Undriven Mazda RX-7 Evo heads to auction

Think Group B and you’re probably beset with images of flame-spitting, mid-engined all-wheel drive hatches, all monster wings, distended arches and gaping intakes, pulverising great gales of air into submission; parting seas of spectators, eyes wide, screaming and cheering, pebbledashed with grit and bedecked from head to foot in dusty warpaint.

That sort of thing. You probably don’t think of a Mazda RX-7.

The reason for that is that Mazda missed the Group B boat. By the time it had designed and homologated its RX-7 Evo Works car, the powers that be had decided that Group B was too wild and dangerous and had canned the regs that had – for a brief moment – made rallying more popular than F1.

Mazda’s loss is set to be one lucky individual’s gain, however. A never-raced Rx-7 Group B example is crossing the auction block at Sotheby’s in London next month and, well, it’s just achingly wonderful. It has never turned a wheel in anger and there’s some speculation as to whether it has actually been driven any material distance at all. Chassis number MRTE 019, one of twenty such cars Mazda needed to build to satisfy homologation requirements, still sports the original hand-drawn markings on the underside.

The detailing on this car is magnificent, with all the original stickers and fastenings. The peripheral-ported 13B twin rotor lump sits around 10cm further back compared to the production car, while the fuel lines run between the seats. That ducktail spoiler houses an oil cooler and all-up weight was less than a tonne. The Enkei magnesium alloys are period perfect and that monster six-cowl light pod on the front is the stuff of teenage revhead fantasy. Even the almost dainty NACA ducts on the bonnet are things of beauty.

Mazda Rally Team Europe was tasked with creating the 300 horsepower rotary screamer, under the auspices of team boss Achim Warmbold. The Belgian fabrication facility only managed to build seven fully assembled cars in 1984/85 with the remainder comprising of scrupulously-detailed kits of spares. Students of Group B will probably realise that a rear-drive naturally aspirated car never stood a ghost of a chance against the likes of the Peugeot 205 T16, Ford RS200, and Lancia Delta S4. The best it ever managed was a third at the 1985 Acropolis Rally.

This particular car just sat in the dark at Mazda Rally Team Europe, a forgotten car that would never have succeeded in a rally category that had been killed at the stroke of a legislator’s pen. Nobody was interested in a car that was, in truth, a bit of an embarrassment to Mazda. It was shuffled off to the Swiss importer in the early 90s and then reappeared in Scandinavia before collector and rally nut David Sutton brought it to the UK. He took the car to pieces and reassembled it with an obsessive level of detail and now it’s being sold.

The price? That’s hard to get a handle on. When was the last time anything like this ever came up for sale? And timing is everything. Early RX-7s are becoming very collectable and prices for provenance cars in general are buoyant. What makes this car even more valuable is the fact that its other cohorts were either crashed, butchered for parts or destroyed in European rallycross events. This is the last one. And it’s just perfect.

Join the bidding at RM Sotheby’s on 6th September.