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 ...

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 ...

Launched in the late 1960s, the Ro 80 wasn't just the world's first mass-produced sedan with rotary power, but also one of the most innovative production vehicles of its era. Follow us: The rotary ...

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

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 ...

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.