the reason small mods dont do much is beacause the ecu does not let them

I think that the 8 is too technologically advanced for its own good sometimes, at least from a tuning perspective. Clearly the engineering that Mazda put into the 8 has worked against some of the aftermarket engineering.

I agree with rotorGod, patience is a virtue. The ECU is MUCH better understood now, the best is yet to come.

Hey RSD - can you give Ike a kick in the goolies for me ? :icon_tup:

nah, he's a good guy.

That won't happen. And if it does, it will be fixed, patched, replaced, whatever is necessary, probably BEFORE the car is available to buy.


There is too much of a following by tuners, young kids, old guys, etc, for the EVO X to be "hard to tune". The RX8 is probably only modified by 10% of its owners, maybe even less. Those who DO modify, probably only 10% of those even consider going turbo, different ECU, etc...

With an EVO, or STI, I'd venture to say 75% or more of their owners modify, and go shooting for big numbers, at that. There just isn't enough aftermarket support for the RX8 to get big "fast". This isn't an FD, people. Even that took 5-6 years to develop a good ECU for...

I'm not big on modding my car, anymore. I used to, but not so much now. Notwithstanding, speaking for myself, I would go turbo in a heartbeat if it wasn't:

a) So DAMN expensive...
b) Limited to two choices...with everything else on the "brink" of development for years and years...
c) So DAMN expensive...
*Did I mention how expensive turbos are?

If the after-market just suddenly flooded with viable and quality upgrade parts for prices that were relative to those of other cars, makes, models, etc. for the 8, then I'd go and play but just not like I used to...

FD is unreliable, dude. Most unreliable of the rotaries. I stand by my words. RotaryGod said it better than anyone else could have.

I dunno, My 94 FD has 25K miles on it and it has only been in the shop once for an idle adjustment. I think that is more reliable than my 04 8 with 23K miles which has been in the shop several times for problems like an engine, engine mounts, two smog pumps, headlamps and a few other annoying issues.

Don't those cars have a Motec? Great, they've managed 215whp with a $5000 ECU mod...

Are you honestly making speculation on the reliabilty of a car with a turbo kit that has barely been released? And please tell me you're not implying that RX-8s are getting 40whp from the mods you listed.

Hondata (not even custom tuned), intake, and exhaust, will yield more on a Honda than every bolton know to exist for the RX-8.

Please don't take what I say about modability as bashing. Some of you are taking it personally and acting like I'm putting down your first born. I love both the S2K and RX-8. All I'm saying is that if modability is high up on your list, the S2K and the RX-8 aren't two cars that come to mind.

been out on road course 3 times with z's and m's, they don't blow us away. i beat a few on occasion. driver is most important, but same driver would prolly get close times driving all 3 cars. may even beat the others too.

i'm not turbo guy, but the tuners around my area tell me that 10:1 compression ratio is not ideal for turbo. yeah, u can make it happen. but its not gonna be pretty. all say with that high compression stick with NA. gut and port job. rx8 best friend is light weight. so run some more laps and eat less carbs, that will make ur ride faster for sure.

lol, we all know how girls pack. :cwm27:

+1, all i need for the road course is 300hp. tops. i can live with 260whp alread on track, rest is up to driver. anymore, and u just giving audience a sliding show.

10:1 compression isn't that high anymore. I mean, the new Turbo Mini is 10.5:1. Its all about the tune!

I went on a wine tour (the Coonawarra http://www.coonawarra.org/home.asp ) for about 5 days with my wife. We managed to fit one medium and one small luggage bag, and on the way back : 57 bottles of wine.

Admittedly there was wine on the back seat, in the rear foot wells, and stuffed every which way in the boot/trunk ... but we were well impressed with our haul.

And cheers to the local friendly police officer at a small coastal town called Robe who advised us about where the police were patrolling along the nice sweeping roads on the way back ...

I read an article a year or two back where SCC magazine invited 4 tuners to play with their tuned Z cars at Willow Springs. The also brought out the Nismo Z, and some guy with an SCCA "stock class" Z racer. With wheels, tires, suspension, and a better locker the "SCCA driver" beat the best tuner car by 2.5 seconds on the track, with the stock horsepower!

Going fast on the street from one stoplight to the next is one type of fast. Putting down consistently fast lap times is another. Sometimes they coincide, as in the Evos and WRX STI's. Other times they don't (the E30 M3 and RX-8 spring to mind). Camber curves, weight balance, and perfect bump-steer aren't sexy on the street but damn sure will pay off at the track!

BTW- Racing Beat can get 300 hp out of a well-ported 1.3 liter rotary, but it'll have the idle characteristic of a paint-mixing machine! I've seen their dynos...

Im not taking it personally, I love this types of friendly discusions :)

but the thing its that most honda tuners lie theyr asses off when it comes to hp gains to the point of manipulating a dyno to show gains that are not true, remember the company that sold some stages for the rx-8 claiming huge power gains? :cwm27:

the rx-8 right now goes from an average of 178 to 185 rwhp to close to 220 rwhp with the mods I mention in fact amemiya got 224 rwhp

we are comparing new cars, like the 350z and g35 they have some more time with theyr turbo kits but it was obvious from the begining that this engine could not handle large amounts of FI, they begang to blow from metal failure almost from the star

but this things can be argue for a long time you have your opinion and with time you will be proven wrong

We're talking about present time. Not some mystical far off place where RX-8s put down 500whp with turbo kits and can get 50whp with a few boltons.

224whp? Hahahaha. Great, and just a K&N will get you 12hp, they said so... Show me one person on this forum that gained 40+ whp with the boltons you mentioned and I'll give you a public apology.

Again! Compression on a piston engine is NOT the same as compression on a rotary engine!

"Modability" has never been a big selling point for me, because it seems to suggest poor engineering. If the Evo, Z, and a bunch of other cars all respond better to bolt-ons, I have to ask why, with the current horsepower wars, don't they come from the factory with these improvements built in? If an Evo can get 35hp from a new intake, it means Mitsubishi doesn't know how to make a damn intake. Correct me if I'm wrong, but "highly moddable" seems to be another word for "poorly designed."

You're wrong. The intake on the Evo for instance, much like the RX-8, is actually designed quite well and an intake won't do much. Cars like that Evo that respond so well to boltons are usually detuned for emissions, reliabilty, and driveability reasons.

Not as much the reliability of the engine as the rest of the drivetrain. While it would be fairly simple for an Evo to come from the factory with 300+ whp it would have a trickle down effect. You'd need a better clutch, upgrade that and you'd need a better transfercase, upgrade both of those and you'd need a better diff. By the time you're done with it the car would be thousands more than it currently is and it would be easier and cheaper to let the owners mod or not mod how they see fit. For a good driver with 300+whp in an Evo you really wouldn't have to do much more than a clutch, if that. But lets face it, the people out there that are good drivers are few and far between. There are a shockingly high percentage of people out there where the Evo or STI is their first MT car. 300+ whp and awd with a newbie driver can mess things up in a hurry. Hell, it doesn't even take that much WHP, I've owned a AWD turbo car since the early 90s and just about every one of them had soem sort of drivetrain complaints. A very large portions of those problems can be chalked up to driver error and people not knowing how to launch and drive AWD cars properly.

You could maybe make the argument that some of the older Hondas that had such restrictive intakes and exhausts were poorly engineered. But considering how reliable those cars were/are it's tough to argue with what Honda was doing. They were engineered well, Honda just didn't extract the most horsepower they could out of them.

Actually it just means "product of a compromised design to appease the bean counters" Who think all cars should be gutless, unobstrusive, unremarkable appliances that take people from point A to point B with as little fuss as possible, and generating the most revenue to the seller for theleast ammount of investment while appealing to the "average buyer"--You know, the middle aged, multi ethnic middle class worker with exactly 2.3 children, who rents/owns (but still makes payments on) a house, and has $10,235 in credit card balances.

ok, I will, it will not be today or tomorrow, but I will prove you wrong.

I was able to prove to people that the renesis in race trim cam make close to 240 rwhp with only boltons and a microtech ecu, I was call a liar by a lot of people when I said this, since it was a long time ago an there was not so much expirience with the renesis at that time.

Back to the comparo...as much as I love the FD ( imo best looking car available under $90K, never had the pleasure of driving one though)...

I can fit an entire 5 piece drum kit in my 8, including 22" bass drum, three toms, snare, cymbal bag, and all hardware incl. cymbal stands!!! Good luck getting even the bass drum in any other sports car on the market. :celebrate

I can add my 2 cents. I breifly owned a '94 FD Touring pack and it was a nice car, but had too many issues to be fun. Everytime I had to go someplace I would close my eyes and clench my teeth praying my 7 would start. Not to mention I rarely got boost from the second turbo above 4500 rpm (due to a vacuum issue) and my never-rebuilt 13B was approaching 87,xxx miles so I was going to need the apex seals replaced pretty soon. The 8 is lightyears ahead in reliabitly, and a lot more comfortable (I don't have kidney bruises anymore!) and so on.
And yes, I know FD's can be made to be reliable, I had a buddy with a '93 with a single turbo conversion and a few other tweaks and it was fine, but those all take thousands of dollars just to get it to that point.


Oh, and Mitsubishi doesn't design a better intake or Nissan a better ECU because of Emissions regulations by the EPA and because of fuel mileage requirements. Did you know the EPA regulates intake noise? It also regulates exhaust noise, engine noise, gear noise, and interior noise, not just exhaust gas emissions. So if Mitsu was to make a better intake, it still wouldn't be as good as the non-street legal versions. The only way AEM and other companies get away with it is when you get your car inspected, they don't test your intake noise, or gear noise, or other stuff that is tested on a brand new car going through production.
But the other poster who said the stuff about the "trickle down" effect, as in if you get a better intake it's useless without a better exhaust, so then a reprogrammed ECU, and then you need a better clutch to support the power, then better brakes because you're going faster, etc.......is completely right. SO then we would have a 500+bhp EVO for over $60,000. The Evo or the Z or whatever is tuned within EPA regs and to get the best fuel mileage.


Dave

Funny you mention the 5pc Kit /w 22" Bass Drum, I got a 5pc DW kit for my daughter and I need to take it to PA. Is that without cases?

Sorry about regressing...

As far as the intakes go you're not quite getting it right. Many cars today have very free flowing and efficient intakes, the RX-8, Evo, and WRX are 3 sporty cars that are good examples. With those cars you just won't get much added performance with an aftermarket intake and in some cases you'll lose power because the extra more turbulent air is messing with the maf sensor. Even with a tune those cars won't benefit much from an intake because of how well designed and efficient the intake systems are in OEM form. So in the end an intake on many modern cars is nothing more than an expensive noisemaker.

ill correcet you.... any LSx engine is "Highly moddable" and none of them are "poorly designed"

I had cases for my snare and toms, and cymbals, but not the bass drum. I put the bass drum in the front passenger seat, other drums + cymbal bag in the back seats, and all hardware in the trunk w/ cymbal stands going through the pass through (and I've got 2 amps and a sub in the trunk too!!)

Make sure you lay down some towels or something as to not damage the leather or door panels, especially the bass drum up front. I learned that the hard way one night after a gig I was quick (and drunk) about getting the bass drum in there and I slightly damaged the door panel with some of the hardware on the bass drum.

Anyway, it sure is nice to have a car with the performance characteristics of the 8 and still drive it to gigs! :ylsuper:

"correcet" : I'm not familiar with that word, although it does seem perfectly croumlent.

Judging by the context it was used in, it seems to mean " make falses absolutist statements ".

The LSx engines are nice but they REALLY benefit from better intakes and exhausts. We really saw this on my friend's Z28 and his brother's Z06. The new 600 hp Viper has stainless steel headers and everything seems to be pretty well optimized so they are unlikely to get anymore power from just bolt ons. Of course they've also got 600hp but the point is that the better the factory does with the total package and not just the engine itself, the less simple mods such as intakes and exhausts will do to it.

Ultimately it's pointless to make these comparisons. Every single car show I go to I have the smallest engine producing the most horsepower per displacement. And yes, saying a twin rotary 1.3 is really a 3 liter v6 is a bunch of BS. So when the factory z produces about 450hp stock then we can call it better.

If you want to tinker get an FD, if you want to drive get an 8.

Ill remember that, thanks!
I'm probably stripping off all the spurs & legs too...

Again, apologies for digressing. :Eyecrazy:

Are you saying that our engine should be compared to a 1.3L N/A piston engine ?

I think the displacement is irrelevant . One should look at

Power to weight ratio
Fuel consumption
Power across the rev range

On this basis our engine is comparable with most 3L N/A or 2L turbos .

Power to weight ratio. On this basis, our RX8 is comparable with most economy cars.

Fuel consumption. On this basis, our RX8 is comparable with most 350+HP V8's, or trucks/SUV's.

Power across the rev range. On this basis, our engine is comparable to Honda's. I can't think of any other engine that doesn't make any power until near redline.

Agree with this except for the economy car thing . How many 2L economy cars put out over 200 hp ?

I suppose the closest engine to compare in most respects would be the S2000 engine

Similar weight
Similar power
Better fuel economy

AMEN

I don't see how 2.0L turbo'd can be classed the same as our engine in any respects. They kill our gas mileage (REAL gas mileage -- not EPA sticker), they made tons more power to weight, and they make power from 1/3 of the RPM to redline! Completely different from our engines...

If I were to get an FD it would be with an LS-6 engine in it. My buddy has one and it is "all that" and more.