Category: MazdaSpeed 6

The Mazdaspeed 6 was an awesome sleeper, 4wd turbocharged and in a descreet package. The Speed6 uses the same engine found in the Mazdaspeed 3.

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An Intake for Every Engine

It has become evident to us that a number of our customers want more ability to configure the color schemes and finish options on their intakes to match the look of their car or their personality.

Because of this, we have investigated the feasibility of making all of our intakes fully color and finish configurable and are planning a staged product rollout to facilitate this. A product rollout complete with actual hard dates that you can rely on.

Stage I: Black Silicone & Filter and Full Configurability.
December 14, 2009

So starting…well…now, we have begun this transition with the rollout of black silicone couplers and charcoal-colored dry flow air filters on our Mazda3, Mazdaspeed3, Mazdaspeed6, Mazda 6, CX-7, CX-30, and CX-50 intakes. This brings us to three silicone colors (red, blue, black) for the Turbocharged MZR 2.3 DISI engines and two silicone colors (blue, black) on the MZR 2.0 and 2.5 Naturally Aspirated engines for the 2010+ model year.

Another option included in the first stage release of our fully configurable intake system is full configurability of your intake on our website. If you want black silicone, black MAF Housing and blue filter, you can choose that. If you want a red filter and a blue silicone, go right ahead. We’ll build it on the fly. We have gone through a number of lean manufacturing steps that will allow us to be agile and build our kit contents on the fly and retain our same day shipping capability for all stocked color capabilities.

Stage II: Color Anodized MAF Housings.
February 10, 2010

In this stage we will be offering three additional MAF Housing colors (most likely Blue, Red, Gold) and two powder coat colors of turbo inlet pipe, which will be determined by your requests and polls on a number of popular Mazda enthusiast forums. Due to smaller batch quantities on the anodizing and additional process steps, we’ll be offering these colors at a small premium.

Again, we will still allow you full reconfigurability to an extremely granular level -if you want a Blue Filter, Gold MAF, Black Silicone and Black Powdercoated Turbo Inlet Pipe, we’ll do it. Seriously, if you want a Red Filter, Gold MAF, Blue Silicone and Black Turbo Inlet Pipe, we’ll do that too. And just like we have provided now, photos of these combinations will pop up as you configure them on our website.

Stage III: Full Custom Anodizing / Powder Coating and more.
March 15, 2010

First off we’ll be offering powder-coated turbo inlet pipes starting with a gloss black and working into a number of other color coating options.

Additionally, this stage will allow you to fully customize anodize your MAF Housing in as many colors as we have access to. If you want a full blacked out intake with an emerald green, dark purple or titanium bronze anodized MAF Housing, we’ll get it for you (again at a reasonable premium depending on interest and volume). We’ll do our best to do small runs and keep what we can on the shelves based on polls and interest. Have a specific powder coating color? We can make it happen. We may also start anodizing inlet pipes (we’ll be switching 4043 to 5356 TIG filler rod for perfect anodizing results if we go that route).

Here’s an example of some of the anodizing colors we’ll have available:

We will also be evaluating silicone colors at this point -because we know some of you are dying for that Kawasaki Green Silicone with Purple MAF Housing to go along with your Bosozoku exhaust, zero offset wheels and stretched tires. Or maybe you just want a clean, all white intake to go along with your CWP Mazdaspeed 3. Honestly, we’ll have to hear from you on which direction to go, but I’m guessing white will be in demand.

There’s more…but if we told you, we’d have to kill you. We’re still aiming to keep this under wraps to some extent as we’ve got some really unique options on the table that we’re still getting samples of. As soon as our samples are in, we’ll be polling for interest and standard style options.

We’re doing as much as we can to provide the exact products you want, configured to your style and taste. To do so, we’re having to stretch our manufacturing agility and call on all of our resources through local machine shops and manufacturers to keep small batch parts on the shelves in a wide variety of options.

Again, tell us what YOU want to see on your car. Have a wild combination that you absolutely MUST HAVE for your car and willing to wait for it? We’ll be putting together a handful of case studies showing some of the more creative combinations for the roll out of the future options on these products.

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CorkSport Dyno Day

Last Saturday at our CorkSport Swap Meet, we had a great turnout for the Dyno Testing. With 16 people signing up ahead of time and 5 signing up on site, we got some great runs in from a diverse group of participants. We even felt sorry for a handful of non-Mazdas and let them participate as well!

DYNODAY
High horsepower of the day was Jason O’Neill with his ’01 Miata. Jay’s car made 393hp to the rear wheels with a brutal 368 ft lb of torque. A week earlier he had the motor out to diagnose some issues with the variable valve timing as well as try to get the head into the shop for new valve guides and seals and couldn’t make it in time so he threw it back in just to drive down to the event on a set of beefy drag radials. Later in the evening he ran an 11.51 at 124mph out at Portland International Raceway. Brutal. I’ll say this much, when a lightweight little Miata pushing 400+hp (it was uncharacteristically chilly out Saturday night) on a cold track makes a 1.6 second reaction time, it’s driver has had some practice. Hats off to Jay for his awesome car and sticky launch skills.

Close behind was an LS2 powered FD RX-7 that was unbelievably clean. The install was gorgeous, with little over 1000 miles on the clock since the swap, and the powerband was equally beautiful. Dropping an Earth shaking 300ft lb of torque at 1600RPM and following that up with a 45 degree horsepower curve topping out at 376hp, this car would be more adrenaline pumping fun than a barrel of monkeys in an AK-47 factory. And the owner’s passion for Mazdas goes way back…he bought an FD off the lot new in ’93 as well. While purists will wince at the addition of Chevy Power to one of the crown jewels of Mazda’s Rotary history, I would guess anyone who saw the meticulous install and the owners passion for making this an all around amazing car would give it a thumbs up. The drivetrain wasn’t the only amazing thing about the car – the suspension and bodywork were phenomenal as well.

We had a pair of Speed3’s and a Speed6 on the dyno as well, with high HP numbers in the high 260’s and high torque numbers in the high 290’s. The dyno runs on these cars are all over the map, preferencing torque on one run, horsepower on the next. One car ran 257HP w/ 296ft lb followed by a run of 269HP w/ 282ft lb. And I always thought the less the driver could effect the run the more consistent the output would be – not so with the MZR 2.3 DISI powered sedans.

The rest of the pool consisted of two FS Powered Mazdaspeed Protégés, a BP Turbo Powered Protégé, Four Miata’s and two eardrum scalding FB RX-7’s that both gave the LS2 a run for its money for smoothest powerband.

All in all it was a great day, and we had some good opportunities to talk shop and discuss opportunities for more power. The Seattle area group from MazdasNW.com came down and were able to meet up with more of the folks on the forum who are from the Portland Area. All in all, it became clear that a lot of these Mazda enthusiasts are hungry for opportunities to spend time discussing their wrenching projects and spending time with like-minded people. I look forward to future opportunities like this. Thanks again for everyone who came out to the event…without such great participation, none of us would have had as much fun as we did.

P.S. If you have video of your car on our Dyno during the CorkSport Dyno Day and it’s not included in the above video playlist, fire over a copy for me and we’ll add it! Sorry for not getting all of the cars on video, I had a few different hats I was wearing and wasn’t able to get them all.

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Catalysts for All!

Now I know what you may be thinking – WHAT? We don’t need no steenking catalysts. But ya see, that’s the rub – those track days at the ‘ring are lots of fun, but you’re not fooling anyone when the people in the lunch line at Laguna Seca can smell your exhaust. I’ll be the first to say that catalysts serve a great purpose and beyond the evils of over-restrictive cats on stock vehicles, can be a great addition to any performance vehicle.

At CorkSport we have been listening to you, our customers, and there seems to be an interest to have the performance of a racepipe without the foul, eye-scorching smell of fuel every time you cold start the vehicle. Well, you’re in luck – we’ve recently found a source for high quality metallic substrate catalysts in a compact yet high flowing 410 stainless steel package and we plan on offering a range of products that provide these catalysts as a configurable option with our current line of racepipes.

Catalysts: How they work and their failure modes.

A catalytic converter is a device resembles a muffler or resonator – basically an enlarged section of your exhaust system that has a honeycomb structure held inside of it. The honeycomb is then coated with a substrate that creates a chemical reaction based on heat and any unburnt fuel in your exhaust system. Anyone who has used a propane space heater – the kind that glow and don’t really give off any tangible flame – has seen a catalyst at work. Substrate and brick/insert design is relatively straightforward – the more surface area you have, the more efficient the catalyst is at burning unburnt fuel. In the search for more surface area, the density of the honeycomb increases – as does restriction of the system.

This honeycomb comes in two forms – a metallic stainless foil version and a ceramic version. Based on the manufacturing process, the ceramic version must be retained in the canister with a fiberglass or vermiculite packing material around the circumference of the ceramic ‘brick’. In rotary and turbocharged applications, this material often deteriorates from excess heat and pressure allowing the ceramic substrate to rotate and/or crack.

Our catalysts

Our catalysts utilize a 200 cell metallic substrate design and have the honeycomb material all the way to the wall of the canister without any additional packing material that may deteriorate. The metallic spiral is held in place mechanically from either end to prevent movement. The canisters and tubing are made of 410 Stainless Steel and all carry a 5 year manufacturers warranty.

New products

To start with we will be offering the RX-8 Power Series Racepipe in a single resonator/single 65mm catalyst configuration (as well as a single or dual resonator configuration). We’re in the process of doing the first production run on these and hope to have them out in the next two or three weeks.

The next product we will be working with is the Mazdaspeed3 Racepipe with 80mm high flow catalyst, this should be available in the next month in production quantities.

Finally, we are also working on Mazdaspeed6 Racepipe with 80mm high flow catalyst.

Drop me an email if you’re interested in getting in on these products hot off the mandrel – we’ll have a handful of pre-tested prototypes and then full production runs of all of these products within the coming months.

– Jason

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Sneak Peak: CorkSport SRI Air Box

Hey everyone!

Just a quick update as to what we’ve been working on our here at the shop.

I built an air box for our short ram intake for you MazdaSpeed 6 and the MazdaSpeed 3 guys. I built it as a full box but with a removable top so the air filter can be easily removed for cleaning. The use of the air box will help keep hot engine bay temperatures from entering your intake system. In my preliminary testing, a 2 to 4 degree drop in intake air temperature at cruising speeds was measured with the air box installed versus not being installed. Hope that those of you that end up purchasing it, enjoy it!

Here are a couple of pictures of what it looks like installed in a MazdaSpeed 6:

And here is a couple shots of what it looks like in a MazdaSpeed 3:

That’s all for now, tune in next time for more updates from the shop!