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"We wanted to raise Mazda's profile in motorsport," von Holzhausen says, "and when we re-connected the racing angle to our design philosophy we realised that motorsport is obviously very functionally driven. If we can prove that 'Nagare' works in this most extreme environment, then we're proving how real it could become. This isn't just an art thing."

To which end, you will find footage on YouTube of the Furai lapping Laguna Seca, looking and sounding every inch the modern racing car. Furai means 'sound of wind', by the way, but it goes deeper than that.

"This is a living, breathing machine," says von Holzhausen. "You can drive it, it has a rotary engine, it says everything that Mazda stands for. But it also has this wild form language which just happens to be perfectly functional."

They can prove it too. The Furai was co-developed with Californian engineering skunk-works Swift, which used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to ensure that the car had useful aero and proper cooling to help dissipate the heat generated by those busy rotors.

Says von Holzhausen, "We found that some of the elements that looked aerodynamic actually were aerodynamic. Look at the Lockheed SR71 'Blackbird' or F-22 Raptor: they're beautiful, but their beauty comes through in the engineering. I doubt that any designer sat down with a sketch-pad and drew them that way."

If it looks good here on the page, the Furai in the flesh is truly awesome. Most car designers stress the importance of discipline, but this thing stretches the rules to breaking-point. There are even hints of chaos theory about it, but von Holzhausen assures me that it's not totally unrestrained: "You can't completely ignore the rules," he claims, "or things can become overly organic or blobby."

Head-on, it looks spectacular, morphing the established 'Nagare' elements - the five-point grille, expressive lights, flowing front wings - into something that's pure, predatory endurance racer.

The ribbed, sculpted body-sides swell and flow into a faintly terrifying rear end. The rotary engine sits very low in the chassis, promoting a useful centre of gravity, and the engine cover looks as though it's been slashed to ribbons. ("What was the inspiration there?" laughs von Holzhausen, "the inspiration there was a very hot rotary engine.")

The traditional race-car air-box has been replaced with something the team refers to as an 'air fang', which helps funnel clean air towards the intake. "Normally there are big, ugly louvres all over a car like this," von Holzhausen adds, "but we've created this sculpted flow to help air in and out." Without the wings, the drag factor is an impressive 0.36; with them, it's 0.5.