Drove the Mazdaspeed3 today. I also drove it last Monday and Tuesday. I've noticed I've been driving it more than the Mazda 3 Turbo. It's not that it's a better car than the newer Mazda 3; the Mazda 3 is a better daily driver. It's simply because I don't want to rack up miles on the newer car, especially when the Speed3 is still perfectly capable of daily driving duties.

The Speed3 might already have 145K miles on it, but it still drives well, still looks good (from afar LOL) and can still haul ass when I need it to.

The Mazda 3 on the other hand just crested 16K miles and I'm cringing already. I want it to gain miles slower than the current rate it is gaining miles at. I'm trying to save it for longer drives like road trips, and for drives where I know I will be stuck in stop and go traffic. It doesn't help that the wife tries to drive it every chance she can get. She is literally addicted to driving this car because of how good it drives, the swell of low-end torque and the ease at which it can pass other cars on the highway. Oh and did I mention, there's no wheel spin when I floor it from a stop. Not even in this colder and sometimes rainy weather.

I understand that to some, this might seem like a luxury. Every morning I get to pick which car I want to drive to work in. In a sense, it is a luxury to have that option. On the other hand, none of the two cars I have are “luxury” cars. One is an old beater that happens to be a hot-hatch from a bygone era. — (Now that's a blog post for another day, making your own beater car.) — The other, is just a Mazda 3 with a turbo engine, though the interior is really quite... I'm not gonna say luxurious, but I will say... premium.

Regardless if its a luxury or not, I can tell you how I achieved such a feat. I pay off my cars and keep driving them, instead of trading them in for a new one right after paying it off. You save so much money by not having a monthly car payment. And if you save enough of that money, you can then buy another car in the future, and still keep your old car as backup.

#Journal #Cars #Mazda #Mazdaspeed3 #Mazda3Turbo #PersonalFinance

And I think this is the one. It has that deep bassy sound like from the Magnaflow exhaust, but this sounds deeper. Maybe that's due to the 80mm downpipe? It doesn't seem to be as loud as the Corksport and Borla, at least not as attention seeking.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a custom built exhaust. At least you can glean some useful info from the video though. It is using 3 inch piping, with a split design like the Corksport/MBRP exhaust. Sound is managed via two Cortek mufflers (a brand I've never heard of before). You can probably substitute those mufflers for comparable bottle resonators from Vibrant, but I mean the Cortek mufflers in this video sound so good, why not just use them.

#Cars #Mazda #Mazda3Turbo #CarExhaust