2004 Mazda RX-8

Saturn and that stupid little tuba boy ruined the suicide door. Half of the people who look at the RX-8's "Freestyle" doors mumble something about the SC2, the other half call them pickup truck doors.

That's too bad, because it's those doors that fooled... we mean convinced Ford management to let Mazda build rotaries again.

Despite being one of the best pure sports cars ever built, the third-generation RX-7 was, from a corporate standpoint, an unmitigated disaster. Sales were abysmal and Mazda's warrantee department took it in the ass. The sting of that painful experience is still fresh for the bean counters, so the rotary engine development boys won't get any beans if they try to make another one.

But if you add back seats and give the marketing team a chance to come up with a zippy, X Games name for rear doors, then you've got something. You have a four-seat sports car. Nobody has ever made a genuine four-seat sports car, so the idea has never been a failure.

Brilliant!

Perhaps the best thing about the back seats is that once you're in the front seat, you can forget they're there. The RX-8 really does drive like a sports car, and it makes very few compromises to accommodate management's back seat.

The suspension--double wishbones up front and a five-link setup in the rear--is far softer than the last U.S.-spec RX-7, but it's brilliantly damped and has much more travel. Forget the bobbing andfloating that comes to mind with the phrase "soft suspension"; instead, think smooth, flowing, and unaffected by bumps or rough roads.

The RX-8 feels composed on nearly any surface, the only exception being a surprisingly unstable feel during high-speed braking. The balance at the limit has a notably different character than a Miata or RX-7. Both of those cars have an uncanny willingness to rotate, with the rear wheels sliding so willingly and effortlessly that a driver would be forgiven for thinking four-wheel steering was at work.

By contrast, the RX-8 follows steering inputs perfectly up until the limit, where it starts to understeer. It's not a squalling, unresponsive understeer, though. Lift the throttle and slam it back to the floor and you can get the tail out just fine. And when the rear tires do break loose, they do it so smoothly and progressively, a 350Z powerslide feels spooky by comparison.

The whole driving experience is a surprising contrast to the 350Z. The Z feels muscular, edgy, and a bit bulky by comparison. To drive a Z hard is to wrestle massive grip, huge torque and, frankly, a pretty sharp handling limit.

The RX-8 feels light, nimble, and intuitive by comparison. Coming out of corners, the Z's massive torque makes the RX-8 feel wheezy, but attacking the same challenging twisty road in both cars (which, so far, we've only done in our minds), going the same speed would be more relaxed in the RX-8 than the Z.

From the driver's standpoint, the RX-8 is a great place to be. The interior is open and airy compared to a Z, not to mention the last RX-7. Helmet room is still an issue, even without the optional sunroof, but mostly from the side, where the side curtain airbags have made the roof rail thicker.

Airbags are everywhere, with seat and side curtain bags augmenting the standard front bags. Thing is, Mazda was afraid the freestyle door would raise safety concerns among potential customers, so it went overboard making the car safe. In addition to all the bags, the all-aluminum rear doors hide beefy tubular-steel "virtual B-pillars," to spread side impact loads into the reinforced floor and roof. Despite the massive opening the double doors create, the chassis is quite stiff, thanks in no small part to the beefy, S2000-style structural backbone that divides the interior.

The steering is assisted directly by an electric motor, so there's none of the hydraulic assist nonsense of virtually every other car's power steering. Whip the wheel from full right to full left, autocross style, and you will never outrun the hydraulics. Even the electrically driven hydraulic system in the MR2 Spyder can't claim that. The stubby, rotor-shaped shifter falls to hand perfectly, and has the same light, quick shift feel as the six-speed Miata, S15 Silvia, or European-market Lexus IS200. No surprise, considering it's the same transmission. The pedals too are perfect, with excellent brake pedal feel, and pedal placement that makes heel-toe downshifts intuitive. And the seats... you never even notice the seats, which is the best compliment there is. They're comfortable and they do their job in a corner.

The RX-8 has a lightweight feel that comes partially from the suspension tuning, partially from light, effortless controls, and perhaps partially from actually being lightweight. We think curb weight is in the 2,900-pound ballpark, but honestly, we're not really sure. Mazda hasn't released an official weight yet, and our test car was whisked away before we had a chance to put it on the scale. More on that in a minute. What we do know is that most of that weight is in the center of the car. Mazda claims the yaw moment, or the car's rotational inertia when spun about its center of gravity, is actually 5 percent lower than the RX-7.

Making the car longer and adding back seats worked against the low yaw moment goal, but the RX-8 managed to lose a lot of weight from the extreme ends of the car to make up for it. The engine, first off, is 86 pounds lighter than the RX-7's. It also sits 60mm farther back (and 40mm lower) than the old engine. In the rear, the gas tank was moved from behind the rear suspension on the RX-7 to under the back seat on the RX-8, and the spare tire and jack were removed entirely, replaced by the much lighter combination of a tire repair kit and a prayer.

The tire repair kit alone tells you how serious Mazda is about making this a sports car. The kit is needed because the tires, Bridgestone Potenza RE040s, are not run-flats--run-flat tires are heavy and seldom sticky enough, and would compromise handling. A spare tire is a dealer option, if you don't want the trunk space.

But what about the engine? Funny you should ask. The new engine is eerily smooth and quiet at idle or cruise, but open the electronic throttle and you hear the rotary's new voice. The side exhaust port has eliminated the ear-bleeding shriek the rotary was once known for, so the heavy, restrictive mufflers of every previous RX-7 are gone. The exhaust is now simple and straight, and the intake largely unmuffled. You hear mostly induction noise from the driver's seat, and it's a unique sound. If an electric engine could have soul, it would sound like this. Imagine an auto parts jockey grinding a Honda starter motor's gear into the corner of an 8-foot length of pressure-treated 4x4 pine. Put your ear on the other end of the beam and you'd hear Renesis. Well, maybe. Either way, it sounds so cool you just want to mash the throttle all the time.

At low rpm, the RX-8 is gutless, but responsive, much like an S2000. But as the revs climb and the number of intake ports goes from two, to four, to six, the engine wakes up. At 6250 rpm, when the high-rpm power ports kick in...well, we're not really sure. You see, our test car, and every RX-8 at this point, is an early, hand-built prototype, and apparently, after a bit of hard use, the power port valves on these prototypes are starting to stick shut.

Mechanically, it's a minor issue, and should be easily resolved, but the effect is huge, almost exactly like driving an S2000 with the VTEC disabled. With the power port valves stuck shut, the engine becomes effectively the same as the 210-hp engine available in base models in Europe and Japan, and in the sissy, four-speed automatic in the United States. We discovered the problem on our dyno, when the RX-8's power went flat at exactly 6250 rpm.

Given the missing 40 hp, we didn't bother doing acceleration tests, but here's the fun part: Several other magazines did do acceleration tests, and we're pretty sure their cars had the same problem ours did. Expect acceleration times to improve dramatically when the production cars arrive. Our car was yanked from our hands the instant we discovered the problem (hence the unknown weight), and a solution is in the works.

We still did our normal slalom, skidpad and braking tests, however. It turns out the brakes feel so strong because they are. The RX-8 hauls to a stop in 114 feet. The slalom is dispatched at 70.6 mph and the car manages 0.90 g on the skidpad. For perspective, that's better grip and nearly equal slalom and braking performance to a 350Z, but not as good as an EVO 8 (see page 122). Once the power ports start opening, we'll have a full and accurate power and acceleration report.