KEY POINTS:
Batman, your new car is ready.
Mazda has pulled the wraps off the latest in its series of Nagare (which means "flow" in Japanese) concept cars. The Furai, which was unveiled at the Detroit Motor Show, is designed to celebrate 40 years of Mazda's rotary engine technology.
The Furai, pronounced "foo-rye" and Japanese for "sound of the wind", is a racing car for the road that also runs on 100 per cent ethanol.
The look and style of the car also echoes others in the series - the original Nagare concept (which made its debut at Los Angeles in 2006), the Ryuga (first shown a year ago in Detroit), the Hakaze (which appeared in Geneva last year) and the Taiki (from the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show).
Franz von Holzhausen, Mazda North American operations' director of design and the person who led the team that created the Furai, says: "We were looking for a way to bridge the gap between Mazda Motorsports and the production vehicles in our line-up.
"The mindsets of road-car and racing car fans are quite different, so the purpose of the Furai is to find a meeting point for these disparate interests.
"The Furai achieves this by purposely blurring boundaries that have traditionally distinguished the street from the track.
"Historically, there has been a gap between single-purpose race cars and street-legal performance models - commonly called supercars - that emulate the real racers on the road.
"Track cars are, by their competitive nature, ill-suited for practical highway use, as well as generally far from road-legal. While some supercars visit the track, they are primarily road cars not properly equipped for racing. The aim of the Furai is to bridge this gap."
The Furai is based on the Courage C65 chassis, which earned its stripes during two seasons of LMP-2 endurance racing in the American Le Mans Series. Ditto for the engine - a powerful three-rotor unit.
