The Wankel, better known as the rotary engine, has always held a unique place in the world of performance cars. Compact, lightweight, and capable of high revs, a rotary offered an alternative to ...

Most car enthusiasts associate the term “rotary engine” with Felix Wankel’s invention, developed in the 1950s and most commonly associated with Mazda. However, more than half a century before the ...

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 ...

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 ...

The oft-rumored, long-awaited Mazda RX-7 sports car is now a reality. Since 1974, rumors have persisted that Toyo Kogyo was preparing a brand-new, rotary-powered, sports-type vehicle to compete ...

In the early '90s, Mazda's rotary-powered RX-7 was the quintessential Japanese two-seat sports car. But then the Miata ...

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 ...