The last time you could buy a new Mazdaspeed vehicle was in 2013. The Mazdaspeed3 hot hatch was a torque beast that compared to today's hot hatches is not exactly refined. But why hasn't the Japanese automaker done more with its in-house performance brand? Road and Track spoke to a couple of Mazda engineers and was told the reasons come down to money and brand image.

"To do a (Mazdaspeed) car, you really have to do it right, said Dave Coleman, Development Vehicle Engineer at Mazda. "And we can't develop a new engine for that, we can't do all the stuff with the core hardware at our scale, and with the ambitious stuff we're trying to do with our small team. If we had an engine on the shelf that would fit that properly, then we could talk."