Mazda 6 | CorkSport Mazda Performance Blog

February 11, 2021October 31, 2022

Mazdaspeed 6/Mazda 6 Front Adjustable Camber Arms

We are happy to announce the return of the CorkSport Adjustable Front Upper Control Arms for Mazdaspeed 6 and GEN1 Mazda 6 to complement the return of the CorkSport Adjustable Rear Camber Arms. Back and better than ever, the CS control arms provide improved handling and easier wheel fitment through front camber adjustability. An impressive 4.5 degree adjustment range ensures you are able to get the camber you want. Whether you are dialing in your handling for the track, correcting your added camber from lowering, or even just adding in more camber for that new wheel and tire setup, the CS adjustable control arms are a good fit for your build.

CorkSport Adjustable Front Upper Control Arms for Mazdaspeed 6 and Mazda 6

The focus of the CorkSport Adjustable Control Arms is an easy modification of the OEM camber setting. You only need to jack up your car to easily access the four bolts on top of the control arm. Once loosened you can adjust as needed before tightening everything back up and lowering your car, without even removing a wheel! It’s a great setup for correcting camber from pothole damage or lowering, optimizing your alignment for the track, or adding negative camber to get the stance you want to fit that new wide wheel setup.

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Modify your Camber setting without needing to remove your wheel!

At CorkSport lowering spring height (1.5” lower than OEM), our local race alignment shop measured an adjustment range of approximately +0.5° to -4.0°. During the measurements they even complimented how easy the CS arms are to adjust! If you’re lower than CS spring height, you are able to go even more negative due to the natural camber gain of the MS6 double wishbone front suspension. While if you are higher than CS springs, you won’t be able to go as negative.

Truly an easy bolt-in installation with no strange handling geometry changes

Because the CorkSport upper control arms replace the entire OEM upper control arms, we knew that fitment was vital to ensure correct handling characteristics, and an easy installation. These arms were designed directly from the OEM control arms so they are truly an easy bolt-in installation with no strange handling geometry changes. With the added camber adjustment, we also verified clearance throughout the suspension travel and at all camber settings to prevent any strange noises or damage to your vehicle.

Long lasting strength for your Mazdaspeed6

We have put the CS adjustable front camber arms through extensive real-world testing to ensure long lasting strength for your car. We have been testing an early production unit on a MS6 for around 6 months at the time of writing. This car has been used in everything from daily driving, to aggressive driving in the twisties, to even hauling heavy loads around. Throughout all of this, the car has been setup with -3° of camber with a 255/40-18 summer tire on a 9.5” wide wheel. We have seen consistent performance out of the CS control arms with no issues whatsoever, so you can be sure they can take whatever you can throw at them!

Each set of CorkSport Adjustable Control Arms is made from A513 steel for long lasting strength and durability. The camber adjustment box on the arms are gusseted for added strength and rigidity. The arms are then finished off with a black powdercoated finish for long lasting corrosion protection and a great look. Each kit also comes with brand new ball joints, castle nuts, and cotter pins to keep everything operating correctly. Plus, we upgraded the rubber bushings where the arms mount to the chassis to spherical bearings. This change ensures good consistent handling feel and reduces slop that can result from old worn out rubber.

That about sums up the CorkSport Adjustable Control Arms for Mazdaspeed 6 and GEN1 Mazda 6! Be sure to check out the product listing for more images, as well as our product video to see these arms in action. If you have any questions, shoot us an email or give us a call, we’re always happy to help!

December 3, 2020November 3, 2022

Mazda 3, 2014-2018 Carbon Fiber Engine Cover

We are happy to introduce the CorkSport Carbon Fiber Engine Cover for 2014-2018 Mazda 3, 2014-2018 Mazda 6 non-turbo up to 03/02/2018 build date, 2013-2017 Mazda CX-5, and 2016-2020 Mazda CX-3!

Personalize your look to match your build!

Add some much-needed flair to the engine bay of your Mazda in 10 minutes or less. Offered in two different REAL carbon fiber weave patterns with 4 choices of CS emblem colors so you can personalize your look to match your build. Read on for full details and check out the images!

CorkSport Carbon Fiber Engine Cover for 2014-2018 Mazda 3, 2014-2018 Mazda 6, 2013-2017 Mazda CX-5, and 2016-2020 Mazda CX-3!

The CorkSport Mazda 3 carbon engine cover spices up your Mazda’s engine bay with a fantastic 100% real carbon fiber. You have your choice of weave between a regular 2×2 twill weave or “forged” carbon for a little extra cost. The forged carbon was originally developed by Lamborghini and uses chopped strands of carbon instead of the traditional carbon cloth for a unique appearance. Both are finished in high gloss for a truly great look!

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The Mazda 3 Engine Cover Fits Like OEM

Each CorkSport engine cover is designed to be a direct replacement for your OEM engine cover. We used an OEM cover when creating the design so you can be sure it will fit and look just like OEM. All OEM mounting locations were replicated and then securely bonded to the carbon. The covers sit right where they’re supposed to and don’t cause any vibrations or rattles!

Add some flair to your engine bay

We finished off the CorkSport CF engine cover with a custom billet aluminum “CS” logo badge. It offers a nice finishing touch that replicates the Mazda badge on the OEM cover. To give it your personal touch, four different anodize colors are available: blue, red, black, and silver. Each color looks great with the carbon background, whether you want a stealthy black look or bright red to match your car’s paint and your CS intake!

If you’re looking to add some flair to your engine bay and impress at your local car meet, check out the CorkSport Carbon Fiber Engine Cover. Be sure to check out the product listing for more pictures and don’t hesitate to give us a call with any questions, we’re happy to help!

October 31, 2019April 24, 2023

Front Strut Tower Brace for the 4th Generation Mazda 6

We’ve heard you asking, we’ve even seen you trying to fit our strut tower brace for the 2014-2018 Mazda 3 onto your 6. We are proud to announce the challenge is over. We’ve created a new design specifically for the 4^th generation Mazda 6 and its available now!

You may have a goal of improved driving experience or you just want a visual improvement to the engine bay. We are offering both to you.

The polished aluminum strut bar and powder coated steel brackets look great under the hood of the Mazda 6 and the added chassis stiffness provides improved handling and driver feedback.

Install is a breeze with color step-by-step instructions and included hardware. If you’re looking to get even more out of your Mazda 6 in those curvy back roads then we suggest a rear swaybar and sport springs to go along with the CorkSport Front Strut Tower Bar.

This package will really wake up the chassis of the Mazda 6 providing you with a sports car feel from your big sedan.

Don’t hesitate! Gets your today!

April 25, 2019August 17, 2023

Mazda 6 Turbo Lowering Springs Release!

We at CorkSport are happy to introduce the Sport Lowering Springs for 2018+ Mazda 6 equipped with the 2.5L turbocharged engine. In our last post, we talked about the height, handling, and quality of our new springs. If you haven’t seen it, check it out HERE. Today we’ll cover how we tested the ride quality and go a step further to talk about damping and natural frequency. I’m going to warn you now; this gets a little bit complicated, but we’re happy to answer any questions you may have.

Spring Damping

Let’s start with a basic example–your car hits a bump that compresses the spring. It “springs” back to its normal length. In a perfect world with no friction or damping, the springs in your suspension would keep bouncing up and down forever, this is called oscillation. Add back in dampening and friction, and the spring will settle out to its normal length pretty quickly. How different strengths of damping affect the “oscillation” can be seen in the graph below.

The car has hit the bump at the bottom left of the graph. As time goes by, you can see the spring expand and compress, and so on. The Greek letter is not important but what is important is the numbers. When it is 0 (black line) the spring compresses and expands over and over to the same height. As the number increases, you can see that the spring returns to its normal length faster until it gets too large and overpowers the spring (dark blue line). For a car, the 0.4 to 1 range is ideal as there is minimal “bouncing” without having too high of damping.

What does all this mean though? Let’s say from the factory the car is in the 0.7 range (orange line). If we went to a drastically stiffer spring but kept the OEM dampers, we may end up in the 0.2 range (light blue line), which would be uncomfortable due to all the bouncing every time you hit a bump. The CorkSport front and rear spring rates chosen are small enough of a change to fit well with the OEM damping, ensuring no bouncing.

Stock 2018 Mazda 6 and CorkSport Modified Mazda 6 — Stock height vs. CorkSport Springs

Natural Frequency Analysis

To go along with this, we did some natural frequency analysis. Natural frequency simplified is how quickly the suspension responds to a bump. The higher the natural frequency, the harsher the ride in a car is. Most “regular” production cars sit in a 1.0-1.6 Hertz (Hz) range for a comfortable ride. Sports cars are usually in the 1.6-2.3Hz range. Full race cars are usually 2.3-3.0 or even higher. An average person will start thinking a ride is stiff/harsh at around 2.0-2.2Hz. Using a special app that ties into the accelerometers of a cell phone we can approximately measure the frequency of a specific suspension setup. With stock suspension on the Mazda 6 2.5T, this yielded ~1.4Hz front and ~1.7Hz rear.

With a stiffer spring, these frequencies will increase, but we wanted to be sure to only increase them slightly, to not severely affect comfort. We went through a few different combinations to get our ideal result. Our final setup ended up at ~1.5Hz front and ~1.85Hz rear. This is enough to notice the suspension feels “sportier” without riding harshly.

2018+ Mazda 6 Roller Shot with lowering springs

There is one other big thing to highlight with frequency. Notice that both the OEM and CorkSport lowering springs have a higher rear natural frequency than front. If your natural frequency front to back is close to equal, the car has a tendency to “pitch” front to back over bumps. Since your rear tires hit the bump slightly later than the fronts, to have a comfortable ride the rear suspension has to “catch up” to the fronts to prevent this pitching back and forth. If a frequency is too much higher in the rear, it can be too fast for the fronts and cause the same pitching issue.

Natural frequency was always on our minds when designing the CS springs and we tested a bunch of different combinations to determine the optimum balance of ride and handling.

That about does it for the Mazda 6 2.5T Sport Lowering Springs. Be sure to let us know if you have any questions-suspension is hard, even for us! Lastly, be sure to share your MZ6T with us by using #CorkSport.

-Daniel @ CorkSport

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March 14, 2019August 14, 2023

Let’s Get Chilly: CorkSport Intercooler for SkyActiv 2.5T

It’s time to break down our design for the CorkSport Performance Intercooler Upgrade for the Mazda 6 2.5T. We have covered both the OEM intercooler and piping, and our design plan for the upcoming Sky-T intercooler piping upgrade in previous blogs, but today’s focus is the intercooler itself. Intercoolers are a delicate balancing act between size, cooling efficiency, and pressure drop so naturally things can get a little complicated. Buckle up and stay with us, and be sure to drop any questions you may have down below.

Taking a look at the stock intercooler mounted on the Mazda 6 (shown above) shows us quickly where our size constraints lie. With the large crash bar, we cannot go too much larger in height without trimming the crash bar, bumper, or both. However, there is a ton of room for added thickness and better end-tank design that can really help increase the width of the intercooler. The stock intercooler core is 24.5” wide, 5.5” tall, and 2.625” thick. Our plan is to fit a 27” wide, 6” tall, and 3.5” core without any trimming. This sizing combined with a low-pressure drop will be good for 400WHP with no issues! Because the Mazda 6 comes with just around 200WHP from the factory, this sized core provides plenty of room for upgrading down the road without causing excessive boost lag that can occur if an intercooler is simply too big. Check out a prototype CorkSport intercooler mounted on the car below.

Mazda 6 Front Mount Intercooler Installed

Now that size is taken care of, let’s move on to cooling efficiency and pressure drop of the CorkSport intercooler for the SkyActiv 2.5T. These are tied closely together as getting extremely high cooling efficiency usually means high-pressure drop and vice versa. Just so we’re on the same page, cooling efficiency is how well the intercooler cools off the pressurized air that passes through it. So a highly efficient intercooler will be able to bring the boost temperatures down similar to the ambient air temperature. Pressure drop is exactly what it sounds like, a loss in pressure from the inlet to the outlet of the intercooler which can be caused by a number of things: poor end-tank design, too many intercooler fins, or simply poor flow distribution in the intercooler. Too large of a pressure drop means lower boost pressures reaching your engine and/or your turbocharger working harder to achieve the same boost levels.

Mazda 6 Front Mount Intercooler product photo by CorkSport

Pressure drop and cooling efficiency are influenced primarily by two things: fin density and end-tank design. Fin density is basically how many fins the boosted air must pass over when traversing the intercooler. More fins = better cooling efficiency, but also more pressure drop. To choose the best core for the SkyActiv 2.5T we plan to use multiple different fin densities and test each for power, cooling efficiency, and pressure drop. While we can get pretty close based on our work from the CS Mazdaspeed Intercoolers, it’s always best to test and identify the best one for each platform. With this extensive testing, we can reach our goal of improved cooling efficiency, lower pressure drop, more power, and no CELs.

End-tank design is critical as it determines how the air reaches the core of the intercooler. Sharp bends, poor air distribution, and small inlet/outlet size all adversely affect the performance of the intercooler. To fit the core size we want, we had to do away with the plastic inlet and outlet pipes of the stock intercooler. This was advantageous as it gave us more room to have a smooth-flowing end-tank that distributes air well to all the runners and does away with the sharp corners present in the OEM end-tanks. In addition, we were able to increase the inlet and outlet size of the intercooler to 2.5”. This is a fairly standard size that has shown to work well for the Mazdaspeeds with stock power and without choking flow way up to Barett’s 600+ WHP.

CAD design of the 2.5T SkyActiv Intecooler

Those of you with a keen eye have realized that the connection between the CorkSport front mount intercooler (FMIC) and the OEM Intercooler is not the same. As shown in the CAD rendering above, each intercooler kit will come with the silicone and custom adapters that are needed to work with the OEM piping. If you decide to upgrade to the CS intercooler piping kit, later on, the CorkSport Intercooler for SkyActiv 2.5T will not need to be removed, and you will only need to change some silicone parts.

We will have more info on this kit coming soon, with the next blog covering our testing of the different core designs using a few new toys from AEM Electronics. Be sure to check out the product listing for more info, and to be notified when the intercooler is available. Last but not least, CX-9 Turbo and CX-5 Turbo owners, we are 99% sure this kit will also work on your rides but we plan on validating fitment before release!

-Daniel @ CorkSport

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Stay Up-to-date with CorkSport

Modify your Camber setting without needing to remove your wheel!

Truly an easy bolt-in installation with no strange handling geometry changes

Long lasting strength for your Mazdaspeed6

Stay up-to-date on the latest news and product updates from CorkSport.

Personalize your look to match your build!

Stay Up-to-date with CorkSport

The Mazda 3 Engine Cover Fits Like OEM

Add some flair to your engine bay

Stay up-to-date on the latest news and product updates from CorkSport.

Stay up-to-date on the latest news and product updates from CorkSport.

Spring Damping

Natural Frequency Analysis

Stay up-to-date on the latest news and product updates from CorkSport.

Stay up-to-date on the latest news and product updates from CorkSport.