Features

Walking the High Wire

Walking the High Wire

Katrina Mueller-Jackson sets the stage for SCI's own RX7, a study of low-cost exotica in progress. Photos by D. Randy Riggs.

The fact of the matter is that if this exact same car were 20 years old and had a prancing-horse logo on the nose, it would be selling at auction for 130 grand. The current RX7 is closer to an exotic Italian thoroughbred than most of today’s exotic Italian thoroughbreds, and that’s made it polarize opinions like nothing else in recent memory.
Whether or not the RX7 was initially conceived as an affable, all-purpose touring GT like the 300ZX or Corvette with which it purportedly competes, the execution of the car has certainly never brought that idea to reality. No, this is something much less interested in compromise and daily concerns than those other, bigger, less demanding automobiles: To own and love a 3rd-generation RX7 would take as much commitment to the purest sports-car ideals as it would with a Ferrari or a Lotus. Nothing has been sacrificed on the alter of cushiness here, and no quarter is given to the incompetence or limited attention span of the typical American buyer.
This is a car that’s difficult to drive, difficult to live with and difficult to maintain; it is also electric, vibrant, invigorating and thoroughly focused on its narrowly defined goals. In short, the Mazda RX7 is a true thoroughbred, with all the concomitant strengths and weaknesses that entails. RX7

Switched at Birth
But while the Z-car and Mitsubishi 3000 were at least able to break 5-figure sales during their honeymoon years, the RX7 has never come close. In part this is simply the nature of trying to sell such a hard-chiselled beast. There aren’t nearly as many true believers as poseurs out there, and to appreciate the RX7 you have to really love sports cars, not just love the idea of being a sports-car guy. But it’s also true that RX7 sales suffered because its masters refused to accept this: Originally, this highly strung machine was tossed into the marketplace with little recognition of what it really was—an exotic car at one-third the price.

Instead, Mazda pitched it as just another Japanese high-sports luxury car, a paradigm for which any pure sports machine will always be ill-suited. From the designers’ standpoint, that had never been its purpose. Only a customer who cares little about cavernous trunk space, copious shoulder room or bum-coddling seat squabs—the Lotus or Lamborghini customer, for example—will actually understand what this car was built to do: achieve synergy with its driver. Anyone looking for family values will have walked into the wrong dealership. This is a car for the desperately speed-crazed margins of society, a.k.a. enthusiasts—people who’ve outgrown their Chevy-engined Healeys but have yet to reach Ferrari status. And yet Mazda never seemed to have played that card, back when they were still willing to put any money into selling RX7s at all. Now the window of opportunity is probably closed. Three years ago, the Mazda’s 255-horse, twin-turbo rotary made it a viable contender against the then-current Ferrari 348 and Porsche 911. But while the subsequent arrival of the 993-based Porsche and the F355 have markedly raised the stakes at the costliest sports-car table, so far Mazda has been loathe to respond. The RX7 goes on, getting progressively refined and debugged but materially unchanged.
Does this mean that its parent company is backing away from their role as a sports-car manufacturer? I hope not. Mazda has often bemoaned that it lacks the heritage of the great European marques, but in many ways that’s been a self-fulfilling prophesy. This is the only Japanese company to have won Le Mans outright; it’s been a long-dominant force in IMSA GT racing; and with the Miata, Mazda singlehandedly reinvented the lightweight sports roadster. To be recognized as one of the world’s great enthusiast companies, I think all Mazda really has to do now is believe in it themselves: Putting more faith in their own performance flagship would be a big step in that direction. Sermon over.
There’s one other matter to discuss on this head, and then we’ll get into the things that make the RX7 worthy of our ongoing attention. This final topic is one of mechanical integrity, an issue which was the nuts-and-bolts accompaniment to the RX7’s early identity crisis. When this car debuted (to stunned reviews) for 1993, it was quite frankly underdeveloped—another parallel with the world of true exotics. Not only were the first models’ suspension settings ill-chosen, the car’s overall paint and assembly quality left a lot to be desired. (Mr. Agnelli? Mr. Chapman? Sound familiar?) This last issue brings us to the RX7 we have here.

On Again, Off Again
 The staff of SCI has always had a passionate love/hate relationship with this car. It’s both the most challenging and potentially rewarding driver at anywhere near its price and a car that delivers many of the same hassles as an exotic. Leaving that first characteristic intact, Mazda has tried to address some of the second. The result is a 1995 RX7—the firm has no plans to import mechanically identical ’96s until the current supply runs low—that reportedly addresses all the quality, tuning and option missteps of the earliest cars while leaving its scintillating dynamics intact.

That smacked of a challenge to us, so we got ourselves one. No, I mean we really got ourselves one—ours, done, finito, with a 12-month charter to drive it, autocross it, rally it and just generally put it through all the high-performance paces for which the RX7 was originally intended. Along the way we’ll also put Mazda’s assertion to the test, but additionally we hope to demonstrate that today’s thoroughbred sports car really does still have uses beyond driving back and forth to work, or toting around the groceries with the transmission locked in "D," the stereo on full blast and the electrically-operated remote-control carrot skinner locked in the "babe magnet" position.
By now there’s no secret about the RX7’s unique properties. At 2830 pounds it’s the lightest car in its class by far and the only thing going with a rotary engine. The 4-wheel, 11.6-inch vented discs haul it to a stop from 60 in an eyeball-sucking 119 feet, while its window sticker now starts around $38,000. Just between me and you, you can expect to knock a big chunk of that off when you haggle.
Dynamically, this machine is a curious combination between utterly willing and stubbornly recalcitrant. Get it out on a track, and once you’re in the groove the RX7 becomes a laser-like extension of your organs and limbs. The feather-light steering is utterly exact, while there’s plenty of power from the spooled-up turbos and the brakes are grabby enough to essentially ingest this car’s nose back in on itself.
On the other hand, the 2-rotor Wankel feels remarkably un-rotarian. (It refuses to wear plaid jackets?) No, it refuses to tach up: Stuff your heel into the ideally placed gas pedal during a hard-braking downshift, and the powerplant takes a noticeable extra beat to respond. Everything from Toyota’s luxuriant Supra aspro mill to the 330-horse Corvette Grand Sport proves more eager to spin while unloaded.
Conversely, neither of those piston engines deliver the same smooth, eager, seemingly endless rush up the tach as the Mazda. Even though both turbos kick in with their own noticeable spikes, overall this is an incredibly predictable and willing engine once it’s under load, capable of launching the car from corner to corner with almost numbing competence.
What it demands in return is that the driver pay attention. What he or she must always remember is to focus on the matter at hand, to give every downshift that extra beat it desires, and to always drive at least one corner ahead, since they’ll be there in a nanosecond. Similarly, the jackrabbit-quick steering lacks the initial resistance one finds in most cars of this type; instead, it is only by actually co-ordinating hand and eye that an accurate apex can be cut. Heavens! A car that actually requires some talent and brains? They still make those?
The RX7 asks a lot of its pilot, but it offers notable rewards—in both lap times and thrills—in return. Anyone who’s driven a mid-engine Ferrari at full chat on a racetrack will understand the import of this characteristic. Successfully driving such a car imparts a feeling of victory in itself, while negotiating the same stretch of tarmac in an all-wheel-drive, artificially boosted, pork-eating behemoth is often so boring as to be not worth the trouble.

Tour of Duty
 Over the course of the next year we’re going to keep our metallic-blue/green RX7 on a short leash. (Obviously, by the time D. Randy was out shooting for this feature we still hadn’t figured out the exact package we’d be ordering.) Settling on an ex-demonstrator with 2700 miles on the clock, we’ve so far gone to 5800 and already learned more about this car than a more conservative owner would in a lifetime. We know how the RX7 feels at 145 (rock solid, all the way up). We know how much oil it drinks when you’re really in the throttle (about a quart every thousand miles, which is pretty normal for a rotary). As for actual mechanical woes, the Mazda has so far been A-OK—even though it’s already spent numerous miles under SCI staffers Lamm and Dahlquist, two venerable young gents not exactly known for their velvety touch or monastic restraint around high-powered machinery. Well, in case of the very worst, our RX7 came with a bumper-to-bumper 3-year/50,000-mile warranty and 24-hour roadside assistance.

And we’ve learned that just as the RX7 was conceived and executed in the spirit of an exotic, it also has some of the same niggling details you’d expect from a truly limited-production sports car. So far we’ve already identified a distinct lack of trunk space, some ill-placed ancillary controls and a dipstick hole hidden somewhere on Mars. On any other Japanese cars these traits would have been ironed out years ago, but because of the rest of the Mazda’s nature they seem oddly appropriate here. Just like the no-longer-defensible left-side ignition key on the Porsche 911 or the unforgivably bad driving position of every 8-cylinder Ferrari, the Mazda’s own tics can either be seen as annoyances or character: If it sported a trident or a spastic bull on the steering boss we’d pick the latter, so I see no reason not to give the RX7 the same benefit.
By the next issue, we’ll have taken it out for some track days, engaged in some high-speed touring and looked into autocross. As long as we’ve got ourselves a thoroughbred, we might as well exercise it.

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