There is a reason more Mazdas are raced on any given weekend than any other brand

Anyone who has been around grassroots racing for any length of time – and especially those who race Mazdas – has likely heard the claim that, “More Mazdas are raced on any given weekend than any other brand.” A look around the paddock at an SCCA or NASA event will likely confirm that statement, but there are hard numbers to back it up: In 2017, the percentage of participants in SCCA production-based racing competing in Mazdas, Majors and Regionals combined, was more than 53 percent. 

Impressively, that figure doesn’t take into account the Mazda-powered Formula Atlantics and Prototypes, or the spec classes of Formula Enterprises and Formula Mazda – the 53 percent number strictly relates to those competing in GT, Production, Touring, Super Touring, B-Spec and Spec Miata. Even if one takes Spec Miata – consistently one of SCCA’s most popular classes which comprises about 43 percent of Mazda’s production-based competitors – out of the equation, Mazda participants still make up 39 percent of SCCA competitors, four times that of the next manufacturer. And, of course, Mazda racers win, scoring Majors victories at a rate double that of any other manufacturer.

Mazda’s director for Mazda Motorsports, John Doonan, believes the reasons for Mazda’s popularity among racers isn’t complicated. It comes down to great cars and great support.

“The reason it happens – the foundation – is that all of the Mazdas that our customers race started out as tremendous road cars,” says Doonan. “So a great road car makes an even better race car. That’s a testament to our engineering staff and to those people who have designed and built the road cars. 

“When those cars become race cars, we have continued to stay the course on a strategy that provides technical and troubleshooting support, and provide direct part sales opportunities for the customers. And then there’s the contingency programs and the Mazda driver development – Mazda Road to 24 and Mazda Road to Indy provide the best opportunities for racers to climb the career ladder from grassroots racing up to the highest levels of pro racing.”

The attitudes that create the atmosphere of enthusiasm and support doesn’t start or end with Doonan and his Mazda Motorsports team – it goes all the way to the top at Mazda. “I have this discussion with the management team every opportunity I have to meet with them,” Doonan says. “From the highest levels of the company, they have continued to bless, endorse and mandate that grassroots racing and having our customers and our fans compete in a Mazda is 100 percent the foundation of our motorsports strategy. They love that Mazda customers choose to invest in racing Mazdas. So we as the motorsports staff have taken it as our task to be the caretaker of that audience and provide the levels of support that keep our customers racing.”

There’s another interesting statistic regarding Mazda racers: they are four times more likely to own a Mazda road car than the general population. It also goes beyond wheel-to-wheel racing, as Mazda continues to provide similar levels of support to its autocross competitors and customers in other forms of motorsports.

“We definitely don’t want to rest on our laurels,” he notes. “We continue to focus on the customer, their experience with us and providing value for them on an ongoing basis. We just established a Southeast support program, we bring parts support to Idemitsu Mazda MX-5 Cup races, we continue to deliver parts in a timely manner no matter where anybody is in the country. We have spread the availability of some of our competition parts out of distribution centers not just in California, but in the Gulf region, in the Southeast, in the Midwest and the Northeast to try to be able to turn around racing customer needs in a more timely manner.

“Simply put, we’re really proud of where we are and our footprint across the whole sport – but grassroots racing is the foundation,” Doonan continues. “It will continue to be so and we will continue to find ways to make our customers happy and to support them in their interest and their hobby and their passion to race. There are a lot of people who work at Mazda that are racers themselves, from our design team to our engineering team to our executives, so there are like-minded individuals in the halls of Mazda.”