Wow! Thank you.

Now here is the logic: Several years ago we were blowing up engines right and left. Left and right. backwards forwards, etc. I started asking around to get some help and ended up talking with David Haskill of SpeedSource. If you've not heard the SpeedSource name before they are the Professional Road Race team running building and running the majority of 3 rotor Rolex cars in the Grand-Am Series. They built the Dempsey cars. They built the Racers Edge cars. They build the Sahlens cars....

They also built the original Renesis cars (like ours) from 2004 until a few years ago. Some of these cars are still floating around. Some have been trashed/wrecked or converted to something else.

SpeedSource has been a factory supproted Mazda team for several years now. David Haskill is the team engineer. David is also a driver. Smart guy. Super nice guy. Very busy guy.

So I contact him and share our issue. One of the first things he asks me is this: "what kind of air filter are you running?". No kidding. Did you know that their 3 rotor engines run THE STOCK RX8 PAPER FILTER? Yep.

We ran a K&N style for a few races just because I thought this technology was the best. It made about 1 more hp on the dyno than paper. So we ran it. We also toasted two motors at Daytona and one at Homestead running the Grand-Am Koni Challenge Series. When we pulled these motors apart we found (drum roll) sand blasted rotor housings where the air would enter the intake ports. Switched over to paper, ran both these tracks again and the witness marks were gone. Problem fixed. David also confirmed that he had saw this before also.

That is the basis of why I beleive paper is a better filtration media. We run the Mazda/AEM cannister style filter that comes with the long AEM/Mazda intake. We also found this intake to make the most torque.

Cheers,

Eric