The FD RX-7 is everything you want in a sports car, including failure | Cammisa Revelations | Ep. 17

[Music] in case you hadn't noticed cars are all basically the same these days that wasn't always the case there used to be oddballs like the mazda rx-7 and the fd is everything you've ever wanted in a sports car plus it's beautiful it won every single award you can think of and then sold so badly in the united states that it was killed off in three years taking the entire rx-7 nameplate with it in other words that is why we can't have nice things [Music] every fossil fuel burning car in production today uses an engine that is functionally identical to the mercedes patent wagon from 135 years ago can you imagine if the telephone hadn't changed in 135 years hey siri why won't you answer me until the latest crop of evs there hasn't been a single mass-produced commercially viable alternative to a piston engine other than the rotary the rotary engine's concept was dreamt up and patented by a german named felix weinkel in 1929 his idea was to use a rotating assembly rather than reciprocating pistons to ingest compress and then combust fuel turning explosions directly into rotational motion the potential benefits were huge but the engine was tiny and a wankel only uses a third as many moving parts as a reciprocating piston engine felix michael didn't actually make the engine commercially viable what he did was make millions by licensing the idea to companies who then had to make it work and by the way those licensees included everybody gm ford amc rolls alfa romeo citroen mercedes-benz porsche nissan toyota suzuki to name a few everybody the delorean was designed around a wankel so was the amc pacer so was the original mid-engine corvette and yet nobody was really able to make felix's wankel work except nsu briefly and a little japanese company who'd like to do things differently matsura i don't actually speak japanese i think that's how they pronounce it mazda mazda the cosmo was the second production car to use a rotary but the first to use a carbon apex seal that made weinkel's work work without smoking like a vaping stoner at a hookah bar it was also the first to use two rotors which canceled each other's small imbalances the cosmos one liter rotary was smooth as silk and powerful 110 horsepower plus it revved to 7000 rpm all the way back in 1967. the cosmo was light it was agile and while other mazdas had a rotary engine available as an option the cosmo was the only mazda available solely with a rotary until its spiritual successor the rx-7 the first gen rx-7 was a huge hit out of the gate in 1979 because it was a ray of hope debuting as piston engines were being choked to death to clean up their emissions compared to them the rotary was clean and efficient and fast the rx-7 was as quick as many of the big lumbering v8 powered american cars of the era and lighter european stuff like the porsche 924 mazda became a little obsessed with that porsche so its stated goal for the second generation rx-7 was to be a porsche and the results were well one magazine put it best by saying shameless aping doesn't pay look the second gen rx-7 was a worthy competitor to the porsche 944 but the similarities between those two cars were just too obvious and besides a germanic obsession with weight and complexity probably shouldn't be the mazda way and so the third generation rx-7 would return to mazda doing things mazda's way nothing was off the table the company would consider putting any kind of engine anywhere in the car it could be four wheel drive mid-engined or even have a piston engine whichever worked best but mazda realized the rx-7 already had something that every sports car tries for but so few actually achieve heritage the rx7 by the way was already well on its way to winning more imsa races than any other car in history so the rx-7 would remain rotary powered with the engine in front and drive wheels at the back the rx-7 could concentrate on being powerful because it didn't have to be cheap the miata was about to debut and it would cover that brief it could concentrate on being lightweight because it didn't have to be filled with heavy tech and luxury features the cosmo coupe had that covered so instead the rx-7 could be both powerful and lightweight which kind of sounds like a race car doesn't it yeah and for good reason ah the same guy who did this car was also mazda's racing director simultaneously working on the le mans program his name was takaharu kobayakawa and thank god he went by kobe and his four rotor 787b was the first japanese car to ever win the 24 hours of le mans which it did four months before the fd's debut the 787b's engine showed so little wear at the end of the 24-hour race that it could have gotten an oil change and gone back out and won another 24-hour race that's really cool but it's also irrelevant because the car itself was about to crack in half some frame reinforcements that were screwed into the magnesium firewall were literally pulling themselves out it didn't matter because it all lasted long enough but that was the same light-weighting strategy applied to the rx-7 operation z was a fanatical weight reduction plan that pulled something like 200 pounds out of the fd compared to its predecessor but the team went a little too far and at the absolute very last second mazda realized they needed to reinforce the side sills because they were flexing so much that the rear suspension couldn't properly do its job no big deal they caught it in time but that's a perfect illustration of just how close this car came to being too light the fd weighed under 2 800 pounds in its base form but it was a 255 horsepower twin turbocharged monster whose goal was not only to wipe the floor with every one of its direct competitors but also to keep up with the brand new acura nsx for half the money and that's exactly what it did the fd rx-7 turbo won automobile magazine's design of the year it won motor trends import car of the year it made it onto car and driver's 10 best list every year it won road and track's best handling car in america award and broke the record for the highest grip level ever recorded in a road car it beat the holy grail mid-engine acura nsx around streets of willow by a second and a half and then just for fun it beat a 911 turbo two the driving position is a little crooked but there's no badge but i have great visibility outside plus i can see the tops of the fenders from the driver's seat and that helps me place the car on the road this was one of the design briefs for the rx-7 and mazda managed to do that without making the car look doofy speaking of looks included in the fd's brief was the goal of creating a car that had the potential to be a future classic something that would be on the lawn at pebble beach in 50 years and indeed it was designed within spitting distance of pebble beach at mazda's california studio so the most beautiful car to ever come out of japan was designed in america with an engine that was conceived by a german under the hood is the 13b rew 13 stands for its displacement 1.3 liters rew stands for rotary engine double turbo why w and not dt well in japanese the word for double that's it is very similar to the word for w so for shorthand they just wrote w so technically it's the 13b re double not u [Music] it's tiny yeah sure it displaces only 1.3 liters but you can't really compare that directly to a piston engine's displacement what you can do is look at its size the engine itself is smaller than this three horsepower generator it made 255 horsepower and that was with the help of two identical hitachi turbos they were the same but they worked sequentially at low rpm and low load all of the exhaust gases were routed to just one turbo because this little engine didn't move enough air to quickly spin up both of them somewhere around 4000 rpm a rat's nest of like 67 vacuum hoses would suck a couple of valves open to orchestrate a beautifully timed changeover pre-spinning the second turbo so that there was a perfectly seamless transition from single to twin turbo operation what an awesome concept that didn't work at all what actually happened was that the boost would drop momentarily during the position and then surge back up often noticeably enough to upset the car in corners the fd had nothing but the best when it came to suspension double wishbones front and rear and it had the miata's incredible power plant frame which formed one rigid structure out of the engine transmission and diff for zero drivetrain latch the rx-7 was a sports car in a field of fat gts this thing is really fast but it's not just a numbers car it's magnificent to drive and this clutch that is a model of engagement perfection this is exactly how clutches should engage the shifter well this is the company that makes the mazda miata need i say more although it's kind of strange you'd never know driving this car that it's related to the miata because they're opposites in corners the miata horks over and you feel all of its weight and it's roly-poly this is the opposite the rx-7 feels massless it's just an extension of yourself it was almost a thousand pounds lighter than its overly complicated competition things like the mitsubishi 3000 gt vr4 or the nissan 300zx or the toyota mark 4 supra or the subaru svx and that wasn't always a good thing those other cars killed off their name plates because they were too complicated and they were too heavy the fd was the opposite automobile magazine said it was like a race car for the road but then warned that you should be careful what you wish for inside it's cramped it's loud you feel every bump and so do all the other craptastic interior plastics which all creak and rattle in sympathy [Music] the whole thing felt fragile apparently doc severson who was the band leader for johnny carson's tonight show band returned his after a couple days because it dented so easily well apparently he shouldn't have been having so much sex on the lightweight aluminum hood car and drivers long-term rx-7 was in the shop nine unscheduled times in 35 000 miles and then the car gave them a final middle finger by sacrificing its water pump right after the test concluded and this was all before the 13b's true sensitivities were really known for example if you put synthetic oil in this thinking you're doing it a favor well it'll just wear its apex seal and you'll have to build a new motor or if you fail to change the coolant every second full moon it will rot the rotor from the inside out meaning you'll have to build a new motor or god forbid you stall it when it's cold it's just gonna flood and refuse to restart then over time outrageously high under hood temperatures cooked everything into a pile of oddly shaped coal including 67 000 petrified vacuum lines of course there are fixes and workarounds for most of this stuff all cars have problems but not all cars drive like this perform like this rev like this or look like this [Music] i haven't seen an fd on the lawn of pebble beach just yet that's their loss but with this car's legacy and those looks it's only a matter of time before those snooty old geezers realize that is a revelation now if you excuse me i need to go for a drive now [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so you're just gonna keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay action i'm not some rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up up up up up keep the ferrari out i'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 1,520,657

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, RX7, RX8, Cosmo, Rotary, Motor Trend, Demuro, Doug, Camissa, Camisa, LS swap, Koby, K swap, Throttle House, 110S Cosmo, Porsche 924, Porsche 944, Haggerty, Apex seals, crash, Felix Wankel, Delorean, Mid engine corvette, Zora, Acceleration, POV, mazda rx7, mazda rx8, initial d, fd rx7, wankel engine, wankle engine, mazda rx 7 fd, mazda rx7 fd

Id: quLmDySyO7k

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021