So, I'm coming back from a month–and–a–half hiatus after my Logitech G29 wheel broke, and while now armed with a slightly more upmarket Thrustmaster T300RS, I'm still coming to learning the ins and outs of the new hardware, and so when presented with the liberty of picking this week's car, I knew that I had best pick something I was already familiar with. Something that's easy to get to grips with and forgiving if mishandled. And if it also happens to be readily available in the Brand Centrals of both GTS and GT7, that'd just be the cherry on top of a cherry cake. Does such a car exist?
Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone else in between, the Mazda Atenza Gr.4: the car that's been with me throughout the entirety of my two–year tryhard journey into the game's eponymous Sport Mode, during which I had only signed exclusively with Mazda. Needless to say, I'm very, very familiar with how this thing drives.
You wanna know what else I'm familiar with? Losing. A lot. With this car.
Now, don't get me wrong; with the current Balance of Performance setting it at 103% power and 99% mass, the Atenza looks menacingly quick on paper, being just the third most powerful Gr.4 car behind only the GT-R and Veyron. It is also slightly lighter than average, being 11th lightest in a field of 28—not too shabby at all for a car that drives all four of its wheels, and utterly insane for a third most powerful car in its class. However, the Atenza only enjoyed these stats near the end of the game's support, when Mazda suddenly became an official partner of Gran Turismo and introduced the RX-Vision GT3 to the game. Prior to that, the Atenza Gr.4 had always languished at 104% power and 100% mass—that's right, this abysmal Atenza you see before you today? That's with the power of politics buffing its longevity and cornering speed. Can you imagine how dumb and blindly loyal a person would have to be to Stan for Mazda before this political buff?
With numbers like that backing it, it ought to be a wonder and a half how the Atenza Gr.4 isn't a top contender in its category. As is customary with cars that have strong straight line shove, the Atenza isn't that apt when the roads twist and meander. While possessing a slightly improved 60:40 weight distribution over the road car's 63:37, it's still massively front heavy by racecar standards, especially when it feels like it's centre of gravity hasn't been lowered any, as though the Gr.4 car still has a big, tall, heavy diesel block underneath its aggressively perforated bonnet. What this results in is a car that, while beginner friendly and difficult to upset, is in the same vein markedly more unwilling to slice into corners and bite apexes, even in comparison to other front engined cars in its category like the RCZ, much less mid engined supercars with their low, svelte bodies. Drivers will have to exert notably more effort into fighting the wheel to push the heavy nose of the car into the apex, and the Atenza very much feels like an FF car to drive, wherein the front end does all the work and the rear end simply follows with no opinions or objections.
"Big deal, that sounds like a typical trade off for having a speedy car in the straights, what makes an Atenza as awful as you make it sound?", you might be thinking at this point. What makes the Atenza TRULY awful is that it pays more than the due price for its straight line speed, but it still gets overshadowed by the GT-R when a power focused track arises. And so what we end up with is a car whose entire point is eclipsed by many other cars in its category that can beat it at what it does best and do more, such as the GT-R and the FF menaces. In fact, if there's one thing the Atenza might do better than any other car in Gr.4, it'd be eating tyres... in a category with FF cars.
Don't ask me to explain it, because I have no idea WHY THE HELL the tyres on the Atenza go off as quickly as they do. All I can tell you is what it feels like behind the wheel: as if the mechanics didn't have time to properly align the suspension and decided instead to just coat the tyres with a layer of liquid glue to give the requisite grip. Once you hit the track, the first few corners feel incredible, almost in disbelief that a sedan chassis can handle this neutrally and immediately, but near the end of the lap, when the tyres have shed all the glue, the massively cambered tyres not only offer zero grip, but also start to aggressively autocannibalise, forcing drivers to alter their driving even before the end of a 2 minute lap—and don't go assuming I'm talking about races with insane wear rates like 10x or something; I'm talking about just plain ol' 1x. I think I've taken wanks longer than the tyre life of the Atenza Gr.4.
At this point, I don't even know if there's really any point to rag on the Atenza Gr.4 any further. Yes, there's more. In the interest of completion, I shall also complain about the the entire drivetrain of the Atenza Gr.4. I'm not sure what kind of engine PD put into the Atenza for Gr.4 competition, but whatever ended up taking the place of the road car's diesel engine is more rotary than a rotary is a rotary—the nondescript 2.2L Inline 4 is so awfully peaky that, even when shifted at redline, clicking in the right paddle feels less like upshifting a car and more like disassembling a running engine. Compound this with the fact that the in–game tachometer flashes for an upshift way too early at roughly 6,900rpm when fuel cut is at 7,500 means that the game will shift the car way too early if left in AT, which means that players who opt not to shift for themselves will suffer a massive disadvantage—enough to lose several positions off a standing grid start. You can immediately forget about any race that requires you to save fuel as well, since short shifting completely asphyxiates the peaky car. So obscene is the power drop with each upshift that I've even come to memorise at which exact speed in km/h to make upshifts in the Atenza Gr.4: DON'T, 122, 156, 196, and 235. Because it has gears wide apart from each other and a peaky engine, the Atenza will hazardously bog at low speed scenarios, such as launching from a standstill and coming out of the asinine chicanes of Monza, and that is such a crying shame since the AWD ought to have been such a weapon in propelling a car out of these low speed sections past its 2WD competition, especially when absent any aerodynamic grip. If the Atenza is going to be so terrible at these low speed sections where AWD would make the most sense, why is it saddled with the mass of having AWD? Give it the OP straight line speed of the FFs or the tyre life of an FR and take away it's AWD then!
Overall, the Atenza Gr.4 is a perfect catastrophe of mismatched parts that almost looks intentionally awful: comically bad tyre wear, only slightly strong acceleration, rather weak turn in, horrifically peaky engine, and overall just good for nothing. It's almost hard to believe that a group of professionals have come together to create this bespoke, built to spec racecar in a liberating virtual setting without any logistics or costs to hinder them. In fact, I'm even going one step further in my slagging of the Atenza Gr.4: I think an independent tuner in real life could build a faster, more cohesive Mazda out of a small shop in Chiba. I think that the RE Amemiya Boost Up 7, primarily built to attack winding mountain passes, is just a set of Racing Hard tyres away from sticking it to the purpose built racecar on the latter's home turf: a smooth, wide open racetrack.
The tale of the tape goes as follows: even without the boosts afforded to the Atenza by Bias of Performance, the Amemiya FD is still slightly down on power, measuring in at 367HP (274kW) versus the Atenza's showroom condition 393HP (293kW). However, the Amemiya is a whopping 150 kilos (308lbs) lighter than the Atenza at 1,240kg (2,734lbs). The big story in this fight however, isn't in power and mass, but rather, in the gearboxes—the Amemiya FD is saddled with a 5 speed stick with an overdrive 5th gear, and it's going up against the Atenza's straight cut sequential 6 speed racing unit. Oh, and the Amemiya FD has been noted by many of us here at COTW—myself included—to be a twitchy demon of a thing to wrangle around a racetrack. And so what we end up with here is a showdown of two extremely different cars each based on a production Mazda; of power and stability versus free spirited agility. Factory versus private. But which one comes out on top?
The Boost Up 7 feels to me like it has been set up to take these Racing Hard tyres by default, because its characteristic nervousness at its limits has been almost completely stifled by the full racing slicks, and any twitchiness that remains can be very quickly caught and easily corrected with just a quick flash of counter steer. What hasn't changed at all is how much of a joy Ama–san's creation is to drive; the aftermarket street brakes hold their own against the slotted racing discs of the Atenza thanks in no small part to the latter's unwieldy heft, and when I turn the steering wheel in the 7, it feels as if the car as a whole rotates around my bum, in sharp contrast to the sensation the Atenza gives of having to fight the front end, which in turn has to fight the rest of the car simply to turn. And while similarly optimally shifted at around 7,500rpm, that is a mere piddling mid range in the Wankel Rotary's rev range, with the Boost Up 7 redlining at a hair–raising 8,500rpm. Its punchy mid range torque and ample headroom in the rev range not only lets the RWD road car out–launch the AWD racecar, but it also let me hang onto a lower gear if fast approaching a braking zone instead of forcing me to shift and waste crucial time, a luxury that is beyond even fantasising about in the Atenza.
In the end, I had a hard fought battle with all of the Atenzas, lag spiking one into the shadow realm (sorry Rob...) and beating all but one when the chequered flag dropped at the end of the four lap sprint. Losing to Vic isn't very telling; it's like saying the sun rose this morning. And so I thought to run the two cars at 100% power and mass on racing hards at Suzuka again, and uh...
I got the exact same time for both cars, down to the thousandth of a second.
So what's the point of all this? Why compare two cars that are built to do very different things? That'd be like saying that an F1 car is quicker than a Group B car; they're built with different budgets, goals, and rulesets in mind. What I aimed to demonstrate with my very elaborate stunt is that Mazda desperately needs a much better representative in Gr.4 if it's to have any legitimate chance of making it onto the big stage with the likes of Porsche and Toyota—and that it has easy access to much better alternatives that would be much more suited to serve as a base for a racecar. Imagine if RE Amemiya built a GT4 RX-7. How awesome would that be? Granted, the FD RX-7 is an ancient dinosaur in the automotive industry, but that hasn't stopped the 458 or Evo X from representing their brands in this game, has it? Surely the RX-8 would qualify as a homologation model? Hell, if Mazda is fine with fictional cars taking the stage, why not the Vision Coupe, a newer concept that bowed two years after the RX-Vision? Hell, if we can have an RX-Vision GT3, why not also an RX-Vision GT4?
The Atenza Gr.4 is just inexcusably bad, and there's very little reason I can see as to why it hasn't been fixed yet or replaced completely. Maybe Polyphony Digital has just given up on Gr.4 as a whole, I dunno. When was the last time we had a Gr.4 race at a World Tour event, anyway?
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