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In case you're wondering, I'm J. Thorne.
I just got back from an enchanting day at Mazda's Rev It Up event. If you didn't go - man, you missed out on some fun. It was a longish day, what with driving 140 miles each way and uh....driving for fun in between. Never let it be said that I don't like driving.
I learned a lot. Such as: I haven't been pushing my car nearly as hard as I imagined. I must confess that I was pretty frustrated at first. The 6 just didn't seem very talkative. I didn't feel like I knew what was up with it. A breakthrough happened on the "Braking & Turning" clinic. The instructor advised me to brake later, and harder. I did, and all of a sudden it just clicked. The 6 said,"Yeah, that's more like it!" Suddenly, I felt a lot more confident.
Second: Boy, I hates me an automatic transmission. Bleah. I understand Mazda's reasoning in the decision, but that understanding doesn't make up for laggy throttle response. This really threw me at first - I'm very much accustomed to my Integra's throttle pedal - it's response sharp as hell. I left the 6 in manual mode for the actual competition runs, and that helped quite a bit.
If I had it to do over, I would have gone through the driving clinics twice. That, and I would have hit up the go-karts before competing. You will not be shy about braking late and turning hard after those critters!
These were just single-speeders, but they are absolutely brutal. Driving a go-kart is more of a workout than I expected.I also got to try a six-speed Miata and a MazdaSpeed protege. These were just "test drives", so they didn't get run too hard. I thought the Protege turned about as nicely as the Miata! I'm more keen than ever about buying one...which was probably Mazda's goal all along.
I must also say that the RX-8 is sex in vehicular form. One of the demonstrators took it up to 5000 RPM - it was so smooth you'd hardly know it.
There were also some full race cars there. I was surprised how well I fit into them.
