On cold start, valve timing is such that unburned gas is released into the exhaust manifold where it ignites causing rapid warm up of exhaust manifold and catalytic converter. Mazda is the first production car to have full length headers (kinda in a knot) and pass emissions because of this cutting edge engineering. The full length header makes it possible to run 13:1 compression on 87 octane gas which increases power by 15% and mpg by 15%.