when i'm cruising on 120km and on 6th gear the rpm needle rest on 3.75 to 4k is that normal??

 

yes

 

i hope its normal.. thats where mine sits

 

Put it on 8th gear if you want the RPMs lower at that speed

 

yea, 8th gear is when you push down on the shift **** and put it in 6th gear

 

Forget the 8th gear. Just put it in neutral and the engine spins at 1000 rpm on the highway!

 

you're used to piston engines that rest at like 2000 - 2500 rpm at 120km/h...

 

actually my 92x aero turns at 3000rpm @ 120kph.

 

well of course I was just generalizing the range... the RPM @ 120kph is dependant on the engine size too.... so quick to jump to people...

 

Wouldn't this be a function of the gearing rather than the type of engine???

 

yeah.....its more of a gearing issue than engine size issue. The rx8's gearing is short to keep the car up in the higher rpm's where the useable power is. But definately, the rpm is dependant on gearing no matter what type of engine it is. I dont know if you mean engine size or power???? if the engine has more " power" or torque the rpms can sit lower and you still have power......ie. my old 1.8t jetta ran at 2000 rpm in 5th gear at about 120km/h but it made 175 ft/lbs of torque at 1800 rpm so it moved at a lower rpm.

 

some people shouldnt own sports cars the OP being one of them.

 

It was a rhetorical question

 

Yes, the gearing is crazy high on the 8. I guess they figured alot of people would be too lazy to downshift a couple of gears to get moving. Majority of people leave it in high gear and try to move by pressing the gas pedal harder.
The Rx-8's 6th gear is an FD's 4th gear. At 3300rpm in 5th I'm doing 140-145km/h.
This is the gearing they chose when the car was making its stock torque rating of 217lb/ft at the crank. So it's only about 50-60lb/ft more than what the RX-8 makes. I don't see why they couldn't make 6th gear a little lower in the rev range. It would help fuel economy ten fold!

 

^then we would loose our krazzy acceleration in 6th.
As a friend who went on to "turboing" the 8 said

"you know that feeling, when you are on the highway and you need to overtake... I didn't like that"

 

You can always shift to a lower gear if you want to pass

 

no u can't

 

M-Oron

 

?

 

They should have lowered the gear ratio in 6th gear to improve fuel ecomony and if someone wanted to pass on the highway, you can easily just down shift to a lower gear to get that acceleration.

 

yup. if you look at the relation to rpms and mph, in 6th gear, multiply every number by 20. so if you are at 2000 rpm in 6th gear, you will be going about 40 mph.

 

I definitely agree, I wonder how people who live in Europe like our pointless 6th gear, with higher or no speed limits.

Neo's post sums it up.

As for the turbo story, the point I was making there is that the 8 doesn’t really pull well at high speeds. I have the car for 2 years now but am not completely confident in its overtaking abilities (especially if you got a passenger and some luggage). Even if you downshift into 4th.

 

at 60 mph, just down shift into third. third redlines at about 83 mph.

 

Europeans love their manual shifters and they don't mine manually changing gears to maximise on engine prowess unlike us Automatic-centric North Americans. Hence we like big torquey engines to compensate for our laziness to change gears. It's a cultural thing.
Just like Europeans will never understand our obsession with crappy handling 'performance cars'.

 

^
I meant pointless with respect to reducing fuel economy.