The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

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

Chris Bruce has worked in the automotive industry since 2011 and has written thousands of stories about cars, motorsports, and motorcycles in that time. He has written for Autoblog, Autoviva, CarFax, ...

Every story dealing with a new rotary engine from Mazda lands in a different place on the matrix of possibilities between “Coming soon!” and “Never gonna happen!” In 2011 it was speculated that the ...

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 rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

Click to open image viewer. The first successful rotary engine is generally attributed to the American F.O. Farwell in 1896; but the French Gnome, developed by the Seguin brothers, was much more ...

The Wankel rotary engine was made popular by Mazda, who built rotary style engines from in production cars such as the RX-7, ...

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard ...

The fascinating history of Chevrolet's mid-engine prototype, the Aerovette, and its unique rotary engine powerplant.

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...