It must be the week for sexy white per­for­mance Japan­ese cars.

40th Anniver­sary RX-​​8. Click to Enlarge.

Mazda is build­ing 200 Marble-​​White, lim­ited edi­tion RX-8’s in order to cel­e­brate the 40th anniver­sary of the rotary engine. The car only comes in Mar­ble white , and unfor­tu­nately offers the same power as the exist­ing, stan­dard RX-​​8. Darn.

The car is dis­tin­guished by spe­cial badg­ing, Alcantra and leather inte­rior, spe­cial retro stitch­ing, Bil­stein dampers, a foam filled cross­mem­ber and some new 18″ shoes.

Per­son­ally I was hop­ing for a tur­bocharged RENESIS, or a lim­ited edi­tion in the form of the JDM Series 8 RX-​​7 motor with the boost wound up a tad. But if wishes were wings…

[Source: Auto­blog]

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Head over to http://www.importjap.com today.

A mile­stone in the tech­nol­ogy of car propul­sion has just been passed with the 40th birth­day of the mod­ern car rotary engine.

Mazda took up the chal­lenge of rotary pow­ered vehi­cles with it’s first vehi­cle, the Cosmo Sport. Though the orig­i­nal Wankel engines were under­pow­ered fuel guz­zlers even by that era’s stan­dards, Mazda con­sid­ered the engine a solid con­cept and con­tin­ued with research and development.

Mazda’s mod­ern turbo rotaries� have a firm and suc­cess­ful place in the import cul­ture in the guise of the RX-​​7 (and to some extent, RX-​​2, RX-​​4 and RX-​​4) with Series� 1 to� 8 being a com­mon sight on Aus­tralian roads, boosted to incred­i­ble pow­ers, as well as occu­py­ing strong posi­tions in motor­sport around the world.

Mazda’s non-​​turbo RENESIS engine col­lected� the Inter­na­tional Engine of the Year award for it’s debut in the then brand new RX-​​8, per­haps finally being recog­nised as a world class engine in it’s own right.