Jan. 25, 2014, was filled with sports car racing promise for IMSA in general, Mazda in particular: The merger of the Grand-Am series and the American Le Mans Series began with the 2014 Rolex 24 at Daytona, and a massive combined field of 67 cars took the green flag.

Among them were the two diesel-powered Mazda Prototypes, debuting after a whirlwind winter of transitioning from the Mazda 6-based race cars in the short-lived GX series, to the handsome pair of full-fledged Prototypes that would propel Mazda, and its soon-to-arrive consumer diesel-powered Mazda 6s, into the future.

The diesel-powered Mazda 6 never arrived. And by the time it was ready, Volkswagen’s “dieselgate” had, perhaps forever, blasted the bloom off the rose for anything in the U.S. that used a diesel engine but couldn’t tow a horse trailer.

Mazda lost that weekend, finishing 56th and 57th.

Mazda also lost this past weekend at the 2019 Rolex 24, finishing 42nd and 46th in the streamlined 47-car field. It was Mazda’s 50th straight loss since that miserable weekend in January 2014, making it 51 and counting.

And this one was even more miserable. Far more miserable. Both its cars dominated the mandatory Roar Before the 24 practice several weeks before the race, and Mazda qualified on the pole for this year’s Big Show, besting the Cadillacs, Acuras and Nissans. This might be it: Mazda’s best chance for a win since, well, forever in the calendar scope of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Obviously, it didn’t happen. In the dead of night, minutes apart, both the Mazdas burst into flames, literally and figuratively -- the pole-sitting No. 77 while on track, the No. 55, which qualified fourth, as it sat in the garage, under repair. The 77 was retired, jammed against the wall of the No. 1 garage, prime real estate earned by winning the pole.

The No. 55 returned to the track. Then it was spun into the grass, squatting oddly from some new mechanical damage. It was towed to the garage on a rope and 28 men, employees of Mazda; of chassis-builder Multimatic, the company that built the Ford GT, and of Joest, the legendary, Audi-centric German company hired by Mazda in 2017 to fix the program, attacked the car from the front, sides, back and underneath. There were electrical problems. There were powertrain problems. A brand-new engine was uncrated, and employees began cannibalizing it for parts.

Behind the car, John Doonan, head of the Mazda Motorsports programs in the U.S. -- and perhaps the most loved and respected constant presence in the paddock -- stood there with a look on his face you’d expect to see when a man is watching his house burn.

This couldn’t be happening -- again -- but it was. Shortly before 6 a.m., about an hour after the rain started, Mazda gave up and literally closed the door on the two garages. Five years and a day after that first loss, Mazda had lost again.

What went wrong with this program?

The one undeniable factor is that the first two years, the Mazda diesel was a pokey, heavy boat anchor that never stopped breaking, but often broke parts that had never broken before, never broke again. Now, its turbocharged 2.0-liter is also not known for its long-distance prowess, screaming for hours to stay up with the barely-idling Cadillac V8, basically a Chevrolet NASCAR motor under the valve covers. And you could say that the Mazda driver lineup, largely derived from graduates of Mazda’s feeder series, were too inexperienced.

And you could say that a comparatively small manufacturer like Mazda had no real reason to stop racing what it sold. You could still say that. It has not been announced that Mazda will likely be in the production-based TCR class of the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge series -- the warm-up act for WeatherTech series -- in 2020, but it will, using the brand-new Mazda 3, which we have driven and pronounced to be an excellent platform for a little race car that will battle others like the Honda Civic Si and the Hyundai Veloster N.

Whether the TCR Mazda 3 will be the only race car the company fields in IMSA remains to be seen. This is not to say that this is Mazda’s only problem: Some inexplicable corporate personnel moves and bizarre cuts to its previously profitable grassroots racing programs, which were once the envy of its competitors, haven’t helped.

Mazda has the remainder of the 2019 season to win, perhaps even dominate, the WeatherTech series in the Prototype class. But it probably needs to start with a race it nearly won last year, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, this March.

Mazda’s last win in IMSA’s top series was on Sept. 28, 2013, when it took the GX class victory in the Lime Rock finale for the Grand Am series.

For 51 races since, we’ve seen John Doonan watch his house burn down. We’re not sure he, nor us, can stand much more.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io