Hello everyone, I recently inherited my good friends 04 Rx8. It's been sitting for a while because he has unfortunately been wheelchair bound for a while and when I got it towed home, I tried to start it and nothing. With a charged battery it tries, the starter is turning and I hear air being pushed out the exhaust and a strong smell of gas. I'm not sure if this qualifies as cranking but that's what it's doing.

So it's getting power. I removed the driver's wheel and checked if there was spark to all 4 plugs which their was. The fuel pump also primes every time so ik that's good. I just put some new premixed gas in the car so it should be good in that respect. I'm going to try starting fluid tomorrow but besides that I'm pretty lost in what to try. I've done the flooding procedure because that's what I thought the symptoms were telling me to do and there was no change in behavior before and after. I'll link the video of what it sounds like.
https://youtu.be/NNVfUJXBcCI

If you have any ideas please shoot them my way. This is my first rotary car so I'm not sure what and how to check everything. It's also at 98,000 miles so I'm aware a rebuild will be in it's near future but I would like to only consider that as a last resort because with my luck I'd rebuild it and it still wouldn't start. Thanks!

 

find a shop that has a dedicated rotary compression tester ( standard type wont work) get the compression tested.

Just because you have spark, doesn't mean it enough to fully fire the air fuel mixture. Coils are a weak point on these. If you remove the coils and they have a white spot on the base, then they are cooked & require replacing. How clean are the plugs?

Is it a manual or automatic transmission?

 

I'll check the coils tomorrow. Am I checking the coils where they connect to the wires and to the actual spark plugs? Also I asked on another forum for some advice and they pointed out that the starter sounded like it was spinning pretty slow.

It's an automatic.

And thanks for the tip about the compression tester, I didn't know that and would most definitely have just used the AutoZone generic one.

 

This photo below is a example of really bad coil. Automatic trans RX-8's have a low spec engine compared to a manual gearbox version. Starter motor speed is also very critical on these engines, along with a fully charged and high capacity battery.

 

The only one that had anything on it was this one(#4 closest to the firewall) I gently ran my finger across it cause it has been raining recently and I thought it could be a water spot but that part didn't come off, only some dust. All the rest were perfectly clean.