“Without the rotary engine, there would probably be no Mazda. And without Mazda, the rotary engine certainly wouldn’t have been in production for nearly 50 years.”

You only need to read Mazda’s website to know how vital the rotary engine is to a company famed for its ‘jinba-Ittai’ or horse-and-rider approach to building cars that become at one with their driver. Feliz Wankel’s engine design was a perfect fit for the Japanese manufacturer’s cars. With just three major moving parts, the rotary engine is smaller, easier to package and more powerful than a conventional engine with cylinders. 

Mazda’s commitment was tested when it began making the rotary engine commercially viable in the early 1960s. Having committed to the Wankel rotary engine design, Mazda dispatched a team of engineers to NSU to learn as much as possible about the rotary engine. 

However, only some things were good. The rotary engines suffered from wear, where the apex of each point of the triangle formed a seal with the rotor housing. This would come to be known as ‘chatter’ marks or, more ominously, as “the devil’s nail marks”.

Mazda compiled a group of 47 of its best young engineers to solve the problem with the department head, Kenichi Yamamoto, telling them, “From now on, the rotary engine must be on your minds at all times, whether you are sleeping or awake.”

By 1963, Mazda was running out of ideas. It had tried every solution it could think of to solve the ‘chatter’ problem – even an apex-seal material made from horse and cow bone – until a breakthrough came in the form of a new apex seal that changed the frequency of the seal’s design to reduce wear.

The new design banished the chatter marks, and the following year, Mazda made the apex seals from an aluminium-carbon composite that made them tough enough for commercial sale. Now, all that was needed was a car to put the new engine in.

It would come in 1964 when, at the Tokyo motor show, Mazda announced its plan to build the Cosmo Sport to appeal to consumers swept up in the magic of the space race.

The Cosmo Sport reaped the rewards of a rotary engine that, despite its tiny 491cc capacity, produced a useful 110PS (81kW) to send the Japanese sports car to a top speed of 115mph. It allowed the Cosmo to be lightweight and compact, contrasting with the heavyweight performance machines from Europe and the US. 

By 1969, the rotary engine was branching out across the Mazda range. It was fitted to the Luce R130 Coupe – Mazda’s only front-wheel drive rotary – in 1969, while 1974 saw it powering the Mazda Rotary Pickup and the Mazda Parkway Rotary, a bus with a 26-person capacity. 

It wasn’t until 1978 that the rotary engine found itself in an actual performance model – the first generation of the legendary RX-7. The rotary engine was ideal for a performance car, allowing the car’s engineers to get the engine low and far behind the front axle for the nimble handling that RX cars are famed for. 

The second generation RX-7 would follow in 1985, but the third generation car that went on sale in 1991 is remembered best in the UK. It featured twin, sequential turbos with a small turbine handling low engine speeds before handing over to a larger specimen that handled all the power up top. The RX-8, could yield up to 237PS (177kW) from the rotary engine.

While the RX-8 did an excellent job of highlighting the rotary engine’s strengths, it also highlighted one of its biggest weaknesses – serious reliability issues. To run well, a rotary engine needs to be well-lubricated with oil injected into the motor as the rotor moves within its housing. 

That was fine in the 1960s, but the high emissions that come with burning oil were a significant problem in the ’00s. The short-term solution was to use less oil, lowering the emission to legal levels but, in the long term, causing wear and poor compression. This explains why you can pick up these genuinely innovative cars for less than £1,000.

Emissions are less of an issue in motorsport, and the rotary engine would take its most famous victory in the engine bay of the 1991 Le Man’s winner, the Mazda 787B, but rotary engines have been victorious everywhere from the Bathurst 500 in Australia to Germany’s Nurburgring and Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. 

Sadly, right now, the only rotary engine in Mazda’s line-up is reserved for range-extending the electric MX-30 R-EV, but concepts like the Iconic SP, RX-Vision as well as hopefully chatter that Mazda may one day fit rotary engines to the MX-5 sports car, show us there’s still plenty of love out there for the Wankel engine.