Mazda celebrates 50 years of rotaries

Today is the 50th birthday of Mazda’s first sports car and its first rotary-powered model, the Cosmo Sport 110S.

First revealed at the 1964 Tokyo motor show before its release in Japan on May 30, 1967, the Cosmo Sport was the first model from Toyo Kogyo Corporation – as Mazda was then known – that wasn’t a small passenger car or a commercial truck.

It was conceived after Mazda licensed NSU Motorenwerke AG and Wankel GmbH’s rotary engine technology in 1961, sharing learnings with the German companies in the hope of broadening the use of the engine.

Testing of the prototype rotary engine began after it arrived in Hiroshima, but it seized within an hour, leasing chief engineer Kenichi Yamamoto to assemble a team of Mazda’s most talented engineers — known as the 47 Samurai — to make the company’s crucial new rotary engine viable.

The result was the Cosmo Sport, powered by the world’s first twin-rotor production rotary engine, and just 1176 customer versions were produced.

The Cosmo Sport’s legacy lived on in a series of road and racetrack models honed in motorsport events starting with the 84-hour Marathon de la Route in 1968 and culminating in the 787B’s famous win in the 1991 Le Mans 24 Hour.

In all, Mazda went on to produce more than 1.99 million rotary-engine vehicles, from sports cars to sedans and even a 26-passenger bus.

Mazda says its decision to embrace Felix Wankel’s unique reciprocating engine technology almost 60 years ago was a deliberate move to raise eyebrows in the rapidly globalising Japanese car industry from which it needed to differentiate itself to remain independent.

The relatively small Japanese brand -- which axed its last rotary sports car, the RX-8, in 2012 – faces a similar issue today and continues to insist it remains committed to the rotary engine.

Indeed, last week it indicated it will revive the rotary engine as the primary power source for a future sports car, which could look a lot like the striking 2015 RX Vision Concept when goes on sale in 2020 – Mazda’s centenary year.

While Mazda is also exploring the use of rotary engines as electric power generators in plug-in hybrid vehicles, the rear-drive ‘RX-9’ sports coupe is expected to be powered by a relatively large 1.6-litre twin-rotor ‘SKYACTIV-R’ rotary engine delivering in excess of 300kW with the help of diesel-like homogenous charge compression ignition (HCCI).