM55 Vision Gran Turismo Gr.1 was the last car I ever raced competitively in an FIA race back in January two years ago. A Group 1 race around Circuit de la Sarthe with inconsequential tyre and fuel use, the usual domineer of Gr.1, the TS050, is rendered completely useless in the race with its comparative lack of top end on the speed focused track, opening up the field to a never before seen variety of machinery in competitive FIA races, ranging from technical LMP1 machines more focused on outright speed, to some obscure VGT converts, and even the dinosaurs of the bygone Group C era were viable! I often criticise Group 1 for being one of the most whack categories in the game, but remove the hybrid cars and their fuel advantage and I think we end up with a class that is much more finely balanced than any sane person could've ever fathomed.
In that hypothetical dream scenario, the Mazda LM55 VGT Gr.1 was, as I recall, one of the fastest cars on the time attack leaderboard, being the weapon of choice for aliens such as Nik Makozi. Me? Well, I spent the whole night before and even a bit of the morning of the race panic–designing a Furai tribute livery for the race and got zero practice in, so I was sleep deprived come race day, and well, the completely random track limits pushed me over the edge into deciding to quit Sport Mode entirely. It simply has become too much dedication, too much work, too much stress, too much frustration, too little control over the chaos, and too little fun. It felt more like a stressful job than a hobby. And so I quit to spend probably more time and dedication writing car reviews on a weekly basis while neglecting my real job most of the time to do more research, testing, and writing. Hey, what's a man without his passion, right? At least this is fun. Testing the LM55 Gr.1 this week in Car of the Week then, feels to me like coming a full circle... especially because I was similarly sleep deprived during this week's meet.
*dodges a thrown tomato* "GET TO THE CAR ALREADY!", I hear you yelling from the back of the room in the dark.
Maybe the reason I'm padding the word count by telling you about myself is because I don't know much about the car. All we can know for certain is that this car is NA and AWD, because nowhere has its engine type been confirmed officially to my knowledge, nor has its placement within the car been made clear, though any sane person would have to assume it's rear mid engined given the flat nosed silhouette of the car. The "brap brap brap" at idle, the stratospheric 9,000rpm redline, and its peaky nature all suggest a Wankel Engine, though the number of rotors, its displacement, or the type of fuel the highly adaptable engine uses is still a complete mystery. The whole reveal trailer for the thing is literally some corny Christmas musical before Mazda goes through its usual resume of winning 1991's 24h of Le Mans while harping on its styling and nothing else. How much does it weigh? How much power does it make? Pssssshhhhhh, is that important? You know it's inspired by the 787B and shaped by KODO design philosophy! What else could possibly matter?
So far then, so very typical of a Vision Gran Turismo car: no one has any idea WTF is going on, who the car's for, what it's meant to do, what its specs even are, and what this means for the company or its customers alike. Very surprisingly for a car in Gran Turismo, an area where we know more about the LM55 than any fictional Gran Turismo car is under its sheet metal: there is an official render of a car with its external shell removed, exposing inner mechanicals such as suspension, exhaust routes, its sole gullwing door in its open position, and even a fully rendered interior that went totally unused in Gran Turismo 6! Were opening body parts or a much more detailed cosmetic damage model ever in the cards for the Gran Turismo series? Or did Mazda go the extra mile in designing their Vision Gran Turismo car because they're passionate, detail oriented folk? Only the team who worked on it can say for sure.
The interior of the LM55 VGT as seen in Gran Turismo Sport.
While Gran Turismo Sport does give the LM55 a new interior, it's clear that the interior in Sport is of a completely separate design from the initial render. With a two–tone interior based on the exterior paint of the car and an immensely helpful HUD on the windshield using Mazda's old font, it certainly looks more uplifting than the initial render, which looks much more soulle- I mean, race focused. A neat detail in the interior to me is how the car's ingress and egress point is very clearly the right side, just like a proper LMP car. Very oddly for a racing car however, the interior of the LM55 in Sport features... air con vents? And no reverse camera? Why do I get the feeling this is the work of PD and not Mazda?
In darker areas of the track, such as in tunnels, the mirrored HUD can even be seen from the outside of the car! How cool is that?
With a fully fleshed out interior, it's such a shame that the car's windshield and windows still retain their high opacity and blackened look, as though still trying to hide a lack of an interior. I personally dislike tinted windows, as it just somehow makes a car look smug and haughty, like sunglasses on a person, and I automatically assume a person to be a jackass if they use either. Is that a fault of mine or the car? Probably mine. I still don't like them, though. I think clear polycarbonate windows would suit the airy theme of a car painted in Atmospheric White with SkyActiv Technology better than TAMIYA sticker windows.
So, we know the interior has been revamped for the LM55's return in Sport. The real question however, is whether its handling has been updated for Sport, because back in October of 2017, Car of the Week tested the LM55 in Gran Turismo 6, where the crew found... a distinct lack of the Jinba–Ittai feeling any good Mazda should have, to put it lightly. To summarise if you for some reason don't want to read it straight from the horses'... mouths?, the car suffered from horrendous understeer and braking distances longer than the legacy of the Rotary Engine, both of which may be attributed to the excessive camber angle PD gave all racecars in a later patch—1.5 and 3.5 degrees front and rear respectively, causing more than 6 degrees of separation between itself and the road. Now, Gran Turismo Sport is hardly the game that even gets close to replicating a car's real tendencies and behaviour if their horrendous MR GT3 cars are anything to go by, and so things just seem destined to go from bad to worse for the LM55... unless of course, if two wrongs make a right.
And I'm very pleased to say that that does indeed seem to be the case for the LM55! The detuned Gr. 1 version of it, at least!
While I've previously expressed slight doubt regarding the engine placement of the LM55, any scepticism in the name of being factual gets erased immediately when one pulls the steering wheel off centre in the car—the featherweight front end immediately slices in to hunt down the apex of a corner like only a rear mid engined racecar can if you as much partially lift on the throttle, the ferocity and precision of which I'd go as far as to argue exceeds that of many racing cars that are being trail braked. The LM55 truly blends together the best of a rear mid engine layout with All Wheel Drive, while cancelling out the weaknesses of each, and it almost feels like Driving Nirvana at times because of it. One would have to think that a car with such an eager front end would usually have very loose handling, like a fighter jet that's intentionally unstable, but the rear end of the car has never once threatened to break away from me no matter what my half awake self had unfairly thrown at the car, from corner entry to exit, through bumpy rumble strips or even slight off road excursions, no matter what brake bias I've tried with it. Whatever the situation, the LM55's front tyres will always be the limiting factor before the rears ever approach theirs, making for a very easy, stable drive that can be pushed almost to the point of abuse. I have no idea what the centre torque split of the car is, but I wouldn't want to mess with it even if I could! Thanks to this miraculous AWD system, it allows drivers to give it that much more gas that much earlier in a turn in comparison to other MR racecars I've sampled. Because it's driven purely by an ICE engine without turbos or hybrid systems mucking up the power delivery, there are never any nasty surprises with over or understeer like the LMP1-H cars are liable to spring; just a smooth, gradual raise in power and torque with the revs. With eight closely geared forward cogs, you'll always have revs for any corner as well!
As if Gran Turismo Sport doing justice to a car isn't big enough a surprise, the fact that this package comes courtesy of Mazda of all companies is just mind boggling! Mazda is probably one of the very last companies to come to mind for anyone when the topics of stellar rear mid engined cars or AWD systems come up. After all, the only AWD systems the company makes are just FWD converts, and quite literally the only rear mid engined road car I can think of that can be associated with Mazda is the AZ-1, which didn't even start life as a Mazda, nor ever bore its badge. I really think they should try thinking out of their comfortable, front engined box more! MR layouts are rare for Mazda even in concept car land, but when they do somehow decide to make one, it stuns the entire world and leaves an unforgettable silhouette in its wake, such as the Furai, and now the LM55.
I swear to god, if the engineers at Mazda somehow manage to get a two door, two seat, rear mid mounted NA Rotary sports car with AWD greenlit, I would happily clean their restrooms for the rest of my life if it means that I could be part of the team that helps make it possible! I really do think rear mid engine, AWD makes all the mechanical sense in the world, and the LM55 is proof of that!
...right?
Well... the LM55 is a non TS050 car in Gr. 1, which renders it immediately outclassed and therefore useless in this highly competitive game. The LMP1-H cars can hang with the LM55 in the corners, and will blow the latter's gullwing door off SkyActiv high on the straights with their hybrid power. The LM55, or indeed any non hybrid car, will need a high speed stretch of road, such as the back straight of Maggiore for example, to reel in the hybrid cars and stand a sporting chance against them, and the LM55 is no different. Despite having excellent fuel economy, it is, again, say it with me now: not a hybrid, which means it loses out on longevity as well. The braking prowess of the car, a noted sore point in GT6, has also been addressed, but still leaves something to be desired—the car stops well enough for its power and mass, but it's still not amazing, spectacular, or anything of the sort. In comparison to its Gr. 1 brethren, I find that it still requires markedly earlier braking points, especially for high speed braking zones. With eight forward gears to shift through, your left fingers would be incessantly busy in braking zones, as though furiously scratching an itch that just won't go away. I mean, I get it, it's a peaky Rotary Engine car set up for Le Mans, but isn't eight gears a bit too much? You could probably achieve more with the game's sole aftermarket gearbox option—a fully customisable seven speed.
However, it's not even the car's competitive shortcomings that I dislike the most about it. Rather, it's the sound of the car that grates on me. It sounds like it was copied and pasted as–is from the public registry of ear rapists that is Gran Turismo 6. It sounds phony, plasticky... synthesised. Monophonic. I'm no audiophile, so please forgive me if I misuse terms or don't know what I'm talking about. While other engine notes raise and lower in frequency with revs, the engine note across the rev range of the LM55 sounds to me almost like it's made up of several sound samples of increasing frequency from each other. When the car's revs climb, it sounds like the game simply switches between the sound samples on the fly, and it's as jarring as sliding down a flight of stairs when you were expecting a waterslide. It also sounds just like a sound sample, instead of a sound in a 3D space with reverb... I can't describe it well. It just sounds incredibly flat to me.
I consider myself a Mazda fanboy, and I love their Wankel Engines with an obsessive passion, but the engine in the LM55, whatever it's supposed to be, is just... eww. It's so bad that it makes me never want to ever touch this car unless I have to. I even prefer the similarly phony sound of the 787B in this game than the LM55's engine note, and that's saying something.
In conclusion, I... still don't really know how I feel towards the LM55. It's a VGT, and despite having two versions of itself, both are equally useless. It sounds stupid and awful, and its mechanicals and specifications are just a murky mystery at best. But, it drives like a dream, looks stellar, has shown improvements in its interior, and even has unseen mechanicals rendered! For what it's worth, it's by far the single best driving VGT I've ever driven, and proof that Mazda goes several extra miles even in their off time, break room creations, which is just one of the very many reasons why they're the single best car company ever, bar none. Yes, I'll even fight anyone who disagrees.
