You hear endless myths about the Mazda RX-7, from breathless praise of its “magic” to horror stories about blown apex seals. Strip away the fanboy noise and you are left with a very specific kind of ...

The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

Not every engine has a set of pistons that move up and down in a cylinder. The Wankel, or rotary engine, delivers its power with rotational force rather than a reciprocating mass that hammers out ...

Language is an imperfect medium, but it's what we've got, so let's go with it. Determining the swept volume of inventor Felix Wankel's rotary engine can generate more arguments than claiming what a GT ...

Everyone generally knows about piston and rotary engines, with many a flamewar having been waged over the pros and cons of each design. The “correct” answer is thus to combine both into a single ...

For a time, the Wankel rotary engine seemed like the future. In 1963, German automaker NSU—later absorbed into Audi—debuted the Wankel Spider, the first internal-combustion production car not powered ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...