Race ace Alex Davison puts the new Mazda CX-60 to the ultimate test

It is said that racing drivers can feel things from behind the wheel that mere mortals simply can’t. So who better to put the 2025 Mazda CX-60’s updated ride and handling to the test?

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Mazda NewsPOSTED ON 28/7/2025Race ace Alex Davison puts the new Mazda CX-60 to the ultimate test

It is said that racing drivers can feel things from behind the wheel that mere mortals simply can’t. So who better to put the 2025 Mazda CX-60’s updated ride and handling to the test?

It sounds like one of those terrible answers people give in a job interview, doesn’t it? What’s your biggest weakness? Oh, probably that I’m too efficient and easy to work with…

In this case, though, it’s actually true. Mazda has recently launched a refreshed CX-60 in Australia, with the posh and polished SUV debuting an entirely new suspension set-up, among other major hardware changes.

Not because there was anything wrong with the vehicle it replaces, but because — in the words of the model’s chief engineer, Toshiaki Aoki — the first CX-60 was too good.

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Well, that might be some light paraphrasing. What he really means is that it the first CX-60 was a touch too driver-focused, too tuned for the perfect winding road. But life, as we know, isn’t all Sunday drives and mountain roads, and so this new model is more rounded, more comfortable in everyday driving scenarios.

“For the first CX-60, we used a brand-new platform, and we tried to improve the vehicle’s performance by far. We focused on this shining scene of driving, and we may have excessively focused on that particular scene,” he says.

“All the other scenes were out of our sight, and that’s the point of this evolution — to focus on all driving scenarios.”

There is a lot of technical information threatening to break into this story — detailing changes to suspension, steering and chassis bracing can be eye-glazingly dull — but the short version is that Mazda had a CX-60 that drove like a MX-5. Now they have one that drives like a well-sorted large SUV, comfortable in town, still very capable on a winding road.

To prove it, they unleashed the all-new Mazda CX-60 right alongside the outgoing model, and invited the media to drive the two back-to-back at the iconic Lang Lang Proving Ground — a facility designed to replicate just about every dodgy road surface Australia has to offer, from big and unsettling bumps to jarring corrugations and everything in-between.

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Now, one more fact you need to know before we carry on. The very best race drivers are said to be blessed with a sixth sense. Not of the “I see dead people” variety, but rather an ability to feel a car and its movements through their… well… their buttocks. It’s how they can have a vehicle dance along its outer limits without crashing — their magical toosh tells them what’s happening beneath the tyres, and their arms and feet respond.

And race drivers don’t come much better credentialed than Alex Davison. Supercars, Formula Ford, Carrera Cup, Bathurst, Le Mans — you name it, he’s raced it. So who better to tell us what the new CX-60 feels like?

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