While we had the car we took the opportunity to configure a replacement muffler, evaluate the suspension, and inspect the intake system for possible modifications. We quickly constructed a couple of muffler units, test fitted some suspension springs we had pre-ordered from our supplier in Japan, and disassembled the intake tract for a thorough inspection. Time quickly ran out on our fitting session and we had to but the car back together and return it to its corporate home. We’ll likely offer several new parts for this vehicle in the coming months, we’ll post more later as work continues.

Racing Beat recently had an opportunity to spend a few days driving Mazda’s latest offering, the 2011 Mazda2. While not considered the most performance-minded vehicle in Mazda’s stable, this fun little car may have some tunable performance potential lurking beneath it’s eye-popping metallic lime green paint.

Finally, production has started on the Racing Beat cat-back exhaust system for the 2010 Mazdaspeed3. This new system is unlike any other system that we currently produce for the Mazda3 and we needed to order completely different components for this exhuast application.

Good news, the system will feature a bolt-on comfiguration and will include both a connecting pipe section (with presilencer) and a short inlet pipe section just ahead of the main muffler. We needed to seperate the inlet section into two pieces for shipping purposes,