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Within minutes of leaving our parking garage I wished for a chance to take this Mazda RX-8 to a road course. It's rare to experience a car that likes to rev as much as this one and has such a great chassis. The rotary engine is much better suited to track use than street driving because it drinks gas and oil at an impressive rate and doesn't ever produce much in the way of torque. But keep the revs up and this Wankel will provide power exactly where you want it for a track day. There's a lot of shifting required to daily drive an RX-8, but this particular example seemed more powerful than others I've driven. Maybe it's because I've been driving so many four-cylinder compact cars lately that I'm used to not having much torque.

Sports cars have never been BMW's true forte. The 507, the 503, the Z1, and the Z8 were all unloved loss-makers that attained cult status only (long) after production had ended. And then there's the Z3, which started as a purists' model until the marketing guys called for fatter margins, morphing it into the overweight, retractable-hardtop Z4. Where, one wonders, is the BMW competitor to the Porsche Boxster and the Audi TT? Perhaps not that far away. There's no decision yet, but when we tap the Bavarian grapevine, we find tantalizing hints of a BMW sports car revival.