Awesome car, any pics of the interior?
The most common problems are caused by lack of oil changes, rotaries need oil changes a lot more regularly. Also, never use synthetic oil, it will eat away the seals. Hayward Rotary is only 50 miles from you, they know everything there is to know about rotary engines.
Not entirely true, but close enough..
Lack of oil changes isn't of particular issue (although if driven hard it's recommended to oil change every 3000 miles, with plugs every 6000) but obviously if not done regularly and correctly it's a serious issue on any car. Rotaries are more about ensuring the oil is topped up, as most rotary engines inject oil into the combustion chamber to lubricate the tips, and obviously this uses oil. As an additional safety measure, most of us rotary owners run a pre-mix (2 stroke) in the fuel (around 1 to 100 ratio). Mainly as a safety feature incase the OMP fails leaving the tips unlubricated.
As for the oil type used, there is a huge debate (and has been for years) as to what to put in. I run mine on synthetic and it's perfectly fine. Mazda recommended oil for the RX8 is a synthetic (Red Line Synthetics or Royal Purple) 5w-20 oil.
We in the Mazda Rotary Club did chase Mazda on this for a definitive answer, and received the following:
"The topic has been widely debated. Synthetic oils flat out perform better than conventional. In the past some Rotary engine failures were blamed on synthetic oil which is unfounded in fact, just speculation. In reality synthetic oils do the same job as conventional just with a broader range of tolerance to heat, wear and break down. Fuel and by-product contamination affects all oils. Lack of proper attention will cause issues with any engine."
Most builders in the UK now often use synthetics in customer cars, unless they are for drag/drift/race where they use conventional as purely and simply they are changing the oil every couple of runs (or sooner!) and so it's just not cost effective! My builder reckons having opened up engines being run on either type, you can see visually the extra protection that synthetic provides (doesn't burn like mineral so lubricates the full 360 of the rotor turn, rather than being burnt away half way around).
Each to their own on it really - my thinking is if all the stories are true it's a 50:50 choice - synthetic does protect your tips better, but mineral is supposedly softer on your seals. In this case, a rebuild through seal failure is half the cost of one through tip failure (assuming the cracked tip takes out the housing which is often the case!) and hence I'll chose that as the lesser of the two evils!!
