The rotary was the most radical rethink of the combustion engine in over a hundred years — and it paid the price for being different. Mazda introduced the innovative Wankel rotary engine in the 1967 ...

The defining characteristic of a two-stroke engine is to fire (combust) every time the piston is at top dead center. This makes them highly power dense, but also notoriously makes two-stroke engines ...

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 ...