Originally Posted by
Bikedued
Well, if they hadn't built such a hideous 4 DOOR body on the RX-8, it might have made a better go of it. They shot themselves in the foot. If they would reissue the RX-7 in a modern but retro body that didn't resemble a melted jelly bean like the last one, THEN they might be successful with the rotary again. That's beside the point however. The Miata's of 92 were 16 valve inline 4 cylinders.,,,,BD
I also just found out that the Miata engine was originally meant for a front wheel drive car. In the process the back half of the engine doesn't get full coolant flow, because the thermostat was moved to the front, when it was supposed to exit from the rear of the head. Search "Miata coolant reroute" if you want some useless non Miata owner trivia reading
. I am looking into doing mine pretty soon, as it gets dang hot around here in Summer, and I like to drive spiritedly. Many people who complete the mod report going from overheating regularly, to never overheating again. Thankfully they built the cars with built in air conditioning, so most people never have the a/c on during the hot and sunny months.
Snappy handling, 16 more HP than my first gen. RX-7, and no top? I will not be falling out of love with this little car anytime soon, even though while driving it I am at eye level with a Corvette door handle. Whatever faults it may have, the enjoyability factor trumps them all.
This is true. In addition though, and I got to drive a RX8. the engine had a turbo lag where the darn turbo didn't come on till about 3200 rpm (I can't recall the exact RPM anymore since I drove this car about 12 or so years ago), then add on top of that poor torque and the car was a dog until the rpms got up high enough for the turbo to come on. They should have increased the size of the engine and then added twin subsequential turbos. But that car had fantastic handling and could really carve a mountain road IF you kept the rpms high. The other bad thing about the car, which was true with all rotary engines was poor gas mileage, which was why the turbo waited so long to come on and the power was low on the bottom end so they could attempt to get better MPG at hwy cruising speed, which I thought was nuts because a person that buys a car like that isn't really interested in mpg anyway! And the car required constant attention by the driver because it burned about a quart of oil every 3,000 miles, which was also typical of rotary engines, a lot of people today don't have clue about checking such things! A lot of people didn't like the looks of it, but I liked it because it was quirky. There were other issues with the car too that I can't recall now, but the engine itself if watched and maintained could easily run 500,000 miles. But in the end the Nissian 350Z killed the sales of the RX8 because it was more reliable with better performance and easier servicing which is something that all Mazda's suffer from. As a side note, too bad Mazda didn't make a convertible RX8.
Speaking of quirky I also liked the Chrysler Crossfire convertible, but again underpowered for it's ability and looks except for the SRT6 which I think will be a future classic car to own even more so than the BMW Z4 because the Chrysler had a limited run of those cars.