I consider myself to be a major auto enthusiast. But everyone has their knowledge kryptonite. No matter how hard you try to understand it, it doesn’t make sense. To me, that’s the rotary engine.
To understand (or not understand in my case) the rotary engine you have to look at the car that made it famous. In my first ever blog post, I talked about the Mazda MX-5 Miata and how it saved Mazda and the entirety of the Japanese sports car market. Well, its important to understand why it fell apart to begin with.
In the mixture of all of the great Japanese sports car of the day, there were some questionable choices too. In 1978, Mazda decided to do something different. They developed the RX line of rotary engines. Now, a traditional engine has pistons, usually aligned in a V or in a straight line, that fire off up and down which combusts fuel, creating energy, which moves the car forward. A rotary engine doesn’t have pistons exactly, it has a sort of wheel that spins with pistons inside it that slide into different spots that combust fuel that makes energy that propels the car forward. I have no idea how this works and still don’t understand it after all these years. So I’ve elected to believe that you put fuel in the car, some black voodoo magic happens under the hood, and then the engine makes power.
So after Mazda created their voodoo magic engines in 1978, they decided to design a car around it.
This was the birth of the Mazda RX-7.
The first generation of RX-7’s were incredibly lightweight, coming in at just over a single ton. This combined with the the 100 horsepower produced from the engine, it was incredibly nimble. While 100 is actually pretty low, you have to remember this is black voodoo magic horsepower, and the normal laws of cars don’t matter. So for whatever reason, this generation of cars was incredibly quick.
A second generation of RX-7’s was released in 1985 and ran until 1991, where it was met with a crossroads. The RX-7 was so expensive to make because of the rotary engine, Mazda lost money overall on the project. If it wasn’t for the immense sales of the Miata in 1991, the company likely would have gone under or worse—tried to make cars that competed with the non-sport Civics and Corollas.
The final generation of RX-7 ran from 1991 to 2002, and it had a myriad of improvements. First off, the final generation output 276 vhp (voodoo horsepower) while only weighing 200 lbs more than the first generation. Alongside that, the transmission was vast improved from the original. Due to reasons I can’t explain, RX-7 transmission suffered from the car’s incredibly high redline. A redline is when the engine reaches peak revolutions per minute before it starts to damage the car. The high redline would put stress on the individual gear cogs and the clutch because they would be engaged for far longer than an ordinary car.
On top of that, the RX-7 wasn’t exactly environmentally friendly. Because the engine would be spinning, friction (along side the evil spells occurring beneath the hood) would create an extreme amount of heat so owners found themselves depleting their oil reserves in a week. Normally, that lasts months in a car.
There is a lot wrong with the RX-7. The powerband is funky, it burns through oil faster than the US Army, its transmission is glass, and it has Dikembe Mutombo the Witch Doctor for an engine.
But I still kind of want one.
No, not because I think Han’s RX-7 from Tokyo Drift looked cool (which it did mind you). There is a certain allure to owning something that has such a legend behind it. Even if that legend is evil. It almost seems like a right of passage to own one of the POS sports cars before you can own any of the legends.
And that isn’t to say you can’t tame an RX-7. There are many cases of RX-7 owners understanding how rotaries work through lots of engineering and religious text research, and creating some fantastic cars.
Am I that ambitious? Absolutely not.
Am that stupid? Absolutely.
Pray for me guys.
For the first time I actually felt like I understood fully what you meant when you talked about a piece of a car! In high school the physics teacher had a model of a rotary engine in his classroom that I played around with a lot, which really helped me understand how they worked. What I hadn’t thought about, though, is the amount of friction that is generated. I can see how that would be a major detractor in the appeal of the car.
That sounds like an interesting line of cars, and I think your dark imagery about black magic under the hood describes its appeal pretty well!
The phrase “knowledge kryptonite” really affected me. Idk why. Might steal it, look for it in my album. As usual, your posts are equal parts informative and hilarious. keep on keepin’ on.