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 ...

Rotary engines differ from conventional ones in many respects — and one of them is the fact that they use two different spark ...

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 ...

Perfectly tuning the heat range of an engine's spark plugs is something of a dark art to all but the most well versed tuners and the engineering egg heads at automotive OEMs. Getting the spark plug ...

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, ...

How Mazda's engineers doubled down on rotary power when everyone else gave up, creating a 30-year legend in the process.

The electric motor might carry the hype banner at the moment, but some minds remain convinced that there's plenty of innovation left to be extracted from internal combustion. AIE is one of the rotary ...

The Wankel rotary engine is known for its troubled life in the mainstream automotive industry, its high power-to-weight ratio, and the intoxicating buzz it makes at full tilt. Popular with die-hard ...

Every story dealing with a new rotary engine from Mazda lands in a different place on the matrix of possibilities between “Coming soon!” and “Never gonna happen!” In 2011 it was speculated that the ...

While modern engines feature many tweaks and improvements on the original ideas, they usually aren't as interesting as the strange contraptions engineers experimented with in the early days. Take, for ...