The rotary engine has been absent on the frontline for quite some time, and it's on the way back. But not with Mazda.

The rotary engine is not quite dead. Despite it last making a sports car experience in the Mazda RX-8 just under a decade ago, the oddball triangular engine has an unbelievably strong cult following ...

We look at why Mazda introduced the three-rotor 20B Wankel rotary engine, and why it only ever saw service in the Cosmo coupe of the late 1980s.

For more than a decade the name Wankel has popped up whenever car enthusiasts start talking about advanced-design automotive powerplants. The theory of the Wankel engine goes back to 1954 when Dr.