Mazdaspeed

Mazdaspeed was the in-house performance and motorsport division of Mazda. It began in 1967 as the Mazda Sports Corner, an independent racing and tuning operation run by Takayoshi Ohashi, who also ran Mazda's Tokyo distributor, and took the Mazdaspeed name after Mazda brought the team to Hiroshima in 1983. It ran the racing programme that won the 1991 24 Hours of Le Mans with the Mazda 787B, and it sold factory approved performance parts and touring kits for models such as the MX-5 and RX-7. Mazda took control of it in 1999 as a tuning and parts operation, and from 2003 the name went onto consumer models: the Mazdaspeed Protegé, the Mazdaspeed MX-5, the Mazdaspeed6 and the Mazdaspeed3. Mazda has not offered a Mazdaspeed trim since the 2013 Mazdaspeed3.