No Boing Here

Introduction: My first new car was a '71 R-100. At the end of my ownership it was a dedicated autocross car with quite a few mods. We added a first gen RX-7 that we owned for 13 years. I'm not a complete noob, but I know very little about the details of the Renesis rotaries beyond the general specifications.


Our current hobby is off the pavement in a Wildcat XX side-by-side. We like all types of off-roading, but an XX needs a lot more power at the dunes. Turbo kits are all very low volume, and are super expensive compared to turboing a street car (you can get a glimpse of our street toy by googling Brandt Miata of the Month). It strikes me that an RX8 rotary might make for a great engine swap, perhaps without putting the engine through the same stress that an extra atmosphere of boost would on the side-by-side engine.


I'd like to have between 200 and 240 crank hp. I would retain the CVT clutches by mounting a clutch taper on the flywheel. The OEM engine in the Wildcat XX is a Yamaha 998cc triple making 130 crank hp, and the gearing is based around peak output at 9200 rpm. I can lengthen the gearing by going to 10% taller tires fairly easily, and of course I can tune the clutch to operate at a lower RPM if that is required to make the rotary last, but running at a lower rpm will limit speed out in the desert, where we can really crank it up.


What do you guys think? A 200 hp side-by-side won't be driven at full throttle much until we go to the dunes. Then it will see WOT for 2 to 3 minutes at a time. Would a stock RX8 motor survive this sort of use? What would the recommended redline (for longevity) be? I used to go through oil control rings every season on the R100 autocross car. It was sooooo easy to just keep your foot in it rather than upshift when the next apex cone was only another 100 feet away. I saw 8k rpm with some regularity.


Thanks in advance!