Developing a gasoline-powered rotary engine was a dream for Felix Wankel, and we mean that literally. Some steam engines worked on the same basic principle as far back as the 18th century, but the ...

Mazda 13B rotary engine in a white Mazda RX-7 engine bay. - TTTNIS/Wikimedia Commons When it comes to unconventional engine design, few exceed the Wankel rotary in terms of weirdness. Despite that, ...

The rotary's reliability problem was mostly an owner problem. Here's the disciplined playbook that keeps FC 13Bs alive.

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...

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 ...

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 ...

Kenichi Yamamoto, who led the engineering team that produced a commercially viable rotary engine at what is now known as Mazda Motor Co. and later became its president and chairman, died Dec. 20 in ...

Mazda's 787B cemented its place in history by winning Le Mans in 1991, but it never competed at the highest level after that. Here's what happened to it.

When it comes to unconventional engine design, few exceed the Wankel rotary in terms of weirdness. Despite that, the same basic principles of internal combustion apply here: Fuel and air are mixed and ...