im new to the whole mazda world. i owned a oo civic si, but it was stolen and stipped. now i own a o3.5 silver mazdaspeed protege 32000 mi. right now its stock and has factory warranty til Nov. 2007 and a extended for 4 more years. what performane mods can i do with out voiding the warranty? if anyone can help it will be much appriciated. thank jeremy.

 

Welcome to the site! Where do you live?

Performance mods without voiding the warranty? ha! Well it depends.. the factory warranty was 3 years 50k miles (unless it was more on the Mazdaspeed model).

Oh oh.. I'm going to totally ruin your day with this one: If you go over 200whp you will blow up your engine unless you drop thousands of dollars on a full standalone ECU. Even then, I wouldn't push it much past that at all. you'll shoot a rod straight through the iron block :P

are you crying now? lol was that too mean? Oh well, you had to find out about the gremlin of your car somehow.

 

Nice! It's probably in the For Sale section already.

MSP is a great little car. It'll out-handle almost anything in it's class without
modification.

And you can still have some fun modding. Just be careful and we won't have to add you to zoom-zoom-boom club.

 

I believe you mean to say that you have an extended warranty that you purchased with the car. The original factory warranty would have expired by now.

As far as performance mods, it usually varies from dealer to dealer. But, if they can attribute a failure to a mod that you installed, then the repair will not be covered. In other words, if your engine blows and you have installed lowering springs, you are probably safe. But if it blows and you had installed a turbo upgrade, they will probably deny your claim. Some people get around that by keeping the stock part, and when something goes wrong, put the stock part back on.

 

Welcome to our community! Moving from Honda to Mazda, you got style and handling at the expense of power.

Your MSP already has a lot of good suspension parts on it, but you might want some good springs and struts. Tein S, Espelir, or Tanabe GF springs with Tokico struts would be nice, and wouldn't likely get you into warranty trouble.

If you get rear swaybar clunk (common problem), the best fix is the AXR swaybar mount relocation kit: a little spendy but it gets rave reviews.

Let us know how it goes!

 

Right i understand what you are saying. do you know if a cat-back and maybe some better tuning or header will cause any problems with a warranty. mainly concerned with a cat-back, using 50 state emmissions legal high flow cat, or the stock cat. thanks. by the way my factory exp. nov. 07. car has only 32000 mi. thanks again for the advice.

 

A cat-back.. doesn't even replace the cat so you're golden.. aside from the fact that there's a few states that say that any modifications whatsoever not using original equipment parts are illegal (CT, MA, NY, CA, etc)

 

Yeah see, I am somewhat new to this club as well. I owned a 94 Protege back a couple years ago but thanks to some mods I did, I kept throwing spark plugs left and right. I'd redrill them in and there they'd go again. So after a few years, I saw a Mazdaspeed for sale at a dealer, the rest was history. She is in the shop currently though. I had a Service Engine light appear and I found out it was a code P2006. The shutter vavle or some ****. Anyhow, I get the results today on how long a fix that's going to be. I seem to realize that the MSP is quite a needy little car. As I told my other GF(the human one) I just can't resist the styling of this car. I mean, it could have a shitbox underneath the hood, I'd still drive it.

 

Well it basically does. It's the black sheep of Mazda engines.

 

^^^ LOL! Way to ruin everyone's day Chris! Post 2 and 9 are just brutal!

Funny though

 

I'm not tryin to get the kids hopes up. They are amazing cars, I friggin love them and can't find a better car to replace it with (within any reasonable budget) so Mazda definitely did a LOT right. What they didn't do right at all was the engine, simple enough. They were like "well this is a derivative of the 626 chassis so lets just plop the engine from the base model 626 in it.. you know, that engine we've been using since.. 1993" 10 friggin years of FS (not fs-de.. because the de means it's distributorless, and I think that only came about at the end of the 90s).

Then the 3 comes out and gets mzr lovin.. I'd pay decent money just to have the 2.0 mzr in my car srsly.

My real plan though is to punish my fs-de until it squirts oil out all over the place and then buy an old miata as a daily while I KL-ZE v6 swap my P5.. then when that is done, turbo said Miata

 

Mazda's main problem was getting in bed with Ford.

One of my most painful moments in my P5 ownership was in Autozone buying liquid gasket for my oil pan. The helpful employee asked me if I drove a Ford - "I drive a Mazda," I corrected him. "Oh same thing" was his cheerful response. Ouch. At least it doesn't look like a Ford.

 

SAME THING? nooo!!!

jesus I hate it.. our cars were made in Hiroshima, by japanese workers, with a japanese design.

Isn't the only made-in-america Mazda the 6 (non mazdaspeed models)? IIRC they are made on the Mustang assembly line (those are some talented robots right there). Plus they have a duratec engine with a different head on it.

Our cars are all japan.. I've never found a u.s. labeled part on the thing. Plus they rust like an early 90s Corolla so it's clear that it's japan all the way :P

Just because Ford owns 33% of Mazda doesn't mean it's the same thing.

 

I don't know much about it (apparently the Autozone guy didn't either) but I was under the impression that our engine shares basic design with focuses?

 

um I don't think so..

The focus (north american) had two 2.0 litre engines, a Zetec and a Duratec..

They have your car confused with the Mazda3, where ford has the "Duratec 20" 2.0 based off the Mazda MZR 2.0 from the base Mazda3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Du...ine#Duratec_20

And even then it's not that the Mazdas have Ford engines, it's the other way around..

The MZR 2.0 is in no way related to our 2.0 FS-DE