The first Mazda to win Summernats

FATRX3 is the car that made the V8 crowd pay attention to rotaries. In 2016, John Saad's 1972 Mazda RX-3 became the first Mazda — and the first rotary-powered car — to win the Summernats Grand Champion title, at Summernats 29. The year before, it had already taken MotorEx Grand Master. In a world dominated by big-cube V8 Holdens and Fords, a tiny two-door coupe with a 1.3-litre rotary had beaten them all.

The build took years and the philosophy was total. There is not a single original body panel left on the car. Every surface was modified, smoothed, and finished to a standard that blurs the line between car and sculpture. The engine bay was built as one continuous piece — engine and Ford C4 automatic bolted together as a unit, then sculpted, smoothed, and polished so the transitions are seamless. After final assembly, the gasket edges were hand-brushed silver. That's the level of obsession.

The mechanical specification matches the presentation. The turbocharged 13B Cosmo rotary puts down over 400 horsepower at the rear wheels through a Mark Williams 35-spline modular differential — the kind normally found in Doorslammer drag cars and rated to 3,000 horsepower. The suspension is custom throughout: a CS Engineering double A-arm setup at the front, four-link with coilovers at the rear, the whole geometry plotted from full-scale engineering drawings. At the sills, the car sits just 100mm off the ground.

The Simmons wheels — 20x7 front, 22x12 rear — fill arches that were hand-shaped from motorcycle fenders. The interior is entirely hand-made: fabricated metal dash, custom-shaped high-density foam seats covered in Italian Nappa leather, every piece built to fit one person. As Saad puts it: 'Everything in there's made, nothing's bought.'

HOK Galaxy Grey was the colour. The paint and body preparation alone consumed thousands of hours across Custom Bodyworks and CS Engineering. The bonnet opens in the opposite direction from factory. The front and rear bars are sucked into the body. The radiator support was moulded around the Plazmaman intercooler. It is, in every measurable sense, a completely new car that happens to remember being an RX-3.