I just had an interesting conversation with my friend over at Racers Edge Motorsports...

For those who know, they run a team in the North American Star Mazda championship. For those who aren't, Star Mazda championship switched to Renesis engines strapped into lightweight carbon fiber racecars this year. He's one of the race engineers on the team, and himself took 3rd place in the championship a couple of years ago.

Basically I called to gush about my new brilliant black baby, and also to see how the season was going. When the conversation turned to how the new car was , he said the Renesis was unbelieveable and is leagues better than the normally aspirated 13B that they used to run. Even though they've only had one race so far, the Renesis has proven to be awesome during testing (how's 170mph sound?) and they've not had one problem...except for one major defect, mostly due to the cars electronics. Apparently the car still has quite a few bugs to work out and lots of things are breaking on the car itself (again, the Renesis itself has been bulletproof). One such problem is that they never fully developed the pit speed limiter button. When you go to pit, you're supposed to hold this button down so you cruise through the pit at its speed limit. However, hitting this button also fries the crap out of the spark plugs! As of this writing, they're STILL trying to figure that one out...

Now the flooding issue doesn't seem so bad, eh? :D

P.S. - When the championship makes it up to Road America this June, you better believe I'll be taking side-by-side RX-8/Star Mazda pictures. If they'll let us, and it looks likely, I'm going to have my friend do a few hot laps around the course and shoot a video. I'm crossing my fingers on that one...

 

Sounds like they shoulda gotten cruise control.