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2014 Mazda Skyactiv Prototype looks ready for Daytona

With less than two weeks before the Mazda Skyactiv Prototype makes its race debut at the 2014 Rolex 24 at Daytona, the Japanese Zoom-Zoom brand brought its diesel-powered racer to the floor of the 2014 Detroit Auto Show.
The red prototype marks Mazda's return to prototype racing, and will campaign the inaugural Tudor United SportsCar Championship using a 2.2-liter, SkyActiv-D diesel engine. With 451 horsepower on tap and 580 pound-feet of torque, the racer should stand up well against a field of gas-powered competitors.
Should the Skyactiv win Daytona, it'll be a coup for Mazda. The racer is running an engine with over 50 percent of its parts drawn from the oft-delayed production Skyactiv-D. Head up top for our full gallery of images of the new Skyactiv Prototype. The 2014 Rolex 24 will be run from January 25 to 26.

2014 Mazda6 i Sport

In an automotive landscape dominated by platform sharing, technology exchange and any number of other cross-fertilization/cost-saving/amortization exercises, it's actually pretty rare that we get to drive a new car that is as "all-new" as this, the 2014 Mazda6. With brand-spanking new Skyactiv architecture throughout - engine, transmission, body and chassis all included - this 6 represents a new era of flexible production and cutting edge running gear for the happily lithe car company.
Our own Jonathon Ramsey did a cracking job of running the Mazda6 through its First Drive paces a few months ago, and sufficiently impressed upon us just how good looking a car this is for the midsize sedan segment. Suffice it to say, now, then, that this is easily the most interesting (and quite possibly the most beautiful) midsize sedan in the segment today. However, as Mr. Ramsey reviewed a fully contented example of the 6 - one equipped with the six-speed automatic transmission - we took advantage of Mazda's North American launch event of the car to suss out the base Mazda6 i Sport, complete with its six-speed Skyactiv manual gearbox. This may not shock you, but the stripper's pretty good, too.
Driving Notes

How Mazda got Skyactiv-X to work is incredible

"Take everything you know about engines and turn it around," Mazda North America Vehicle Development Engineer Dave Coleman says, patiently and with a look of benevolent pity, as he's quizzed about the particulars of the company's new engine. The Skyactiv-X engine is enigmatic — and deceptively simple in operation. And the bottom line for American consumers is that they'll be able to buy a car (or crossover; we don't know yet what vehicle will first get it) by late 2019 that provides diesel-like fuel economy but runs on regular old gasoline. In between diesel and spark ignition, but it's neither To truly understand it, you have to dive into the contradictions. Take that regular old gasoline: Contrary to common sense, the lower the octane, the better it works. In the lab, the Skyactiv-X engine loves 80 octane. The lowest Americans get is 87, so the engine is tuned for that octane. Go higher and you lose some low-end torque. Coleman was right. It's hard to wrap your head around an engine that thrives just at the point when most gas engines would aggressively self-destruct. It uses a supercharger to pump additional air — but not additional fuel. It uses spark plugs to start a combustion cycle that normally doesn't need a spark. And, quixotically, it's not displacing Mazda's own American-market diesel engine, currently languishing in a seemingly endless hell of regulatory approval. More bizarre: Mazda is a tiny automaker facing real existential headwinds, and gasoline compression ignition is a massive challenge. GM and Hyundai announced compression ignition, or HCCI, projects (full name, homogeneous charge compression ignition) to great fanfare, but they never amounted to a production hill of beans, crippled by reliability issues or horrible vibrations. Worse, they only worked at an unusably narrow range — low RPMs and low loads. HCCI research improved direct-injection gas and diesel engine technologies for these companies, but HCCI itself remains untamed. The benefits of lean combustion Why even try to tame HCCI? The answer is much better fuel economy and lower emissions. Less burned carbon-based fuel, less carbon dioxide released. That's simple. But there are some thermodynamic reasons for the lean combustion you can achieve with compression ignition that are worth explaining. The ideal amount of fuel for a conventional engine to burn is about a 14:1 air-to-fuel ratio. That lets every molecule burn nicely, in theory.