Shed Of The Week: Mazda RX-8 - Pistonheads.com
And yet, the sight of a tin of 5w30 was precisely what greeted hapless journos whenever they opened the boot of a Mazda RX-8 press car. It hadn't been left there by mistake: it had been put there deliberately, along with a tersely-worded admonition from Mazda UK to check the oil level every ten minutes. Actually it may have been every week, or every day. For owners of many mid-2000s RX-8s it turns out that no amount of oil could stave off the now notorious RX-8 peril of null hot starting. This engineering failure was, and is, a massive shame as the rotary engine is a brilliant design, producing in the RX-8 unfeasible amounts of power (230hp) from a comically small swept volume (nominally 1. 3 litres, though our lovely Government... The hot start (or lack of it) malaise is caused by worn tips on the tri-lobed rotor that is the rotary engine's equivalent of a blockful of pistons. This single whirry lump layout bestows low engine weight and stupidly high revs, but the cost of repairing a Mazda rotary is even higher. Source: www.pistonheads.com
