Originally Posted by
Ted Striker
Yeah, the multi side port/Renesis design was significantly different from earlier iterations, and I think Mazda's quality control was slipping at that point, so it took a while to work the kinks out. Plus, a car's/band's early fans are always the most rabid. By the time mainstream America heard Green Day, their Bay Area fans called them sellouts. First gens always get driven hard.
The Renesis was as much for emissions/mpg as anything else, so people throwing bolt-on performance parts, cat deletes, etc, were working against the early ECU programming that was "thinking" lean/eco, and IIRC there wasn't as much oil injected (again, probably to reduce resistance) so the users were at odds with the engineers.