Before Tuesday of this week, I'd forgotten how wonderful the RX-8 is. The premise of a 4-door sports car with rear seating
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| Due to its functional 4-door, 4-seat design the RX-8 is the only sports car currently selling well in a market that is extremely soft. (Photo: Trevor Hofmann, Canadian Auto Press) |
for adults as tall as 6 foot 2 is odd to say the least. But strange or not, the RX-8 is the only sports car currently selling well in a market that is extremely soft. At first it makes sense, as this is a compromise car. After all, true sports cars have no more than two seats and preferably a top that drops. Of course Mazda already has that niche covered quite well, so therefore creating a 4-occupant sports coupe segment seemed a logical next step. The neat thing about the RX-8 is that, once past the clamshell side doors and into the driver's seat, it feels just much like an RX-7. Of course, the layout is completely different and interior quality much improved, but it's more how low you sit to the ground and stretched out driving position. It only feels remotely like a sedan when there's someone in the back seat filling up the rearview mirror, which never happened on this particular test.
The west coast gulf island that Mazda chose for the 3, 6, MX-5 and RX-8 song and dance, an applicable comparison due to the sporty sound of Mazda engine tuning and extremely capable handling, was a seemingly never-ending circuit of narrow winding and undulating roads through heavily treed forests that often opened up to spectacular vistas of the ocean and surrounding islands, the ideal playground for a sports car
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| The RX-8 is as nimble as production cars get, maintaining a near totally flat relationship with the road surface at all times. (Photo: Trevor Hofmann, Canadian Auto Press) |
just named the least likely to rollover of any car tested by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The RX-8 is as nimble as production cars get, maintaining a near totally flat relationship with the road surface at all time, well at least while the wheels are on the ground. The dips and dives, heaves and blips in the less populated sections of the island made for a few exciting moments, but the RX-8 handled it all with grace and composure. The feeling is otherworldly. This is in marked contrast to an RX-8 I drove at its initial press launch, which felt twitchy at high speed especially when braking mid-corner - this is not recommended but sometimes outside influences demand. Whether the particular car I previously drove had a problem, or Mazda has since dialed in some more predictability to the chassis, I'm not sure. Either way, it seems to drive even better now than it did a year ago.
