I keep going back to the past experiences of cars I have owned, and thinking of cars I would like to own. Speaking of a car I want to own, the Mazda 2 it has been officially released, down in California at the LA Auto Show. I am really pumped about this car. Sure, we are getting the Mazda 2 four years after the rest of the planet, but hey better late than never in my opinion.
We are getting the “face lifted” version of the car (shown above) here in North America. The top of the line model will probably come with a 1.5L or 1.6L engine; Mazda has not released that information yet. My guess is that we might get the new SKY engines Mazda has been working on.
The size of the Mazda 2 is pretty close to the old BF chassis 323s. The same thing goes for power output, fuel economy, and versatility which will make for a fun package to drive (and modify). I already have visions in my head of a fully built 1.6 engine with a complete pile of CorkSport parts on it. It will take a little bit of time to get everything developed, but I know I am patient enough. Heck I’ve already been waiting years for the Mazda 2, what’s another few months for some performance parts?
A funny design idea I had after seeing the green car was to get one and add Mt Dew decals, and get the sort of urban Mt Dew camouflage like the current can design (seen below). Mix it up with some graphic designs and come out with a truly unique car to hit the streets with.
At the LA auto show they also had a few show versions of the Mazda 2 including a sport version with an aggressively styled body kit and lowered (see below) labeled “2evil”. The whole package looks good for a sport model. Some journalists had tossed around the “Mazdaspeed 2” name for the model but I personally think this is just a concept show car.
One thing for sure is I plan on having some fun with the Mazda 2 once I get mine. What do you guys think? Anyone else as excited as I am?
The most frequent question we get on any of our products for newer vehicles is ‘How will the installation of this part effect or compromise my vehicle’s factory warranty?’. Our parts have seen a lot of mileage and a lot of trips to the dealership and we have seen a lot of different scenarios as it relates to factory warranty claims. The bottom line is -your experience all depends on your dealership, and different dealerships have different attitudes when it comes to aftermarket parts. We have seen dealerships do factory warranty replacements for Turbocharged Mazdaspeed engines and put our downpipe and intakes right back on the car when they’re finished without batting an eye. We’ve also seen other dealerships just take a single look at a car with a full turboback exhaust, intake and front mount intercooler and cry ‘void.’
Anecdotal evidence and your experience with the dealership process aside, the bottom line is the law. In this case, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act is the end all -be all when it comes to aftermarket parts on a factory warranty car. This act requires that there is substantial evidence by the party offering the warranty to link the warranty claim to some cause of the modification prior to denying a claim to the warranty -meaning if you put an intake on your Mazda3 and your oil pump fails, the manufacturer needs to be able to tell you how that the addition of the intake was the actual cause of the failure of the pump. What this means from the anecdotal perspective is all those ‘boy who cried wolf’ episodes of dealers seeing a Peterbilt intercooler on the front of a Speed6 and screaming ‘VOID!’ are nothing but posturing and are in effect an illegal violation of the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act. Especially when these posturing episodes are not even linked to a warranty claim in the first place.
But hey, if you come in with a hole the size of Alaska in your #2 piston and a giant slice out of the block when your connecting rod took a vacation from its duties at 7000rpm and you have a manual boost controller installed or have obviously forgotten to connect the boost control solenoid line and were running 26psi of scalding hot boost, you’re going to be in for an uphill battle. Further investigation and pressing your dealer in such a situation to provide the connection between the modification and the warranty claim to show causal relationship between the modification and warranty claim will generally motivate higher degrees of cooperation. Some of the links at the end of this blog post will give you further information on contesting warranty claims and the unique options that the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act provides for mediation of these disputes -they’re very consumer friendly methods of resolution.
The best thing to do to prevent heartache and investment of unnecessary time and effort is to find a local servicing dealership who is amicable to the addition of bolt on parts for your car. Many dealerships sell aftermarket equipment in their parts departments. We even have a number of Mazda dealerships who are regular customers of ours and install our parts for their customers. It is really in the best interest of any dealership to make their customers see the car they have purchased as custom and their own, and most dealerships realize this and do their best to take advantage of the opportunity. Some ways that you can find the best dealerships in your area are to ask around on local and national enthusiast forums like https://www.mazdas247.com or https://www.mazda3forums.com and other more regional (like our own local https://www.mazdasnw.com) and model specific forums for your area and model of car. Often times these forums have permanently linked threads discussing reviews of shops and dealerships for their members.
For futher information on the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, you can read up on it in a few articles linked below:
Hopefully this information provides you with the peace of mind necessary to make decisions on which modifications you’d like to accomplish on your vehicle and the confidence you need to work with your dealer if they have any issues with the choices you have made in customizing your vehicle.
All of the FACTS aside, it’s important to remember that whichever dealership you choose, your professionalism and courtesy toward their concerns will go a long way in garnering a decent amount of mutual respect. Treat your parts and service guys and gals right and they will take care of you. Whether it’s just a smile and friendly conversation to establish a relationship with the people who work on your car or a box of Krispy Kreme donuts*, the respect you show to your dealership should be commensurate to the amount of respect and cooperation you would expect from them. They work hard to keep your car in tip-top shape and a lot of times I think their work is taken for granted -but if they know you’re not one of the people who’ll only talk to them when your dissatisfied, they’ll go the extra mile for you.
There are a lot of factors that go into purchasing any part for your car, and a turbo inlet pipe is no different. With a wide variety of materials and configurations on the market, it can be a difficult decision.
I think the major discerning differences between metal and silicone are that silicone is an insulator, which is why there are claims that the silicone is a) quieter and b) less prone to heat soak. I’m not sure if a) is true to a consequential amount, haven’t done a dB comparison by any means…but I seriously doubt that b) is true either. All materials have thermal properties, all materials transmit thermal mass at different rates. You can deduce all sorts of theories as to how this effects the boost air temps, but I really doubt that there is any discernible power output or boost air temp difference between a silicone, aluminum or stainless inlet pipe from one pull to the next. These vehicles push enough air to fill an office cubicle through that pipe in the span of under a minute. Then they run that air into a turbocharger that superheats the air. It takes 3 degrees of inlet air temperature change to result in one degree of boost air temperature change with a stock intercooler based on thermocouple datalogging that I’ve done on a number of different cars (Speed6’s and 3’s). With air traveling through a tube at insane velocities (like lets say…60 meters per second…or better yet 134 miles per hour), I find it hard to believe that there is any major detriment to having the turbo inlet pipe made of a more thermally conductive material than another.
The reason you buy the pipe is so you get rid of the stock pipe, which sports an oh so stylish, effectively square profile that changes cross sectional area erratically and is made of plastic which is also pretty thermally benign. But that’s not where the power or quickening of spool up happens when you add the inlet -it’s the flow of the air and the smooth transition from the intake to your turbo that you want to optimize. Simple as that.
If it were my car, I’d get one that a) works reliably, b) has quality construction and c) has a reasonable price tag. I can’t point out any on the market that fail a) or b)…all are excellent from what I have seen. Ours is ~$120….because designing and manufacturing any piece of tubing and/or silicone doesn’t cost much. Period. It’s a pipe. Every turbo inlet pipe on the market is a pipe -with three pipes in factory locations connecting into it. A few have factory like brackets that attach to the valvecover, some don’t. Some are aluminum (CorkSport and RPMC), some are stainless (Protege Garage), some are silicone. They all do the same thing.
Our system certainly gives you a few options that you should be familiar with when purchasing . But the first thing to remark on is -our intake includes these parts. If you’re in the market for an intake, this information is of benefit to you, but if you really want a good deal on all of these bits, grab our Power Series Short Ram Intake for your MS3 or MS6 or CX-7.
So back to the configurable differences if you already own an intake and want to get a turbo inlet pipe to match. Our turbo inlet pipes have a few toggles: Valvecover breather (yes/no) and Recirculation Valve Port (yes/no). The valvecover breather is almost completely unnecessary if you have an aftermarket intake that is not made by us -as most intakes include this provision in the CAI pipe or the coupler. So that’s almost always going to be a ‘no’ unless there’s some other reason why you want an external intake vacuum source to plug into (catch can, etc). The other is the recirculation valve. If you have chosen to do a strictly vent to atmosphere configuration on your bypass valve (not necessarily recommended), you can choose this option and clean up your engine bay a bit.
The final dial on these is the silicone color – for the silicone coupler between the turbo and inlet pipe, as well as the valvecover breather and boost control solenoid lines. These are available in Red, Blue and Black. Finally, in the near future we will be offering one or more powdercoating options starting with black.
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 have 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.
An Intake for Every Mazda Engine July 24th, 2024CorkSport
Goodbye 323 GTX. Goodbye Cusco, GT Spec, Pedders, Autometer, Injen, Knightsports, KVR, RE-Amemiya, Mazdaspeed, and about 50 other product lines.
You may have noticed a recent news post announcing we are phasing out Mazda 323 GTX Parts. The 1988-89 GTX (in USA) was a great car for its time. Many owners have maintained and upgraded their cars to the point they are more powerful and better handling than some of the newest cars. A remarkable testament to the car considering it is over 20 years old!
Unfortunately, there just aren’t enough of them left on the road to justify further development and support. Sales have steadily declined for this car for many years. Ultimately, I think the recession was the last straw for us. Very limited inventory remains and we plan to remove this car from our catalog by the end of the year. To answer the most common question we’ve received since the official announcement last week: “Yes, a few parts will likely end up in our clearance sale”. To reflect on the most common comment we’ve received so far, “You Suck”; it is regrettable, truly. We don’t like it either, but it was ultimately our customers that made the decision for us.
We are also phasing out many product lines, as I mentioned earlier. Border, RE-Amemiya, Mazdaspeed, Knightsports, and FEED are venerable Japanese brands. They have always been slow movers for us, have long lead times for our customers, and sales volumes don’t support keeping parts in inventory. Japanese quality is exceptional, truly, and if you have the taste (and wallet) for these parts we are confident you’ll find a way to get them.
Brands like Injen, Centerforce, KVR, NGK, Unichip, Koyo, and Greddy have many products that are redundant to our own catalog. We are committed to making CorkSport parts the best value on the market but we don’t make everything. We’ve selected a few partners to fill out our product line. The remainders are being dropped from our catalog.
We’ll be launching a new approach to business early next year that builds upon our reputation for high quality parts at an excellent value and supported by the best customer service in the industry. This plan requires a commitment we cannot maintain while serving sales of other brand names. When you think “CS” will you think ‘customer service’ (pardon the lame humor)? We hope so.
There are no gimmicks here. We don’t trademark some odd spelling of a performance sounding words to trick you into believing your getting technology that is different from everything else out there. You are smart enough to recognize that sort of marketing. We could try gimmicks like free shipping but that means we inflate our prices to cover the cost (and thus it is not free to you) or we erode profits and have less opportunity to use them to serve you better. Better to know what you are paying for in my opinion.
Our goal is value. Price, quality, support before/during/after the sale, shipping, packaging, and warranty all go into the value equation. We are focusing our product line in order to offer better value to our customers through improved customer service and support.
