In 1991, while much of the paddock was focused on brand-new cars built to brand-new rules, Mazda arrived with something that looked outdated on paper and radical in reality. The Mazda 787B did not use pistons. It screamed instead of growled. Most people expected it to be interesting. Very few expected it to win. Twenty-four hours later, Mazda had claimed overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, becoming the first Japanese manufacturer to do so and the only one to ever win

In the 1970s, Suzuki showed that a Wankel rotary engine could power a production motorcycle. Inspired by that success, Dutch manufacturer Henk van Veen set out to build something far more extreme. The result was the Van Veen OCR 1000, a superbike built around a car-derived rotary engine and engineered with almost no regard for compromise. What made the Van Veen unique was not simply that it used a rotary engine. Several manufacturers experimented with Wankels during the decad

The history of the automobile is filled with ideas that were simply too early, too expensive, or too inconvenient for their time. Few technologies embody that truth more clearly than the Wankel rotary engine. Below is a timeline showing how the rotary engine rose, spread across the automotive world, nearly challenged the dominance of the piston engine, and is now experiencing a limited resurgence in Japan. Felix Wankel 1924 – The Concept Felix Wankel conceives the rotary engi