Wankel rotary engine powered thousands of aircraft. One of several problems: It spewed castor oil on its pilots.

If you're finding excuses to love the Wankel rotary, this is one of them. With so much power coming from a small-sized package, with an amazing song to sing, the Wankel rotary is one of the ...

The internal combustion engine, for all its mechanical sophistication, still runs on a 19th-century mechanical idea: pistons rising and falling, a crankshaft spinning, a steam-age architecture ...

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 ...

Rotary engines made their biggest impact in Mazda sports cars, but a recent episode of "Jay Leno's Garage" delves into the rotary's earlier history. Before it was popularized by Mazda, the rotary ...

Gilbert Smith is an automotive journalist with over five years of specialized research and writing experience. Before joining CarBuzz in 2024, he produced in-depth buyer’s guides and feature articles ...

The rotary engine is perhaps one of the most polarizing motors to have ever been commercialized. From its checkered past to its intent to live on as a range extender, the small spinning triangle has ...

A bold collaboration aimed to bring research to reality could rewrite the rulebook on sustainable energy. Advanced Innovative Engineering (AIE), the leader in high-performance rotary engines, is ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...

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 ...