Rotary

We see some fairly radical machinery come up for sale on occasion, but few creations manage to raise our eyebrows so high as Project Sea Lion. Created to nab amphibious land speed record, the machine uses a Mazda 13b rotary engine for propulsion, and its creator says the drivetrain is good enough ...

The minds at Car and Driver recently took a moment to speak with Robert Davis, senior vice president of Mazda U.S. operations, about the automaker's plans for the future. According to Davis, the rotary engine will continue to play a role in the company's products moving forward, with engineers ...

We're not sure what you were into at 17, but if you're anything like us, odds are it wasn't bombing around Infineon Raceway in a Renesis-powered race car. This would be the primary difference between young hot-shot driver Zach Veach and the rest of us goons. Despite his tender young age, Veach ...

In the soap opera saga of are they or aren't they still developing a rotary engine, Mazda seems to have indicated the affirmative. According to a translation of a Tweet from Mazda PR posted on a Japanese car blog, a "new model with a next-generation rotary engine" is in development. While ...

At the end of 2011, the Mazda RX-8 rotary-powered sport coupe/sedan will cease to exist in new-car showrooms. With it, the mass-produced rotary engine will take another hiatus. The original plan was to have the Renesis, the world's only mass-produced rotary, come back maybe as early as 2017 in a ...

Fear not, rotaryphiles. According to a report from The Detroit News, Mazda isn't giving up on the rotary engine anytime soon. Though the RX-8 is headed for the production guillotine, Mazda execs have apparently confirmed that engineers are working on a more efficient and more powerful version of ...

Autocar is reporting that the next-generation rotary engine from Mazda may turn to a laser ignition system instead of traditional spark plugs. The report supposedly comes straight from the mouth of a shadowy senior engineer within the program. Mazda has been hard at work on the 16X Renesis ...

In 1991, the Mazda 787B made history at the 24 Hours of Le Mans by becoming the first Japanese-built machine to win the race. In addition, the 787B was the first (and continues to be the only) rotary-powered race car to achieve the feat. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the historic victory, ...

The rotary rumormill continues to spin about as fast as a Renesis engine at redline (that's 9,000 rpm, for those keeping track). Might the next rotary-powered RX from Mazda be a hybrid? It very well may, if you believe a report from Motor Trend. Lending credence to the story is a 2010 agreement ...

Roundabouts are the scourge of many a motorist and a favorite calming device of traffic engineers, and they're spreading like crazy across the United States roadscape. As anyone who's had the joy of driving in Massachusetts or New Jersey will tell you, plenty of drivers have absolutely no idea ...