I saw this old beauty the other day at the light and took a pic.

In high school I wanted one of these soooooo bad.


What am I?

Bonus: What engine does it have?
Bonus: What is the vintage?
Bonus: Have you ever owned one?

 

Mazda RX7…
Its a rotary engine
Early 80s…82 maybe?

My dad had one

 

1Gen RX-7 is correct..............but late 70s/early 80s.

I thought the 1Gen model was far and away the best-built out of the three. Subsequent versions gained power but lost build-quality. The rotary engines, however, were never very reliable, and consumed lots of oil.

 

That's about a 1984 RX-7. Friend had one of these back in the day.

 

That's an early-70s RX-3. A friend of mine also had one like that, blue in color, although I don't remember if it was that exact shade of blue.

Small world.

 

You got it!

By the late 80's these could be picked up used for decent money but they were always beat to snot and blowing blue smoke after the 2nd or 3rd owner.

My friend had one and I was fascinated how the engine red lined at high rpms.
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Wow, I never knew the RX3 existed.

 

Nice!
Did it have the Wenkel rotary engine?

 

It could rev much higher than a typical piston engine because the rotor more or less "spins" inside an elliptical chamber instead of having up-and-down pistons. That is why it used so much gas and oil compared to a similar-displacement piston engine. You have almost continuous power-strokes inside the chamber instead of the typical 4-cycle intake/compression/power/exhaust process. And some of the oil that is used to lubricate the seal-tips of the spinning rotor is lit off by the spark plug, and the oil smoke goes out the ports....which increases oil consumption and makes the exhaust harder to clean up in the catalytic converter.



It also had an RX-2 brother.

 

So its not a late 70s one, the rear was revised in the very early 80s, so its definitely an 80s model.This is the rear of a 1980 model:

 

Yes, it was a mid-cycle restyling of the same generation. I couldn't remember exactly which year they did the revision. I do remember, distinctly, although, that it felt more solid in the build-quality department than the 2Gen mid-80s version and the much more powerful twin-turbo 3Gen that followed in the early 90s.

 

Yep it had the rotary, revs to the moon and you can't feel it. Pretty sure back then you could rev the engine until it blew up.

 

One reason people DID rev them is that, without a turbo, there was practically no torque at lower RPM's. Revs, of course, also increased gas and oil consumption....many rotary owners got into the habit of carrying an extra can or bottle of oil in the trunk. I remember test-driving an RX-8 with the then-new non-turbo Renesis rotary engine...it was more sluggish than some econoboxes at low speeds, even with a traditional 3-pedal manual transmission.

Mazda, to some extent, also price-gouged on the rotary-engine parts, because they were relatively hard to find aftermarket.

 

OK, enough about Mazda rotaries. What's this one?.............Hint: my late mother learned to drive in one.

 

Its a Studebaker...is it a Champion?

 

Wasn't that posted before in this thread at one point? Studebaker don't know the exact year, 1950's.