The rotary engine, a unique and unconventional design, has provided Mazda with remarkable advantages in the world of racing.

Mazda’s 13B rotary engine did more than power a string of sports cars. It forced an entire engineering department to think differently about combustion, packaging, and character, and it left a mark on ...

The engine in question was the Wankel rotary, named after German engineer Felix Wankel, who first patented the concept in 1929. Instead of pistons moving back and forth, the rotary engine used a ...

Mazda 13B rotary engine in a white Mazda RX-7 engine bay. - TTTNIS/Wikimedia Commons When it comes to unconventional engine design, few exceed the Wankel rotary in terms of weirdness. Despite that, ...

If there's one thing forever associated with the Wankel rotary engine, it's Mazda. Powering production vehicles from the Cosmo's launch in May 1967 to the last RX-8 leaving the plant in June 2012, the ...

Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and ...

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...

The electric motor might carry the hype banner at the moment, but some minds remain convinced that there's plenty of innovation left to be extracted from internal combustion. AIE is one of the rotary ...

Every story dealing with a new rotary engine from Mazda lands in a different place on the matrix of possibilities between “Coming soon!” and “Never gonna happen!” In 2011 it was speculated that the ...

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard ...

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...