Mazda Reviews

No, the Mazda RX-8 sold in Australia only came with an updated version of the 13B rotary engine.

From what I can gather, the only production car to use the three-rotor 20B rotary engine was the Mazda Eunos Cosmo, built between 1990 and 1995 and sold exclusively in Japan. But many race cars have used 20B or triple-rotor engines, and they remain a bit of a holy grail engine for Mazda rotary enthusiasts.

For the record, the first Japanese car to win the Le Mans 24-Hour race was a Mazda 787B in 1991, using a four-rotor rotary engine of 2.6 litres. It was also the first (and only) time a vehicle without a reciprocating piston engine had won Le Mans.

Sometimes head units need a reboot or a return-to-factory-settings button to be pressed. Often, there will be a tiny hole somewhere on the face of the head unit. Into this, you insert a thin piece of wire or a toothpick (or similar) and press just hard enough for the screen to go blank and the unit to reboot. It sounds like you’re using the factory Mazda reversing camera with an aftermarket head unit, so you may need to visit a car audio specialist to get it all working together.

Changing a car’s battery can often be enough to scramble the settings on things like cameras and stereos. You may need to find the security code for the head unit to make it all work properly, too.

The overheating is far from a mystery: Any time the coolant level in the radiator and cooling system drops below a critical point, there’s simply not enough coolant remaining to effectively cool the engine. So it gets hotter and hotter until it overheats.

The bigger question is why the coolant is leaving the radiator via the coolant recovery tank. In many cases, this is because of pressure from the combustion process finding its way into the cooling system. In turn, that’s very often caused by a failed head gasket which is allowing the combustion pressure into the coolant passages inside the cylinder head and crankcase.

The head gasket not only keeps combustion pressure (the result of the air and fuel being burnt in each cylinder) inside the engine, but also separate from the cooling system. But a failed gasket will often allow the pressure and the coolant to mix, at which point the pressure overcomes the pressure inside the cooling system and the coolant has to go somewhere. Generally, that somewhere will be the recovery tank as this is where the coolant goes in the normal course of its expanding as the engine heats up.

There’s a quick, simple chemical test that a mechanic can carry out to confirm whether the head gasket has failed, and this would probably be your first step. And don’t be tempted to continue driving the car and simply topping up the coolant. This type of leak can get a lot worse very quickly, and overheating can destroy an engine while you watch.