New quarterly award concentrates on a single racing discipline, with the goal to choose an overall winner at the end of the year

Over the years, some outstanding representatives of the Spirit of Mazda have been chosen as recipients of the award. But the procedure for choosing those recipients isn’t always perfect.

Mazda Motorsports noticed during the voting that combined, autocrossers and road racers – or representatives of those communities – would get an equal number of votes. But if there are a handful from one and many from the other, the result was sometimes lopsided. Plus, quite often, autocrossers aren’t familiar with road racers and vice versa.

“We are making the Spirit of Mazda award more significant, and along those lines we have decided we are only going to put up autocross nominees or road racing nominees each time, not both at once,” explains David Cook, Manager, Business Development for Mazda Motorsports. “Then we’ll have a runoff between the two autocross winners and the two road racing winners, and then a runoff to choose a final winner that represents the core values of Mazda.”

The prize, which is in the process of being determined, for the overall winner will be “significant,” Cook notes.

Read the full story at MazdaMotorsports.com