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 ...

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 ...

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 Wankel rotary engine offers one of the most unique sounds of any ICE. Most famously used in various legendary Mazdas like the RX-7 and the supposedly banned Le ...