Mazda RX-8

Mazda RX-8 (SE3P): the enthusiast buyer's guide

A rotary howl and 9,000rpm for used-Corolla money

The RX-8, chassis code SE3P, was the last rotary car Mazda ever sold, the successor to the RX-7 FD, built from 2003 to 2012. Where the FD was a two-seat turbo coupe, this one went the other way. Four seats and four doors, with clever rear-hinged "freestyle" half-doors and no B-pillar, so you can post a mate into the back without folding a seat forward. Weight sits near 50:50 and the engine is mounted low and back, which puts the centre of gravity down on the floor. It turns in like a car with half the doors.

Under the bonnet is the Renesis 13B-MSP, a naturally aspirated twin-rotor Wankel. That is the big split from the FD, which was turbocharged. On paper it is a 1.3, but rotary displacement only counts one chamber, so a "1.3" pulls and drinks like something a fair bit bigger. The high-power car, the 6-speed manual, makes roughly 230 PS and revs to about 9,000rpm, which is the whole party trick. The lower-output version, the auto and the 4 or 5-speed, sits closer to 210 PS. Both figures wander by market, so treat them as ballpark.

You have seen one whether you clocked it or not. Han drifts an RX-8 in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which is half the reason a generation put one on the bedroom wall. The pitch is dead simple: a screaming rotary and a 9,000rpm redline for hatchback money, with back seats and doors that actually work. Precious little else touches that at the price.

Buy the engine, not the bodywork

Here is the part that matters more than the paint. The Renesis wears its apex seals and bleeds off compression as it ages, and it drinks oil the entire time it is doing it. That thirst is by design, the oil lubricates the seals, so a car with no top-ups written in the history has been starved rather than spared. It will also flood if you fire it up cold and shut it down before it warms through, which leaves the chamber drowning in fuel and dead reluctant to restart. A tired one gives itself away by refusing to hot-start within a few minutes of being switched off.

So you buy on engine health. Plenty of these have been neglected by owners who ran a rotary like a normal four-cylinder, so the clean-looking one is not automatically the healthy one. Insist on a compression test done warm on a proper rotary tester, reading each rotor face, and walk if the seller won't have it done. It is the single check you cannot fake. From there, look for regular oil top-ups in the service book and expect to sort a weak starter motor and a tired catalytic converter at some point. And go in knowing a rebuild or a good used engine is real money, so price the car with that in your back pocket.