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 ...

Rotary engines differ from conventional ones in many respects — and one of them is the fact that they use two different spark ...

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 ...

When you take a look back at the extensive timeline of the automobile, there are plenty of brands that have a particular affinity with a certain type of engineering solution or technology. Think of ...

For more than a decade the name Wankel has popped up whenever car enthusiasts start talking about advanced-design automotive powerplants. The theory of the Wankel engine goes back to 1954 when Dr.

Good news, everyone! Mazda is not only reassembling a dedicated team of engineers for rotary engine development, as we’ve reported earlier, but today it also announced its intention to expedite ...

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 ...

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, ...

How Mazda's engineers doubled down on rotary power when everyone else gave up, creating a 30-year legend in the process.

Rob Dahm, notorious rotary-powered car builder, has firmly jumped into the deep end of the pool with his latest project: The world's only 15.7-liter, tri-turbo Y12 rotary engine. If that doesn't make ...

Add The Drive (opens in a new tab) Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results The rotary engine is not ...

Mazda’s rotary engine is coming back in the spotlight, but this time it’s not just a nostalgic callback to the RX-7 glory days. Instead, it’s quietly shaping the brand’s electrified future. Rather ...