A small Mazda with a Wankel engine

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We look under the hood of a Mazda R100 with wankel engine

It were, alfabetic, Alfa Romeo, American Motors, Citroen, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Porsche, Rolls-Royce, Suzuki and Toyota who were interested in the new technology and signed contracts with NSU to be able to use the wankel engine. Rolls Royce did that for aircraft engines, the German Krupp thought it could do something nice with it in trucks. But it was Mazda who already came to NSU in 1961 to help with the development of this special engine. After major problems with the seal, Mazda brought the first car with the wankel engine on the market in 1968, the Cosmos 110S.

The benefits didn't weigh enough

The benefits of Felix Wankel's ingenious idea proved unable to push the pendulum to the right side. Certainly not until the first Oil Crisis was staged. Those benefits? An unsteady motor has few (moving) parts, is compact, runs wonderfully vibration-free and can sound very good.

The Mazda R100 was presented in June 1969. The first generation of R100s was technically on the block identical to the 1200 coupe that had been on sale for a year. The wobble engine of the R100 was actually under development throughout production. And those developments had to do not only with the evolution of the technical concept of the block, but also with a more effective way of producing what a volume model should / could have become. In fact, the R100s were prototypes produced in series. Just like the famous Unimogs, by the way. For the important exporting country Australia and for Japan itself, the rotation engine (for fiscal reasons) had 100 hp. For the world outside it became 110.

A lot of power

And on circuits, the factory-tuned Wankel engines could deliver about twice the power with which they could even put the fire on the shins of Porsche 911s. Later the factory supplied official racing kits for the dynamic enthusiasts. The relatively low power of approx. 100 hp for regular customer cars was a choice of caution. The people at Mazda did not yet have sufficient certainty about the service life of - in particular - the sealing strips at the rotor tips. That is why they remained very much on the safe side in terms of capital development. And that this choice makes sense, as the reliability history of our photo model proves. The engine went above the 6.500 rpm 'in red' and at 7.000 rpm the second stage of the carburetor closed.

The availability

R100s were quite popular in Australia. But the 'left-handed' (American) market was the target group for mass production. A total of around 90D R100s have been produced. Quite a few of them died in the hard battle on the circuits. Most of the offer comes from the USA and Austrlia. So in the Netherlands there is at least one ...

 

 

 

 

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