Project NoTorques, an RX8 for time trials, HPDE and some autocross

In reply to cdyer77:

Thanks for the recommendation, I was aware of the radiator but the lead time listed on Mazmart is too long for me right now as my next event is in two weeks.

Kudos and many thanks to Goodwin Racing, they did have the Koyo 37mm in stock and managed to get it to me just in time for this weekend's wrenching session. I'm aware of people complaining about fitment issues with both the Mishimoto and the Koyo (the original Mishimoto seems to have been extremely bad). However at this point in time I don't have much of a choice unless I want to risk using another OEM radiator.

So instead of working on the car most of the day yesterday, I had to clean up the mess I had made ("slight" accidents during the oil changes) and decided to temporarily wire up the LED strip lights I installed a few weeks ago. Blimey, my garage is actually properly illuminated and I can even work in there at night without extra lights. It's almost like I can see what I'm doing now...

I did spend sometime unearthing the radiator. It's rather well buried in the nose of the car, so it does take some unearthing.

Almost there, there is more digging to be done to get at the thermostat that I'll be changing at the same time:

Look, we can almost see the radiator:

And we have found the culprit for the leak:

That's the hole for the connector for the overflow tank - seems to be a fairly common issue on these. I can't tell if that's the original glue (the connector that goes in the hole is metal) or if it's been "repaired" before. Either way, that radiator is scrap as is...

Plan for today is to dig out the thermostat which will require further dismantling and then attempt to replace the radiator. I'll probably have to improvise some of the foam that goes in between the top of the radiator and its mount. I might have to consult Home Depot Racing supplies for that.

Well, the thermostat is in. What a berkeleying palaver. No photos, but a couple of tips - according to the wisdom of the Internetz, there's a 50% chance you might need to loosen the exhaust air injection pipe to get enough wiggle room to turn the thermostat top cover to get it out. Do yourself a favour, don't take the chance and loosen it anyway as that makes the job much quicker. I found out the hard way...

The radiator is also in, which is another massive juggling act because you have to carefully insert the radiator with the fans mounted on its back between a crossmember and the a/c condenser. Try to get the car as high up as possible, this looks like a reasonably easy job on a lift and it's a demi-nightmare if the car is on jack stands with barely enough room to wiggle the thing in. I also made the mistake of not transferring the two top rubber mounts for the radiator before inserting the radiator (they brace the radiator against the top front mounting brackets) and now found out that once the Koyo is in, there is not enough space to put the top nuts on, so right now they serve as locating pins. Let's hope I didn't make another nightmare for myself with that, I don't really feel up to taking the radiator out again...

Other than that, the Koyo radiator is nice, shiny and a perfect fit. I still need to get some foam around the radiator before I can put the air guide back on, but it's beginning to look like I have a fighting chance to have a working car for the event on the 23rd.

Well, with one if - I had to cut off the original radiator hoses and the silicone replacements I bought had an incorrect hose for the top connector. I contacted the merchant but if I can't get a replacement in time I'm screwed...

Hopefully a set of Racing Beat silicone hoses overnighted in from SoCal at $humongous will help me put it together this weekend. The coilovers got delayed, they're supposedly leaving Ohlins today so they're not going to make it in time. Guess I have to figure out if I want to take it on the track on well used stock suspension or try to get the MR2 into usable shape.

In reply to jj:

Not yet, it's hard to drive to the dealer when it's on jack stands...

I'm impressed with how buried they made that radiator. It's like they had this giant engine bay, but didnt want to make things tooo easy. Challenge Accepted.

You can still get a reman engine from Mazda, but I've never been able to find it in any of the online parts lists. Not even over at Mazdaspeed. The Mazda remans don't necessarily have the best reputation, early on at least, but Interwebz rumour has it that more recently they're better. If this one turns into a keeper[1] then I'm probably trying to get a second engine, build it up myself and then swap it out. Rotaries can be fiddly in places but not super hard to rebuild.

From what I've seen, ones with a duff engines seem to be advertised for around $3k at least in NorCal. IIRC that's not quite enough to replace the engine and come out even, unless you actually manage to source a good used engine. They allegedly exist, those good used engines ...

<Igor voice> It liveth, mathter. </Igor voice>

No pictures yet, haven't had time to sort through them but it's now back and running again with the new radiator and new radiator hoses. As usual the silicone hoses were a bit of a pain to install but the old "a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid" trick helped a lot.

I also ended up replacing most of the foam around the radiator. The window a/c weatherstripping from Home Depot is a pretty good alternative and should hopefully last longer than the OEM stuff. I have to go back and get more though as I didn't buy enough of the larger square section one and the thinner one is too small to fit between the undertray and the bottom of the radiator. I'll probably also upgrade to an aluminum undertray instead of the floppy plastic one as the plastic one has a bit of a reputation for altering its shape while driving.

Oh, and I also fitted a Sylfex AuxMod to the radio so I can hook up my phone instead of having to carry a stack of CDs. Boy is taking that radio out fun. Also found that someone had been in there before and one of the side mounting bolts is missing. That'll explain the squeaking from the centre console then.

Tires sorted, got a fresh set of Hankook R-S3s on it now in 245/40/18. It was either those or the Rival Ss, but those are 50 bucks more a corner...

To make life interesting, the weather forecast currently calls for snow over the Sierra Passes on Friday afternoon, just as I'm making my way over to Thunderhill. Yikes.

Some heavy boxes arrived today:

No, I'm not daft enough to try and work through the night to put them on the car. I finally got a quote for getting the door fixed and that's enough of a reminder to not go a-wrenching when tired.

The trip to Thunderhill is going to get interesting, by now the weather forecast is calling for 3-5" of snow up at Lake Tahoe, more at higher elevations. So I can't even take the RX8 to work, got to leave it at home, come back and then take about a 2h detour to Thunderhill to avoid the higher passes.

Nice build, looks like you've covered most of the known issues from the series 1. Something else to check out is your clutch pedal. If you have any squeaking/creaking noises when pressing it down, you'll more than likely have a tear in the support bracket. I've replaced mine twice in 10years. There are aftermarket brackets that bolt up, or you can spot weld a few areas to strengthen it.

The factory endlinks can fail with stock swaybars, so I can't imagine they would do well with larger swaybars.

I second the BHR coils, you install them once and forget about them. Mazda coils require periodic checking, and you will always be wondering if you're down on power.

^+10 ^ Used the bolt on bracket on mine. Real simple and amazingly strong.

I'm aware of the clutch pedal issue (actually looked at one with a bad pedal), this one has been OK so far. It's on the todo list nevertheless, but not that high up.

The endlinks on the car aren't in good shape (most of the boots are torn) so I'll end up replacing them with uprated parts once I address the sway bars.

Well, I'm back from Thunderhill, unfortunately early but with the car still in one piece.

Overall it's good news but it looks like on the way down, the car decided to slice its water pump and alternator belt in half. I only noticed that about halfway through the day and then decided I'd rather not risk blowing up the engine if the belt breaks completely so I went home after the first time trials session.

The good news is that even without the suspension or any of my other typical mods (race seat etc), I managed to get very close to last year's best lap (1:39-something) by running a 1:40-something. Not bad for a car that is in desperate need of a good alignment and on worn stock suspension.

I have to figure out what caused the damage to the belt - it might have just been old age but I'm not taking any chances.

Still no idea what caused the damage, although I suspect I didn't quite tighten it enough and both belts were rather worse for wear. New belts on, no funny noises, so I dropped it off at one of the better local bodyshops to get the damaged door fixed. Should get it back Friday hopefully, with a bigger than expected bill. Ah well, still not too bad...

Also still waiting on the official results , unfortunately the clock is ticking on me having to submit results to Mazda Motorsports..

And here we have the culprit:

Slightly narrower than it should be:

And amazingly enough there were a few remains of the original belt to be found in other places in the engine bay:

Result were published a week or so ago. Looks like all the fast people showed up after I had to leave, I went down from a provisional 8th place to 15th overall out of 20. Still first in my class (CT-C).

On the more exciting news front, finally had the Öhlins coilovers installed by a local performance shop as I simply couldn't find the time to do it myself. Plus the car had to go there for an alignment and corner weights anyway.

So far I'm pretty impressed, but I've only driven it for approximately 30 miles. Seems that the comments about the ride quality improving despite the higher spring rates were spot on. Now I just have to find a track event so I can test it properly before the next competitive event.

Drove it yesterday and noticed that the passenger side window wouldn't budge. Like, at all. As I have a track day with some instruction booked at Laguna Seca on Tuesday I pretty much had to look into right now. First checked the switched, of course they checked out. Wiggling the switch on the passenger side produced lightly audible clicks but otherwise, nada.

So off comes the door card and the motor. Motor works fine with no load, so it's time to look at the regulator. At this point I look up and notice that there's a storm coming, the RX8 is parked outside and I don't really have the space to pull it inside to continue wrenching. So I better get this done before the storm arrives, and that's my excuse for the lack of pictures, too.

Looking at the regulator - a rather Heath Robinsion- ish device - I notice that it seems to be a little out of alignment - on side seems to be sitting deeper in the plastic door shield/mounting surface than the other. So I looked a bit closer with my fingers and the whole berkeleying thing disappears into the depths of the door, immediately followed by the door glass. Wonderful.

So off comes the plastic, I pull out the glass and try to pick up all the pieces of the regulator. That's roughly the same time I read the dire warnings in the shop manual to ensure that the cables never ever come off the drum. Yeah right, that's because it's a PITA to reassemble - I had to ask my wife to give me a hand and it still took us about 30 minutes to piece the darn thing back together.

I made sure that the plastic regulator housing is now clipped into its mount correctly, quickly bolt the motor back on before it changes its mind, then put bolt the regulator to the same piece of plastic card and yay!, working window regulator. Oh, and it's also starting to drizzle...

After greasing the window rubbers with a little silicon grease, the door glass goes in without a hitch, door card back on and ...

... still working. Phew. To celebrate I put some grease on the window rubbers on the drivers side, which also improves matters a little. I guess that counts as track prep.

Not much to report, mainly because there hasn't been much building going on. I'll try to post a couple of updates in the next few weeks - basically I've been to Laguna Seca twice since, had another Club Trials event with my local SCCA region that may or may not have resulted in a new club lap record for my class (still waiting for official confirmation) and washed it a couple of times...

It's developed an annoying front brake judder that I need to fix, but I have another event on Saturday so I'll somehow have to ignore that for a few more weeks. One of the front rotors has about three times the allowable runout, plus the front brakes are dragging, so I'll have to try and rebuild the calipers and at least replace one rotor, if not both.

That said, I've been collecting some parts to improve matters, like this nice and shiny piece:

Some more excitement - I changed the oil before the event and couldn't get the oil filter (Mazda OEM) to seal properly. Didn't notice that until I arrived at work in a big cloud of smoke. Oops.

So instead of setting off to the track in good time, I had to drive back home (about 45 minutes) and let the car cool down enough so I could replace the filter without ending up with burns on my forearms. Turned a panicked oil filter change but at least the replacement held, I'm guessing I nicked the seal on the other filter. Other than that the car was running fine, although I do still have issues with the rear tires slowly losing grip over the course of a session so I got to go sideways a couple of times.

Sign that the loose nut behind the wheel needs further work, methinks.

It's definitely time for some updates...

First, yes, I did hold the club's lap record in my class with this car. For one event, until someone competent showed up...

The brake issues dogged me through the rest of the season. I had to skip the last SCCA event as the judder got so bad it felt like it was shaking the car apart. That part we traced to worn hubs, so I had one of the few mechanics I trust around here install a set of new Mazda OEM hubs. While we were at it, we put new rotors and pads in the front as well, just in case. That almost cured the problem but under hard braking at Laguna Seca (where else), the judder came back. I'm planning to change the undertray for an aluminum one and once that's done we'll fabricate some backing plates and run some cooling ducts to the rotors in the hope that that'll finally fix the issue. I'm still a bit surprised by these issues given the reputation of these cars for having extremely strong brakes. Ah well.

One of the big issues I kept running into is that the stock seat is just too high for me to comfortable drive the car with a helmet on. Even when driving with a gangsta lean I'm prone to banging my head on the roof. To see if a better seat would fix this issue, I ordered a set of Nagisa Super Low seat rails for the driver's side. I've had these before on my MR2 and they're nicely made and basically do what it says on the tin.

First test fit looked pretty good, going from this:

to this:

However, for some annoying reason I always end up having to do this when I take a seat out of one of my (used) cars for the first time:

Yup, one of the captive threads for the mounting bolts was berkeleyed up so I ended up having to recut the thread both on the bolt and the captive nut.

Test fitting myself to the car was a success, I finally fit in propely with a helmet on my bonce. So of course I pulled the Recaro out again while I tracked down a driver's side seat belt buckle with its wiring harness. Call me lazy but I wanted to have a setup that allowed me to swap seats within a few minutes and not have to disconnect the seat wiring harness from the original seat.

Eventually I found someone who sold me this:

It's out of a car with cloth seats and no seat heater but that doesn't matter as the connectors are the same. I did turn the airbag connector into a pig tail with an "air bag simulator" aka a 2.2Ohm resistor:

Then it was time to fit the whole thing to the seat rail:

Needs a bit more zip tie action but it did the job. And finally I have a proper seat in the car:

I'm not a fan of running the seatbelt like this, so it's either time for a custom roll bar and a five point harness or time for another seat. I'm not sure which way I'm going yet - if I want to run Time Attack in SoCal in the Enthusiast class it'd require me to keep the full interior even with a roll bar, which complicates fabrication ($$$). The alternative would be to fit a Bride Low Max recliner instead. That's probably the cheaper option if I sit low enough with the Bride, if not it's the much more expensive option...

Looks great!

Is that a Pole Position? Check and make sure it does not fall into the recalled group. If it does you get brand new ones, call them and check.

The other job was to replace the AST - as we all know rotaries don't like to overheat so having a plastic tank give up the ghost on the track isn't exactly conducive to the engine's health. Plus, a little bling under the hood is never wrong.

Time to pull this apart:

Apparently someone's been using my car as a storage unit while I wasn't looking:

Oh, and if you're too lazy to pull the air box tray out or just don't want to have to disconnect the wiring loom from it, a bungee can help:

Blingy test fit:

When I changed out the radiator I ended up replacing the hoses as well. I originally ordered the Mishimoto kit and found out it only included two of the three hoses, so I ended up with the Racing Beat kit as well. After I pulled the battery box and header tank I noticed a fair amount of wear marks and nicks on the Racing Beat hose so I pulled it out and replaced it with the Mishimoto:

And put everything back together:

Any excuse to play with the Flir attachment for my phone, sorry, I mean checking that everything it heating up properly:

It took a few attempts at burping the system but I much prefer this tank to the OEM one.

And finally, I had the airbag recalls done in December. IIRC there's still another recall lurking for the fuel pump mounting ring, but that wasn't yet current when I dropped it off for the airbag recall. Either way I'm probably going to install a new fuel pump anyway - there is no separate fuel filter on these cars and it's got close to 130k on what I believe is the original pump...

Aaaannnd...

Another recall. Sigh. I knew it was coming, dealer didn't know about it yet when I brought it in to get the airbags done and six weeks later I get another invite to bring it back.

Thanks to some pointers from SteveDallas I found that Mazda Motorsports sells a front brake duct for the RX8 so I'll see if that'll help me fix the brake issues.

Well, that wasn't such a nice surprise...

The RX8 has stood for a couple of months since I've been traveling a lot for work and I don't use it when there's snow on the road. Over the last few days it's been raining so I was finally able to get the car out without having to dig it out.

One twist of the key and it was running, as usual. Only this time it was only running properly on what felt like a single rotor and the low coolant light kept glowering at me. Eventually all chambers decided it was time to wake up and go to work, so it did smooth out. But given that the header tank is about 1/2qt-1qt low on coolant, that doesn't look like a good sign to me .

Started fine warm on my way back from the lunch errands, but it looks like I'll get to investigate this particular issue before I decide if it's worth spending more money and time on this car.