Pop the hood on a classic Mazda RX-7 or RX-8 and the engine bay looks oddly empty. That is the charm of the rotary engine: a compact lump of metal that trades pistons and valves for a spinning ...

In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, ...

Rotary engines (also known as Wankel engines and Wankel rotary engines) are quite different from piston or "reciprocating" engines. One of the distinguishing features is that they don't need valves to ...

When it comes to unique engine designs, one of the most prolific is the trusty rotary configuration. Instead of featuring a number of spherical cylinders moving up and down like in most internal ...

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, ...

While every enthusiast knows or at least has heard about Mazda legends like the Cosmo Sport, RX-7, RX-8, or the 787B race car, those weren't the only interesting models that the manufacturer has ...

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 ...

How the 13B-MSP Renesis evolved from earlier Mazda rotary designs, technical features explained, and common problems and maintenance issues discussed. The 13B-MSP Renesis rotary engine powered the ...

Designed and championed by self-taught engineer Felix Wankel, the rotary engine is now most closely associated with Japanese automaker Mazda. Many of the greatest Mazdas ever made, including the RX-7 ...

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

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 ...