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 ...

Inside the engine are several fascinating parts, which you can see in Figure 7-8. At the top are the cylinder heads. These contain the mechanisms that allow the valves to open and close, letting the ...

As the old saying goes, there is no replacement for displacement. That's not the case when it comes to rotary engines, which typically have very small displacement. Instead of cubes, if you want a ...

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 ...

The 1967 NSU Ro 80 looked like it had driven in from the future, with a slippery body, a glassy, sparse cabin and a ...

Most Japanese performance car enthusiasts are familiar with the 13B twin-rotor engine Mazda equipped the RX-7 and RX-8 with. But unless you've owned and modified an RX of some type, chances are you ...

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 ...

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 history of the automobile has been dominated by vehicles equipped with piston-firing engines. Rarely does something completely different come along, and when it does, it usually fails miserably.

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 ...