Wankel engines first saw use in production cars as early as 1964 — and not even in a Mazda, but rather in an NSU. That little single-rotor powerplant quickly evolved into the more typical two-rotor ...
Mazda's 787B cemented its place in history by winning Le Mans in 1991, but it never competed at the highest level after that.
In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, ...
In a world dominated by pistons, the rotary engine was something different for motorists. It was the vision of German engineer Felix Wankel, built on the belief that the up-and-down motion of pistons ...
Chris Bruce has worked in the automotive industry since 2011 and has written thousands of stories about cars, motorsports, and motorcycles in that time. He has written for Autoblog, Autoviva, CarFax, ...
The rotary was the most radical rethink of the combustion engine in over a hundred years — and it paid the price for being different. Mazda introduced the innovative Wankel rotary engine in the 1967 ...
The rotary engine is easily one of the most controversial powertrains in the world of cars, and it's known for the brap-brap ...