What does it mean to bet it all? To take a risk where failure comes at an incredible cost. This is a place where only the brave go forward, the brave or the stupid.
Perhaps it's because progress is rarely made without a bold roll of the dice. In 1973, the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith, was facing bankruptcy. So he bet the last $5,000 the company had on blackjack and he won, keeping the doors open and paving the way to an $85 billion empire.
In 1976, a young man dropped out of Harvard to chase his dream, risking his future on the chance that he was right. Bill Gates would go on to become the richest man in history just a few decades later and changed the future of personal computing forever. And in Japan in the 1950s an eccentric little car company decided to bet it all, taking the chance that a strange new form of propulsion might just change the world.
A shot in the dark that would set in motion a chain of events. A struggling automaker saved from annihilation. The pride of an entire nation as they took the top spot on the world stage.
And the birth of one of the most beautiful sports cars ever made. All thanks to one last try. One final roll of the dice on the off chance that it might just work.
This is the story of how a Japanese company took on a dare and how they proved that bold risk is the only way to reap bold rewards. This is the story of the RX-7 Now, this story about a Japanese car begins not in Japan, but Germany. And yeah, the dark and evil Germany of the thirties in the forties you see there in Germany was a young inventor named Felix Wankel.
Young Felix is kind of the anti-hero of this story. You may love his invention, but you might hate the man himself. Or at least you're about to.
It's pre-war time. Felix and his family see a fascist rally in the twenties. And just like many other impressionable Germans, he is inspired.
Is motivated. He's radicalized. Suddenly, our young Felix is one of the bad guys.
Yes. Many smart minds were forced into the German war machine, out of necessity, out of survival. But Wankel’s involvement was purely voluntary.
He was kind of down for the cause. So eager, in fact, that in the 1930s he was actually kicked out of the party for pushing for them to be more militaristic. A certain budding world supervillain liked him, though, so he danced back and forth within the fascist regime, even advising the top brass on technology matters.
Many argue that he simply did this to further his career aspirations. Making a deal with the devil to ascend to greatness. Luckily, the devil didn't win.
Now I'm telling you the story not to get you to hate Mazda, or even really Wankel himself, but merely as a case of fact, being truly stranger than fiction. A radical scientist on the wrong side of history all the way on the other side of the world, becomes the center of a story about a small Japanese brand's grand designs, and ultimately the story of how they both failed to achieve the greatness that they felt was so attainable. Now, despite his unfavorable beliefs, Wankel was a visionary.
Felix had no degrees. He didn't even have a driver's license. But even from a young age, he had dreamt of a simple engine that completed all four stages of internal combustion as simply as possible intake, compression, combustion exhaust, all while spinning and operating with as few moving pieces as possible.
He set about this dream in 1924, but wouldn't really make any progress for over two decades. You see, Felix was a visionary, but he kind of had dogsheet eyesight. His designs were flawed.
The only saving grace for his rotary engine was Wankels co-developer. Dr Walter Froede You see, Walter was actually an engineer. You know, you could, like, actually do math and make things work.
In 1951, Wankel Froede and their team announced that they had completed the world's first Wankel Rotary engine, a moment that must have felt like a revolution, pun intended. It was an entirely new way of propelling the world smaller, lighter, simpler, utilizing as few moving pieces as possible. No valves, no springs, crankshaft cams.
Everything was gone. Your average four cylinder engine has over 40 moving parts. Winkles Rotary would have just three two rotors and an output shaft.
All the energy perfectly balanced. Unlike the piston engine, which converts a vertical motion into a circular motion. The rotary is already spinning perfectly balanced and simple and capable of incredibly high revolutions.
So it made sense that the Rotary was set to take the automotive world by storm. Hundreds of manufacturers rushed to license the technology from Felix, and one unlucky brand took home the rights to one of the worst engines ever made. The decision to adopt the rotary engine into Mazda may be one of the biggest gambles in all of automotive history.
Was it a good or a bad decision? I think there's points to be made on both sides. Now, to understand why Mazda was crazy enough to bet it all on Wankel, you have to understand where Mazda was at the time.
Postwar Japan was merging larger companies left and right. Nissan having taken on Prince, was eyeing Mazda next, but Mazda was desperate to avoid being stuffed in the pocket of Nissan. So desperate decisions were made and they bet it all on a high school dropout fascist with bad eyesight.
in 1961, Mazda was run by a man named Tsuneji Matsuda, the son of Mazda's founder. Matsuda saw this revolutionary new propulsion system as a way to pull Mazda out of the depths and save the company in his father's honor. By this time, the secret was kind of out.
Winkles Rotary was, you know, there's not a nice way to say this. A bit sheet, It had low compression. The eccentric shafts were really hard to make.
It was loud, it was dirty, and ultimately, it wasn't very efficient. A few companies had already tried their hands with the Rotary, Mercedes-Benz and Isuzu. Remember Isuzu.
. . I should make a video about them.
Anyway, everyone who took a rotary back to their home countries quickly abandoned the project. Even Walter Froede’s best efforts only produced a motorcycle that smoked out The whole neighborhood was louder than a jet engine and needed a service that no one in Japan was trained to do. So why did Mazda think they could do better?
It might have been because of the vision of one man, Kenichi Yamamoto. Kenichi was a devoutly religious man and believed in the spirit of the Japanese people. He thought that he and his people could solve the problem that no one else could.
He believed that they could make the rotary engine actually work. So Kenichi was given the task of heading Mazda's Rotary Engine development, aka R. E.
He led a team of 47 engineers nicknamed the 47 Ronin, dubbed so because they were the most loyal and dedicated of Mazda's engineers, fiercely committed to the singular task of making this crazy bet on Rotary technology work. And they're in a facility not far from the crater that ended World War Two. The 47 Ronin set about their impossible business.
Kenichi’s team quickly produced their first prototype of Felix Winkles design. And it was, well. Garbage might be an insult to garbage at this point in development.
The team quickly learned about one of the first problems of rotary engines. Lovingly named Devil's Nail marks by its name alone. You can just feel the frustration the engineers must have felt when dealing with this.
These nail marks or chatter marks were waves and distortion caused by vibrating apex seals that led to the engine basically self-destructing. Now, lesser men would have realized that Mazda had essentially bought a cursed engine design and given up. But you didn't get to be one of the 47 Ronin by being a quitter.
Long nights, a lot of coffee and some ingenuity provided the team with an answer. New aluminum carbon composite, apex seals and reworked oil fuel mixtures solved the devilish chatter problem. The rotary engine would now show almost no signs of wear and tear after 100,000 kilometers.
And it was no longer chugging oil just as fast as it did gasoline. With the addition of some extra rotors, they solved the Rotary's other issue. Low end torque.
And in just two short years, Mazda's Roland had built the world's first production rotary engine for a mass produced vehicle. The 10A and for better or worse, the rotary engine was ready to be unleashed upon the world. In the 1960s, Japan finally realized the potential of marketing their machines to the greater world.
And they designed beautiful, purposeful sports cars to break through and grab those customers. What they created were revelations. Toyota's 2000 GT.
Nissan's Fairlady Z. Even Honda's S800 iconic sports cars that captivated the world and put Japan on the map as a serious car manufacturer. And their among them was Mazda's entry, the Cosmo in 1964.
Heiji Kobayashi, a relatively unknown car designer, set out to design a car unlike anything else. When you're launching the world's first car, powered by a wild new technology, you don't just slap it on some commuter car. You dare to dream.
The ultra compact size of the rotary engine meant that the Cosmo had no need for a really long hood, meaning it could break from the typical Coke bottle design of other sports cars from the time. Kobayashi took inspiration for the Cosmos design from everywhere. The Ford Thunderbird.
The Ferrari 400 by Pininfarina, the Japanese bullet trains, and even the ongoing space race between the world's superpowers. Unlike its inspiration, though, the Cosmo just looked fast. The bullet train could easily hit 160 miles per hour, but with a whopping 109 horsepower sputtering out of a one liter engine, the Cosmo could barely break a hundred, and it took eight whole seconds to get to 60.
The Cosmo certainly wasn't fast enough to get you into space. Despite the amount of smoke coming out of the tailpipe, making you assume it was a rocket ship. So, okay, fine.
It wasn't exactly the fastest thing on four wheels, but it did look great. And thanks to the lightweight, it handled amazingly. So good, in fact, that Mazda decided to take it racing.
And this was the breakthrough moment for Mazda. In the sixties, there was a race called the 84 Hours of the Ring, a grueling endurance race that lasted four days around Germany's Nurburgring. And it was there that the reliability of the simple rotary engine shined.
I know it sounds insane. Anyone who knows of the rotary engine today, but there in the foggy hills of Germany, the modest Cosmo managed to finish fourth on its first outing. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be enough to put the Cosmo in the Sports Car Hall of Fame, and it quickly became the car of the nerds journalist derisively called the Cosmo the UFO.
And with that far out sound and insane styling, it was kind of hard to blame them. While Nissan was selling their 240Z in record numbers and James Bond was out murdering people in a 2000 GT, the Cosmo only found fame as a quirky Japanese car fit for fighting Kaiju. Now, the Cosmo wasn't a failure, per se.
It didn't sell great. It didn't change a lot of minds, but people did notice it and therefore noticed the Mazda. That attention certainly gave the bigwigs at Mazda confidence in the Wankel future.
So following the Cosmo, they stuck it in everything. There were the RX-3's the B series truck, luxury cars. And then just as it was getting good, there was an oil crisis.
You know the story. Oil crisis. Gas prices, malaise.
Era gas embargo. Cars begin to suck. And nothing was hurt more by this than the rotary engine.
Despite its small size and efficient design, they got absolutely terrible gas mileage. And this is the era that essentially skyrocketed Japan as a whole to the top of the car world. Small, lightweight, fuel efficient cars powered by cheap and fun 4-cylinders with their confidence shaken and fearing they'd be left in the dust.
Mazda relegated the rotary to only a select few cars on their lineup. Things began to look grim for Mazda. They'd bet it all on Wankel and his new engine design, and it wasn't paying off.
But at this point, Mazda had invested too much in this project to give up on it. And I think we can all be pretty glad that they didn't. So in 1978, with hearts full of Pride, engineers at the Ready Mazda bet it all won last time.
Time and time again, car brands forget what makes a proper sports car great. But every once in a while someone remembers the lightweight rear wheel drive tight suspension and an exhaust note that raises the hair on the back of the neck. In 1978, Mazda remembered dubbed the RX-7 SA The FB generation RX-7 was the first of what was to become a sports car dynasty.
Finally, this was what the Rotary engine was made for, balance the Wankel engine output power and torque of an engine twice its size, and it lived to sing at a high revving note. Spinning in fury, but absolutely content. Yes, the FB never had enough power and even though it was one of the best handling cars in its class, the lack of torque really held it back.
But try telling that to anyone who was driving one and they just smile and wave, pulling away and drowning you out with a rotary powered backing track. At this moment in time, Mazda was teetering on the brink. The Rotary experiment to this point had been expensive and largely a defeat.
But the FB did something that no other Mazda sports car had done before. It's sold. almost poetic in the timing.
Mazda's last gamble on the rotary engine paid off right at the most pivotal moment and the success of the RX-7 kickstarted the heart of Mazda's sports car program right as the golden age of Japanese sports cars was about to begin surprising everyone in Mazda. Most of the first generation RX-7 sales had been to Americans. Decades of reliable, well-made cars from Japan had finally broken past the well, let's be honest, racist tendencies of the American public.
So Mazda sent a team stateside to see what all the fuss was about. What were they buying and what were they dreaming of owning? The answer to what we were buying was Corvettes.
But what did we dream of owning? Apparently that was the Porsche 944. So Mazda set about making a car with the performance to match the vet and the class and sophistication of the Porsche 944.
Yeah. You probably hear class and sophistication and all you think of is weight And you're right. The FC weighed a whopping 800 lbs more than its older brother.
But this was 1986 and sports car buyers were expecting a little comfort to go with the performance. Luckily, though, Mazda was still targeting Vette and performance was front and center. Twin scroll turbos, adaptive independent suspension and tight cornering.
Thanks to a new four wheel steering system. The FC generation RX-7 was poised to take on the American car market by force when it landed on American shores. It was lauded by journalists and subsequently gobbled up by sporty, dorky American car buyers.
This was the car that let you beat a Corvette with good design and technique rather than brute force. And thanks to that, Americans quickly looked past the funky engine design and heavy weight. Australians, on the other hand, still desired the light lotus inspired balance of the FB.
So Down Under you could purchase a limited edition example of the FC RX-7 that had all the options and technology stripped out, known as the RX-7 250 sports model. You paid a bit more to have an Aussie rip out the power steering, the power windows and the rear wiper blade to get that weight down closer to that of the FB Whatever model of the FC you got though, you got one of the most refined, balanced rotary sports cars ever made. And now Mazda's Grand Gamble had finally seemed to be working with worldwide acceptance of this funky spinning triangle method power delivery.
The team in Japan set about taking the platform to an entirely new level in a dimly lit office building on the outskirts of Hiroshima. A project is outlined that would soon take a worldwide effort to complete Operation Z, make Japan's greatest sports car ever, and make it light. Thanks to the booming eighties nineties, Japanese automakers were packing their sports cars with more and more technology.
Four corner steering all wheel drive twin turbos heads up displays big six cylinder engines, electronically activated aerodynamics, space age fighter jet interiors. All of this meant one thing heavy chunky cars. Tom Matano and the team at Mazda had a different idea.
Hot off creating one of the world's greatest sports cars, the Miata. Matano and his team saw their path to Japanese sportscar greatness with lightness. Could they, with the help of the lightweight rotary engine, make Japan's lightest and fastest sports car?
from the get go Mazda knew that they needed to make something truly special. The first generation was fantastic, but visually it was hard to deny how much they had copied from Porsche's 944 This time, Mazda wanted to make something truly unique. So why entrust everything to just one man or just one team?
Internally, they launched a competition between teams in Japan, the UK and the United States for the best designs. Nine designers around the world were all given one goal to make a future classic, something that would be shown at Pebble Beach for decades to come. Thankfully, this was just the project that Wu-Huang Chin had been waiting for his entire life as a child in Taiwan.
Chin had seen photos of the Jaguar E-Type and had become infatuated with its long curvy lines. So much so that he purchased his own E-Type while living in California and working on the design of the first generation Miata. When the competition to design the new Generation RX-7 came about, Matano and Chin set about penning a car with almost no straight lines.
Meanwhile, back at home in Hiroshima, an engineering team had put together a rough design of what could lay beneath the RX-7’s skin Takaharu “Koby” Kobyakawa one of Mazda’s original 47 Ronin led the team that managed to trim the fat out of nearly every inch of the car's design. Project Z managed to put the RX-7 on a 250 lb. diet, meaning that this generation would be nearly half a tonne lighter than its competitors from Nissan, Mitsubishi and Toyota.
Weight savings alone would not be enough to compete in the nineties market, though. The 13B rotary engine would need a little help. So nestled into that ultralight chassis was the first ever sequentially turbocharged production engine.
The 13B was half the size of Godzilla's RB26. Hell, it was smaller than a three horsepower gasoline generator, but it was putting out 255 horsepower. A new double wishbone suspension gave the RX-7 near limitless grip.
This was a true driver's car, balanced, lightweight and no gimmicks, the result of a massive effort from a global team to create sportscar perfection. Mazda's team set pen to paper in 1989, and in 1992, they released pure automotive art upon the world stage. But like so many great artists, their songs would not be sung until long after they died in 1991.
A very tired man grips a steering wheel tight, his leg searing with pain. His body dehydrated to the point of near death. But he presses on to push his car across the finish line of the 24 hours of Le Mans One last time, he and his team are the first to bring a Japanese car to the top podium spot.
And that car was powered by a rotary engine. A few months later, dealerships across Japan began selling Mazda's second greatest achievement, the FD RX-7 Look, there's there's a reason everyone loves the nineties. This was the time when Japanese cars hit their absolute peak.
GT-R, supra, NSX VR4, Evo, STI, So many legendary names, so much noise that it was inevitable that some of them would get lost in the fray. Among them was RX-7 Press reception to the newest Wankel powered sports car was through the roof. The extremely lightweight design meant that the RX-7 punched way above its pay grade, even nipping at the heels of the incredible Honda NSX for one third of its price.
It won Car of the year. Playboy preferred it over the Viper and our RX-7 graced nearly every top ten list. Mazda's effort had not been in vain.
Anyone who put their hands on the steering wheel of the FD or heard its engine dance near Redline rarely had anything bad to say. It was perfection. Mazda had swung for the fences, knocked it out of the park and built a timeless masterpiece.
And yet, well, it was never really the first name in the Japanese sportscar Golden Age. It was always being overshadowed by the Supra, the Nissan GT-R, and even the Mitsubishi GTO. Why?
Well, for starters, the Rotary engine was just too weird, You had to feed it oil, like lots of oil. It was hard to maintain. And if you didn't do it right, you're rebuilding the engine regularly.
Even when it did run, it was smoky. It didn't get great gas mileage. And the Furious lawnmower sound was kind of an acquired taste.
Its sequential twin turbo system was a revolution, but it was also awkward. You got a weird valley of power as one turbo transitioned to the next. It wasn't as spacious and as comfortable as its competition.
It lacked all the wizardry and technology that was the trend of the time. Sitting in a 300ZX was like piloting a fighter jet. Sitting in an RX-7 was like, well driving a car.
in the United States. The FD RX-7 ended sales after just three years from 1992 to 1995. They actually skipped 1994.
Japan got 11 years of FD. It struggled to sell in the UK. It had limited success in Australia.
Then near the end of its run, Mazda had started building the RX-8, a truly unworthy successor and the final nail in the rotary coffin. The masterpiece that was the FD RX-7 was sadly too little and too late. By the time the last RX-7 rolled off the assembly plant.
Time had simply moved on past Mazda's dream. Collectively, the world seemed to be done with waiting for Mazda and had moved on to the comforts of standard internal combustion engines. Mazda had spent decades and countless millions on Wankel’s engine in the automotive industry.
Rarely do you see risks as grand as this taken and the sporadic sputtering rise and fall of the rotary engine is probably a testament as to why Wankel’s original design may have been flawed, but Mazda did actually make it work. They did the impossible. They had bet it all on the spinning Dorito horse and managed to scrape together enough chips to call it a win.
But the Rotary could never reach the potential of its piston counterparts. And when it came time to look at a new generation of Rotaries in late 2000s, Mazda took one look at the emission standards and began working on hybrids instead. But one group of people never gave up on Mazda's dream.
Enthusiasts hidden among the public between the 50th WRX and the hundredth Mustang are those that value driving dynamics more than sanity, who aren't afraid to spend a night in a garage if it means a weekend on a mountain road. Those who keep their lanterns lit for mazda's brave bet the hardened few toiling away, rebuilding, maintaining and more importantly, red lining their rotary engines to remove carbon buildup. This was who Mazda shaped their ideals around their pursuit of the perfect sportscar.
Using methods no one else would dare try had culminated in a timeless masterpiece. Vision had created the RX-7 a vision that surpassed so many hurdles that pushed teams of men through so many hardships to finally realize perfection. Today, Mazda still sits in the shadow Giants, but there isn't a car enthusiast alive that doesn't know who they are.
The FD was released over 30 years ago and its rivals have faded in Luster. The GT-R is now a supercar for anime weirdos. The Supra is a Frankenstein of BMW and Toyota Mitsubishi, a fading light in the dark.
But today and for decades to come. Parked on green hills among the world's finest cars, you will find the last RX-7 leaming proof that sometimes a grand gamble pays off.
