Hailed by many as the most beautiful car ever to come out of Japan, The Mazda RX-7 took seventeen years of development before it finally appeared on the streets in 1978.

Without the perseverance of a team of Japanese motor engineers and designers under the leadership of Kenichi Yamamoto, in the development of the Wankel or rotary engine, this stunningly designed, high performance sports car, would never have happened.

In 1961 the Japanese Company Toyo Kogyo, later to be renamed Mazda, licensed from the patent owners NSU-Opel of Germany, the full rights to develop a new rotary engine.

The Rotary engine was named after its inventor Wankel and had no pistons or crankshaft as such, but consisted of a simple fuel injected rotor blade that span around a central drive-shaft that was connected to a rear wheel differential for drive.

In theory the rotary engine is far superior, through its simplicity in design, than a conventional piston combustion engine, with much less moving parts to go wrong and direct drive power output.

Yamamoto’s team at Mazda set to work on developing a rotary engine that would overcome the problems of loss of compression, exhaust, and the overheating of the rotor blades tips, that had limited Opels success at developing the technology in the 1950′s. Read the rest of this entry »