With a century of history that has seen Mazda turn itself from a manufacturer of cork products to a successful independent global automotive company, Mazda’s story has had engineering innovation at its heart from the very beginnings of the company. And Mazda has never been afraid to highlight the capabilities of that engineering by demonstrating its products in the public eye, putting them to the test on challenging, pioneering and ambitious drives to prove just how good they are.

This never stop challenging approach, started from Mazda’s very first vehicle: a three-wheeled open truck called the Mazda Go. Having switched from cork products to machine tools in 1921, new company President Jujiro Matsuda realised his company had the expertise to produce a product to meet the new demand for utilitarian three-wheeled trikes caused by Japan’s economic upturn. The first motorised vehicle ever produced by the Toyo Kogyo company, as Mazda was then called, it already embodied the characteristics of the company’s approach to automotive innovation, as unlike lots of rivals, it had a ground-breaking rear differential and a reverse gear.