psifactor said:I guess you are right about the two cars having close to the same potential.
Just because mazda did a bad job...All they did was add a turbo kit. Most real turbo cars are designed for turbos. Such as the 4g63 which will hold up to 450hp and still love you. The EJ20 is also alot more friendly wiht boost...But the 4g63 and the EJ20's trannys both suck. I have come to the conclusion that the japeneese do not know how to make Strong Transmissions.
To make Any of thoes cars as i mentioned before you would have to rebuild the engine to actually support any amount of horsepower.
I have been really dissapointed in all of the new prodution cars. I cannot really think of a new car around 25k that I would like to own. The only things that come to mind are the STI, and EVO8. Look at the 350Z, RX8,Eclipise...none of thoes are turbo anymore
Oh well..I guess I'm going to have to stick to old school or get a sti!!!
acctually it's not that the japanese can't build strong trannys...it's getting a combination of a strong engine and a strong tranny.
The Mazda's engine is decent for boosting, it can probally take 12-14 psi reliably, but the tranny will die far before that.
The Sentra's Tranny...it's like umm indestructable you could say, in terms of holding power, according to the tranny's manu website, it can hold up to 400 lb-ft of torque before breaking. But the engine, will blow before that, unless if you find some meraclous way to make that much power all NA on a 2.5L 4 banger.
the RX8 really doesn't impress me, personally. It handles well, but it's lacking the power, I'd much rather get a G35 Coupe, because it can easily be made to handle just as well, with more power.
the 350Z...it's bubbly, G35 looks nicer, and handles almost as nice...and Nismo has a G35 suspension kit comming out.
The only real new cars I'm intrested in are the STi, Evo, and the G35 coupe.
They will be until mazda shows me a real sucessor to the RX7, and until nissan decides to show us a real skyline, Z car, and silvia.
all and all though, we really can't complain about our cars, they're ecnoboxes, the low end of the scale, so obviously nissan and mazda arn't gonna throw money into these cars. They're good for what they are.
The most logical reasons for Nissan and Mazda making these two cars the Spec V and the MSP are: Mazda is phasing out the protege soon, so they wanted it to go out with a bang...they're also phasing out the engine, so to make none of them go to waste, they will throw on a turbo, and hype up the car so it sells, so they can get rid of left over invatory.
The Spec V is diffrent...Nissan was trying to do a revival of it's old sports cars with the 350Z comming out, they wanted to revive the old school SE-R, but they did it also so they could phase out the Sentra SE which used the SR20 engine, which they wanted to stop using since it was making it hard to pass emissions. Nissan also needed a way to bring attention to a car that wasn't selling as well as it used to be.
Mazda and Nissan both made these cars to save money, they didn't exacly do the best job on them. We can't expect them to, we're still driving their low end models.
If I really wanted to turn an ecnobox into a race car...it would have to be an EG6 Civic, the aftermarket for that car is just amazing. It can be all to easy to make a civic a 10 second beast on the drag strip, while easily carving corners in autox.
I really hope the MSP and the Spec V do something for the aftermarket of Nissans and Mazda though, the aftermarket has always been lagging behind for both companies.
