Background of Build Up

Let me catch everybody up. A friend of mine purchased a 2004 Mazda RX8 GT. To my knowledge it was one of the first to hit the shores in NJ (Mazda's main port on the East Coast). He quickly went to work building a competitive show car on his new chassis. I won't go into too much detail here, but Mazda did a good write-up on his work here.

What Mazda's story doesn't tell you is that along with the GReddy turbo kit, came an e-manage. Along with an e-manage, came Ryan's headache's and heartbreaks as he ended selling the car to a friend.

Joe, the now owner of the RX8 ditched the poorly tuned e-manage for a much more stable InterceptorX unit from Mazsport.

So where do I fit into all of this; for a while Joe wanted to sell the RX8 as well and I decided I wanted to have it in my collection of Rotary cars! I had the car for a few months (3 I think). During those months I started fixing some things that I considered "in need of repair". I installed some sparco seat brackets, tuned the InterceptorX to help the idle problem that seemed to plague the car, re-relocated the battery and rerouted some of the underhood apparel and lines, etc.

When I was done, Joe got the car back - but sadly learned shortly thereafter that the engine was pulling low vac and had poor compression (thus the idle issue). It was easy to blame the engines short lived lifespan at 40K miles on the poorly tuned e-manage and Mazda's factory lack of correcting OMP on the early RX8s.

So that brings us to this blog - The Rebuild! The car was never dyno'd before - but it better be when I'm done!