Mazda

Mazda owns one of the most singular victories in the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The Hiroshima manufacturer raced at La Sarthe for more than a decade with a unique technical obsession: making the rotary engine — the piston-less architecture of which it had become the world's last champion — triumph in the most demanding endurance race of all. The crowning moment came in 1991. The number 55 787B, wearing the unforgettable green-and-orange Renown livery, won outright in the hands of Volker Weidler, Johnny Herbert and Bertrand Gachot, beating the Mercedes and Jaguar armadas. Its four-rotor R26B, producing around 700 horsepower with a piercing wail that became the stuff of legend, ran for twenty-four hours without missing a beat — an exhausted Herbert even had to skip the podium ceremony. The victory was historic three times over: the first outright win for a Japanese manufacturer, the first and only for a rotary engine, and the last of its kind, as the regulations excluded the technology shortly afterwards, sealing the achievement's uniqueness forever. Not until Toyota in 2018 would a Japanese marque stand on top again. Mazda has not entered a works prototype at La Sarthe since that epic, subsequently focusing its racing efforts on North American endurance competition, where its prototypes shone in IMSA into the early 2020s. But the 787B never really left Le Mans: regularly brought out for demonstration laps and anniversary celebrations, it stirs the same fervour at every appearance, its extraordinary shriek remaining one of the most beloved sounds among the Sarthe faithful. Absent from the Hypercar grid in 2026, Mazda remains a special case in the race's history: a manufacturer that won only once, but whose single victory carries the weight of entire trophy cabinets — through its technical audacity, its panache and its symbolic reach.

• Country : JPN
• Founded : 1920
• Le Mans wins : 1
• First win : 1991
• Last win : 1991