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 ...

The Mazda 787B carved its name into motorsport history in 1991 as the first Japanese car to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall. Even more legendary was its powertrain, a screaming 2.6-liter ...

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 ...

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 ...

The engine in question was the Wankel rotary, named after German engineer Felix Wankel, who first patented the concept in 1929. Instead of pistons moving back and forth, the rotary engine used a ...

Rotary engines differ from conventional ones in many respects — and one of them is the fact that they use two different spark ...