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 ...

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 rotary engine, with its egg-like block and triangular rotor, is an oddball even among all the other oddball engine designs—sorry, three-cylinder, twin-turbo, camless Koenigsegg, ya basic. That ...

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 ...

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 ...

Isaac Atienza is a Filipino motoring journalist who joined TopSpeed.com in 2021. He also owns a Filpino motoring website called Go Flat Out PH and is also a contributor to a local newspaper called The ...

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, ...

Mazda’s rotary engine has been officially reborn, but not quite in the way you might think. Yes, we saw a drop-dead gorgeous Iconic SP rotary-hybrid coupe concept unveiled at last October’s Japan ...