I don’t know if you know this, but Jalopnik’s Jeep-fanatic David Tracy actually has a huge soft spot for a certain small, retro Japanese import. I respected his love for the first-gen Mazda RX-7, but I never truly understood it until I drove one myself very recently. And I walked away truly sad that we don’t have…
Currently, nobody on the market sells cars that run with the magical triangles of a rotary engine—the kind of engine you’d find in a 1980 Mazda RX-7. Really nobody else besides Mazda was ever able to get it to work in a meaningful way. I totally get it, too; by design, rotaries get atrocious gas mileage and they’re…
The final FD generation Mazda RX-7 was an ambitious car for its day, with high tech like sequential turbos on its twin rotary engine. As such, it was packed to the gills with sensors and hoses and lines, lines that you will discover when you finally tear into your once top-of-the-line sports car that you got for seven…
Mention the rotary engine, and you’re bound to get an entire peanut gallery promising apex seals going boom. Ryan Gilbert wasn’t scared away when his girlfriend’s family 1979 Mazda RX-7 was up for grabs. In fact, he’s well on his way to returning it to the drag nights and autocrosses it used to do.
Every now and then there’ll be a weekend where the whole world gets together and dials its car culture all the way to 11—or in this case, seven. That’s what 7s Day is; a giant celebration of Mazda rotary engines on the weekend of July 7 and 8 that happens in many cities, including New York. But here’s what went down…
Crammed into a red Porsche 911 Turbo S Porsche convertible, we slotted into the traffic rolling towards Times Square with an R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R pulling ahead of us. Beside it waited another R34 Skyline, a hen’s tooth V-Spec II Nür. For one moment, for that whole night, really, there was no 25-year import rule.…
New car smell should be the very last thing I notice. I mean, thanks to my work I’m hopping in and out of new cars all the time. It should have the same effect on me as iocane powder on Westley—inconceivable. So why is it right now smacking me right in the face? This is what happens when you’re in a pristine Mazda RX-7
This year marks the 40th birthday of one of the greatest sports cars ever made: the wedge-shaped, rotary powered Mazda RX-7. So let’s celebrate a car that gave this world all the spinning triangle weirdness it deserved.
In all things, it’s important to know your own worth. In the case of one guy listing his perfect-condition 1994 Mazda RX-7 on Turo, that worth is just shy of $1000 per day.
Before the Mazda RX-8 came onto the scene and reminded the entire automotive world of the existence of triangles, we had the little RX-7. The Mazda RX-7 has become an “internet car.” Currently, YouTube is full of theoretically infinite videos of highly modified RX-7s of all generations with far too many angry rotors…
Outside of Japan, Kenichi Yamamoto isn’t a household name. Not the way Henry Ford and Carroll Shelby and Lee Iacocca are. Yet most people who enter the auto industry don’t get to produce one of the greatest alternative engines ever made, or oversee the development of one of the most beloved sports cars of all time.…
Radwood is the place to be if you love 1980s and 1990s cars, and if you want to take a car there, you’ve got a wealth of options. Here’s why so many fans of that era love the Mazda RX-7, starting with an absolutely pristine one.
Radwood 2, the 1980s and 1990s car show we co-sponsored, had an incredible amount of fantastic, rare, and unexpected 1980s and 1990s rides. It was glorious. But, amid all that glory, there was also a fierce concentration of madness, centered over a strange, second-gen Mazda RX-7 with color-shifting paint and a small…
The rotary engine is a classic failure: once hailed as the future of internal combustion, rotaries have never been more than oddballs, difficult to maintain and, also, were designed by a super nazi. But they have an irredeemable charm, and sometimes you can’t help but love them.
For those of you grew up with Fast dreams and Furious visions filling your world of wheels, I’m about to describe a scene of pure pornography. Imagine yourself surrounded by gorgeous examples of all-time heroes of the Japanese car world. A Mazda RX-2 and RX-3 flanked a Toyota Century. Datsuns gurgled through…
Internet icon Hert ran one of the gnarliest turbo-LS swapped drift cars in the drifting world, and recently made the switch back to rotary power. Many asked why. This should be as good an answer as any.
Under normal circumstances, a Mazda RX-7 Evo Group B Works car would be absolutely incredible to drive or own. One goes up for sale next month, except it has a unique twist—it’s never once been driven or raced.
On July 7, 2017, there was a meetup of Mazda RX-7 owners in New York City. RX-7s on 7/7/17. When I visited Times Square earlier this year, all I got to see was a horse poop as it walked down Broadway. An “army” of RX-7s would have been much better.
Have you ever had a moment with a car? Just a brief couple of minutes in which you fell positively, uncontrollably head over heals for an automobile? I did one night in Hong Kong a while back, and now I can’t stop thinking about first-generation Mazda RX-7s.
