Pop the hood on a classic Mazda RX-7 or RX-8 and the engine bay looks oddly empty. That is the charm of the rotary engine: a compact lump of metal that trades pistons and valves for a spinning ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 engine is unique in its success and failure and its ability to make an impact with a completely different way of thinking. As it is, every production car for the last 130 years, aside from ...
A Wankel engine is a type of rotary engine, but not all rotary engines are Wankel engines. Wrapping your mind around this idea will help you to better understand the similarities as well as the ...
The Mazda RX-7 is more than a car. It’s about balance, innovation and being different. Most cars use engines but Mazda used a special Wankel rotary engine. This made the RX-7 feel really unique when ...
How the 13B-MSP Renesis evolved from earlier Mazda rotary designs, technical features explained, and common problems and maintenance issues discussed. The 13B-MSP Renesis rotary engine powered the ...
Bruno started at Top Speed in 2022 and now serves as Senior Editor for ICE while also training writers across CarBuzz, HotCars, and TopSpeed. A car and motorcycle enthusiast, he enjoys writing about ...
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 ...
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 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 ...