01-31-2010 09:45 PM

The icing on Mazda’s 90th birthday cake must be the SpeedSource Mazda RX-8’s victory a few hours ago at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona enduro. Drivers Jonathan Bomarito, Nick Ham, David Haskell, and Sylvain Tremblay repeated their 2008 win amidst a field of Porsche GT3s* and Camaros.Of course, Mazda has some experience at this [...]

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And they absolutely scream as they cross the start finish line. It would be cool to see them develope a Daytona Prototype!

2MUCHZ

Countdown to a rotary ban in THAT series too:

http://www.tenerife-training.net/Tenerife-News-Cycling-Blog/2007/10/inspirational-people/the-1991-le-mans-mazda-team-and-the-legendary-rotary-renown-787b/

Everybody should take 5 minutes and watch that clip .

It makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck .

What an awesome machine , all the test pilots are laughing

after each ride - so cool , like bringing a gun to a knife fight ! :laugh:

The RX8 won't be banned as it fits nicely into its class. Over the years, IMSA, SCCA and others have figured out what the rotary engine was capable of and classed it appropriately. FWIW, the rotary engine will not rev forever and DOES have limitations. The eccentric shaft that the rotors ride on is much like a piston engine's crank shaft and as the name implies, a good deal of mass resides off set from the eccentric shaft's center of rotation. Whew!

Because of this eccentricity, the faster you rev the engine, the more the shaft starts to wobble up to a point when the rotors little teeth start to walk out of the stationary gears. Then the engine disintegrates. This happens around 10K.

BTW, my old GT3 RX3 race car sounded much like that Le Mans car. Although they are getting rarer, one can still find a big ported rotary race car out there.

I was at the 24hour, talk about loud they are ear piercing and when they down shifted going into the first turn off the start/finish line they had flames like the space shuttle.

I watched alot of it on Speed but wonder how long it will be around, the stands seemed empty even though the infield was somewhat crowded.