The Wankel, better known as the rotary engine, has always held a unique place in the world of performance cars. Compact, lightweight, and capable of high revs, a rotary offered an alternative to ...

Most car enthusiasts associate the term “rotary engine” with Felix Wankel’s invention, developed in the 1950s and most commonly associated with Mazda. However, more than half a century before the ...

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 rotary was the most radical rethink of the combustion engine in over a hundred years — and it paid the price for being different. Mazda introduced the innovative Wankel rotary engine in the 1967 ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...

Language is an imperfect medium, but it's what we've got, so let's go with it. Determining the swept volume of inventor Felix Wankel's rotary engine can generate more arguments than claiming what a GT ...

In the early '90s, Mazda's rotary-powered RX-7 was the quintessential Japanese two-seat sports car. But then the Miata ...