Rumorpile: Next Mazdaspeed3 To Go Without Turbocharging

William Maley

Staff Writer - CheersandGears.com

July 17, 2013

The current Mazdaspeed3 is a bit of a wild and crazy car thanks to its turbocharged, 2.3L four-cylinder with 263 horsepower. With the next-generation Mazda3 coming around the corner, the talk about the next-generation Mazdaspeed3 is heating up.

Auto Express reports that the next-generation Mazdaspeed3 could forgo the turbocharger and go with a naturally-aspirated four-cylinder engine. This comes from a senior engineer who said the Mazda 3 MPS (what Mazda calls the Mazdaspeed3 in Europe) is likely to return “but not as you would expect”. He then went onto say the 2.0L SKYACTIV-G engine could be modified to produce 200 horsepower and have a 7,000 RPM redline.

Now this seems like a very odd move. Most of the sport compacts on the marketplace aside from the Honda Civic Si use turbocharging to provide the kick. If Mazda does go down this route, they would be down around 10 to 50 horsepower to the current crop of sport compacts. However Mazda's ace up its sleeve is the weight loss program it has been putting many of its vehicles through. That might be enough to keep the it in contention.

We'll be keeping an eye on this and let you know if anything changes.

Source: Auto Express

William Maley is a staff writer for Cheers & Gears. He can be reached at [email protected] or you can follow him on twitter at @realmudmonster.