Just had my car serviced. During the process, I talked about some affordable upgrades for my RX-8 with a Mazda Tech. He suggested the Racing Beat race exhaust and Revi Ram Air Duct. I was super excitied to drop about $700 for a faster meaner car, but was a little dissappointed when Jim Mederer , a co-founder of Racing Beat, wrote

"The following table lists the measured power gains from various aftermarket components. Testing has been conducted on the Racing Beat engine dyno with both pre-production and production Renesis engines.

1. Intake – enlarging the oval inlet to the factory air box - +2 HP (this modification eliminates the VFAD intake duct.).
2. Headers – approximately 4 HP peak power gain.
3. Mufflers – muffler & connecting pipe - 2-3 HP.
4. Removing the muffler from the car (engine) – about 4 HP.
5. Remove catalytic converter and resonator from the engine completely, and replacing with "cat" replacement tube – max benefit 8 HP – regardless of what muffler is used (or even no muffler).

"The muffler "off" will yield about 4 HP, with a very loud exhaust note. With it "off" the car, the noise is unbelievable! We find 2-3 HP peak RPM maximum improvement from our exhaust, or any competitive system that we have tested. So someone can see from these numbers, it is quite difficult to get a lot more HP from this engine. The max potential with a header and race exhaust would be around 10HP." End of quote.

It appears as though Mazda has maximized the performance of the rotary engine and any additional performance based investment is more for appearance and sound rather than horsepower.

 

ok

 

Don't get me wrong, appearance and sound are important to me. But a little more hp sure helps the sell.

 

Youre just not going to get much HP without going FI. Now if you want to spend some cash and get crazy, go look at the 3 rotor 20b swapout the PR guys did. that is power.

I'm patiently waiting a tested supercharger option. Until then, I'll be happy hitting the twisties and hiding from evo's.

 

Yup, this appears to be the case. Its weird, apparently enthusiast buyers really do expect to be able to get substantial power gains with relatively low cost mods and the fact that Mazda didn't leave this "head room" in the RENESIS has really disappointed a bunch of people.

For additional power you need to go the turbo route ($$$).

 

yeah apparently its really common to put restrictive intakes and exhausts on NA performance cars so that the owner can easily swap them out and make big power. personally id rather get good stuff from factory.

edit- there are some gains being seen with headers and exhausts higher than what Racing Beat says on that page. where the dicrepancies lay i dont know.

 

What performance updates have you done to your car?

 

Yup. This was the case on the 93-98 Supra. Dam Toyota was useing the same exhaust they where puting on the Camary.

 

revi intake

 

My thoughts are that Racing Beat is pretty accurate, but on some things, like headers and a complete exhaust system, they are being way too conservative.

Both TurboXS and Rotary Performance claimed in the area of 20whp from adding a midpipe/cat back combo. And it is not like either of them aren't reputable in their own right. Those claims also compliment very well with Hymee's recent claims of 14hp with his headers.

 

Wow....nice clips.

 

New engine or FI....

 

Sorry, I'm a rookie. What is FI?

 

FI =Forced Induction . Either turbo or supercharger

 

You will be happy with the RB intake, cold air ram, and exhaust.

Good quality and and extra power to boot.