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.

Gilbert Smith is an automotive journalist with over five years of specialized research and writing experience. Before joining CarBuzz in 2024, he produced in-depth buyer’s guides and feature articles ...

In theory, Wankel-style rotary internal combustion engines have many advantages: they ditch the cumbersome crankcase and piston design, replacing it with a simple, single-chamber design and a thick, ...

A German engineer, Felix Wankel, is credited with developing the world's first rotary engine in the 1950s. Wankel rotary engines use a triangular rotor spinning in a semi-oval case on an eccentric ...

Long before Felix Wankel became synonymous with rotary engines, an inventive Hungarian-American engineer named Stephen M. Balzer secured one of the earliest patents for a rotary-powered automobile on ...

Internal combustion engines have still got a few punches left in them. Case in point: Kiwi drifter "Mad Mike" Whiddett has unveiled "the wildest drift car I could think of," built around the world's ...