2009 Mazda RX-8 R3 - Formula Drift - Super Street Magazine

With the engineering on the rear end, it was time to address the front end of the Mazda RX-8. Bergenholtz Racing has been known for drag racing and horsepower. No matter what we were looking for, we wanted mass amounts of power. It was in our nature for God's sake. We noticed competitors in Formula Drift were opting for V8 powerplants. Horsepower seems to be the name of the game and apparently made the drift cars more reliable, plus having torque on hand at a moment's notice for the drivers was a must. We opted for a Mazda 3-rotor and turbocharged it because the stupendous amounts of power with turbo reliably. We enlisted the services of Kyle Mohan of Mazdatrix to fully build the engine complete with street porting. Mazdatrix did an amazing job and assisted us in consulting of the proper components to surround the Mazda 3-rotor.

The intake manifold for the Mazda 3-rotor appears to be stock but a large amount of fabrication was implemented into it. The factory manifold has a large amount of runners within it and this takes up plenum volume. The manifold appears to look like a plenum but is far from it and based on my experience I did not like this design. I proceeded to cut the manifold in half and port all the runners out. I wanted to create a manifold design that was a true plenum. The plenum would act as a reservoir of air for all the runners to feed from. The runners feeding the plenum were quite long so I didn't worry too much about losing torque. In addition, I opted-out from using the factory 3-rotor throttle-body and we implemented a 90mm GM unit that uses a "throttle-by-wire" design. The MoTeC M800 is more than capable of controlling it. We also relocated the throttle-body further downstream on the manifold to deter any effect of creating turbulence in the plenum. This design would make sure that all runners would be receiving equal amounts of air as well as equal delivery. In the end, the manifold and throttle-body is extremely simple and functional but a pain in the ass to build.

With the intake manifold area completed, the turbo side needed to be addressed. We employed the expertise of Tod Kaneko from Mazdaspeed's Research and Development team. He recommended a TiAL dual ball-bearing unit GT40XSPL that had good characteristics in the lower RPM as well as great horsepower at higher RPMs. Simply, it is a bad-ass turbo. We mated the turbo to a Burns stainless Inconel manifold. Steen Chassis did all the fabrication on it with recommendations for runner length from Burns and Tod Kaneko. With the manifold being fabricated from Inconel, the sucker was damn expensive but bulletproof enough to handle the 1500 degree plus temperatures in the exhaust manifold.