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The general catch all for all things Mazda which do not fit anywhere else.

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Similar differences

I recently went back to Minnesota for Christmas to visit family and take a little vacation (far from a tropical vacation) from the daily grind here at CorkSport. I flew in to Minneapolis, but needed a rental car for the final leg of the journey. Naturally, I picked the cheapest vehicle they had available (Cobalt or similar is what the description read). I ended up getting a white Toyota Matrix (actual rental shown below).

Being that I work on Mazdas every day, I began to compare everything about this vehicle to its similar, but very different competition, the Mazda 3 hatchback. The following two pictures show that the two share similar side profiles and the same 5-door hatchback design. This is where (in my opinion) the similarities end. The 3’s front flared fenders give it a much more aggressive look and stance than the Matrix. The 3 is also fun to drive and holds to the road well. The Matrix seemed to drift wherever the wind blew and never felt secured to the pavement. I also found that the interior of the 3 is much superior to that of the Matrix. The creature comforts and center console layout in the 3 give a much more luxurious feel than the very, very minimal layout in the Matrix.

After driving about two hours from the airport to my parents’ house and hearing repeated clunking in the rear of the vehicle, I decided to investigate. It turns out that the rear hatch cover does not secure to anything and freely bounces when I hit one of the many potholes on my drive.

In conclusion, my job may in fact bias me towards the 3, but in my opinion, the 3 hatchback is far superior to the Matrix.

Have a new product idea or question? Feel free to Similar differences December 31st, 2010Derrick Ambrose

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“Because You Never Know”

Chris Rock said it best “because you never know”. I had one of those moments in the Mazda 2 heading to a MazdasNW monthly meet in November. The weather was less than exciting with it being dark and raining while driving up to Seattle for the meet. Kelly (check out some of her blogs) was riding with me to meet some of our customers.

About an hour into the drive traffic bunched up a little bit but we were still doing the speed limit then I got a surprise. The sport ute in front of me kicked up a truck tire re-tread. My options were pretty limited on what I could do so I just held the wheel straight and took the hit. The re-tread was about 2-3 feet long and it clipped the hood and hit the windshield with the majority of its mass. This caused an instant spidering of the windshield right in front on my view. Kelly mentioned in her surprise a colorful 4 letter word and we kept on driving. There wasn’t much point in trying to stop to look at the damage with all of the traffic.

Back to the “because you never know” quote, as I had one of our Xcorders installed in the Mazda 2 I have the entire video of the tire being kicked up and impacting the 2. The shock sensor in the Xcorder recorded the video in the event save folder automatically.

The tire hit the windshield at a force of over 2gs that the Xcorder registered. I had someone ask me where it happened. I honestly couldn’t remember where. I took a guess and said around Ft Lewis. When I went back and looked later at the video it showed it happened just North of Olympia with the exact location shown on the GPS in the Xcorder which is about 20 miles away from where I thought it occurred.

The good thing is my insurance company did not give me any difficulty in getting a claim going for the repair of the damage. The total damage to the Mazda 2 is over $2000. A good chunk of that cost is to take apart the front end of the car to re-spray/blend the silver paint. I didn’t even have to break out the video to show them what happened. If there had been some questions I would have been able to provide them with enough information to remove doubt as to what had happened all from the inexpensive $200 Xcorder.

– Derrick

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CorkSport and Mazda Dealers

Here’s the story, CorkSport is looking for Mazda dealers willing to sell our products directly to you. We have several already who are great, and are more than willing to sell our products.

For example, we have a dealer in Canada that regularly sell our products and has them on display in their showroom:

Chambly Mazda In Chambly, QC does a great job representing CorkSport brand parts. We encourage you to check them out if you are near them.

If you know of any dealers that are kind to customers with aftermarket parts, we would like to hear from you. What’s in it for you? Well, you can take a first hand look at our parts before you buy them and then get the dealer to install them! Plus, if they have the parts in stock, you get it the same day.

So if you know of a ‘mod’ friendly dealer near you, let us know and we will do our best to get them to carry CorkSport brand parts!

– Chris

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Who is this Derek Jenkins Guy Anyway?

In May 2009 Derek Jenkins joined Mazda after a 15 year career with VW. Derek worked his way through Volkswagen and his last post was Chief of Design for Volkswagen Group North America. He is credited for the Audi A2, A8, and the VW IROC which is going to be the upcoming Scirocco. So why should we care who he is and what he has done? He is now the Design Director for Mazda Design America which means Derek is now in charge of implementing the Nagare design to upcoming Mazda models with Mazda’s new global design chief, Ikuo Maeda.

VW IROC Concept aka Scirocco

With this role he will be directly communicating to the top of Mazda’s research & development, engineering, and product planning. You can expect to see his work in the next few years with new models of Mazdas being released.

The first vehicle to come out with the Nagare design is the 2011 Mazda 5 which is being shown at the Geneva Auto Show. We have more details on the Mazda 5 in the blog post I wrote up in January.

2011 Mazda 5

Models coming up for re-design or replacement includes the RX-8, Tribute, and CX-9. I am holding out hope the RX-8 gets replaced with an RX-7 successor. The new tribute or replacement for it should be a huge departure from the existing model. The CX-9 I am not sure how it will turn out. It should be getting a facelift soon but it could a surprise how much the Nagare styling influences it.

If you are worried that Derek is not an enthusiast I found an interesting mention of him on Zercustoms showing his modded Golf GTI. Let us hope this gives more leverage to a future RX-7.

– Derrick

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Credit for Content: Video & Product Validation

Every day our customers are sharing our products with other enthusiasts, whether it’s through forum posts, YouTube videos or the results of their own evaluation of our products. We’ve seen customer videos and posts about every facet of our products all the way from unboxing and evaluation of our packaging and presentation of the parts and installation instructions. And we love it.

We love it so much that we’re working on coming up with a way to reward our customers for sharing our products and generating content for our website. Starting immediately, we will hold a contest for customer generated content that will result in two awards of 25% off on the CorkSport product of your choice (not to exceed $100). One of these will be for video content, the other for a product validation case study. The winners will be announced in July and if we get good response, we’ll repeat the contest.

Video content could be a start to finish installation video for one of our products, racing footage, or just a well produced video demoing one or more of our products. Videos should be uploaded to YouTube and tagged with CorkSport Credit For Content as well as the full product name (if multiple in the video, pick the most topical).

Here’s a great example: Jeff Ciesielski, one of our local MazdasNW.com members up in the Seattle area is running a sweet little homebrewed Turbo ’92 Miata 1.6l, replete with a 50 Trim T3 .42/.48 Turbocharger, BEGi Manifold, 2.5 Straight Pipe Exhaust, 28x7x2.5 Front Mount Intercooler, 450cc Injectors and Megasquirt 1v3.0 w/ HR10g Firmware controlling the spark and fuel. The best part about his car though is the bone stock radiator with fans wired in parallel. He was running into all sorts of cooling issues, constantly kicking the auxiliary fan circuit on after a full boost run when he decided to give our FRP radiator cooling panel a shot. This inexpensive part has the distinct added advantage of cleaning up the engine bay aesthetic, what could it hurt?

Now, our customers have had great comments in the past on the functionality of these products, but Jeff’s configured with the full datalogging MS1 ECU, and decided to do some before/after comparisons evaluating the coolant temps and intake air temps of his system and here’s what he found:

“I’m attaching two datalogs from the miata which are tagged by date.

The first one shows the car in a very similar setup(in terms of layout) but running less boost. They were taken in similar ambient temps ( 60 on the first, and 55 on the second) and when it was a bit damp out. My CLTs dropped by around 10 degrees, and whereas my IAT’s used to be around 10 degrees above ambient, they now only get around 5 over ambient.”

About a month later I pinged Jeff back to find out if he had found repeatability in the results, and it sounds like a good 10 degree coolant temperature variance can be seen with the radiator panel:

“I still haven’t managed to get it over 197 even when beating on the car, and much like the earlier log I sent you, it tends to stabilize around 189 when driving, as opposed to the 194-200 it used to be at.”

It’s great to hear you’re having good results Jeff.

We offer radiator panels for the NA Miata, Protege, FC RX-7, and Mazda 3.

We look forward to hearing from our customers.

– Jason