Try Not to Cry as a Rotary-Powered Mazda Le Mans Racer Goes up in Flames

Nobody wants to see a car going up in flames. Especially when that car is a valuable Group C endurance prototype, and even more especially when it’s one powered by one of the all-time great racing engines, Mazda’s ear-melting quad-rotor Wankel powerplant.

That, though, is exactly what happened to this Mazda 767B yesterday in the paddock at Laguna Seca during the Monterey Pre-Reunion, a build-up event for the Monterey Motorsports Reunion, one of the flagship events of Monterey Car Week. It was due to race in the Hurley Haywood Trophy, a race for endurance prototypes built between 1981 and 1991.

Although early reports misidentified it as such, this isn’t the world famous Mazda-owned 1991 Le Mans-winning 787B (which is also present at the Motorsports Reunion this year), but a privately-owned example one of its forerunners. The 767B hails from 1989, and wasn’t quite as successful as the 787B, although it did manage fifth in that year’s 24 Hours of Daytona and seventh at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. This particular car, meanwhile, is the number 203 example that finished 20th at Le Mans in 1990.

It was sold for $1.75 million in 2017, and has now been a fixture at various historic racing events, but it looks like it’ll be a while before it turns a wheel again. What started the fire isn’t clear, but footage captured by Instagram user per.0.xide shows the car engulfed in flames while stationary in the paddock as crew members rush in with extinguishers.

It’s an unquestionably sad sight, but there are two positive pieces of news to come out of it. One, and most importantly, nobody was injured in the blaze, which appears to have been put out quickly; and two, the team responsible for running the car, Ghost Rider Squad, has promised that it’ll be restored to full running order, suggesting that the damage wasn’t too serious.

It’s a better outcome, then, than the last rare rotary-powered Mazda racer to go up in flames, the Furai concept, which burned to a crisp during a Top Gear shoot in 2008. At least we’ll eventually get to hear this car’s ground-shaking wail again at some point.