Mazda RX-7 revisited - driving the rotary-engined king of spin

Throw open the bonnet and you get a good view of it. Mazda set it back behind the front axle, to give nigh on a 50/50 weight distribution, and it’s a two-rotor unit that runs on a carburettor rather than being fuel injected. Each chamber is diddy, at 573cc. That technically gives a capacity of 1146cc, but because a rotary completes an entire combustion cycle per revolution – whereas a reciprocating engine wants two revs per cycle – it has the equivalent of 2292cc.

Back in the day, that was good for 105bhp and 105lb ft – not a huge amount, even though the kerb weight is 1024kg. But still, sprightly enough; Autocar tested the RX-7 at 120mph flat out and completed 0-60mph in 8.9sec when it was new, figures that each new generation made quicker as the power output grew.

Today, though, it’s not the performance that’s startling but the engine’s smoothness – and the slickness of the gearshift. Quite often, today, low-powered manual cars have the sweetest gearshifts because the ’box doesn’t have to be so beefy to cope with the modest torque output. I don’t know if that’s what’s behind the RX-7’s shift, but it’s as good as anything currently on sale.

It needs to be, too, because you’ll want to use it to exploit the engine to its fullest. It’s tractable enough at low revs, but this is a unit that likes to spin. Throttle response is crisp and it has a lovely, sonorous sound that is impossibly smooth. There’s no increase in harshness as revs rise and it gets no angrier and no more vibratey. It just hums, wasp-like, with a delicate, hollow rasp to the exhaust.

While much of the RX-7 feels like a classic experience, the engine doesn’t. It’s no wonder there’s an audible warning from around 6000rpm that the 7000rpm redline is approaching. Keep the throttle pinned and the engine sails up to and indeed (because it has a carburettor, not electronic injection) beyond it if you don’t change up again.

The rest of the RX-7 experience is more of its time. The steering is unassisted, so anything between 3.5 and four turns lock to lock, depending on how heftily you’re prepared to challenge its soft limits. And although, later in life, the RX-7 was – still is – popular with drifters, given the number of turns between locks, that’s something I’m disinclined to try with this one.

Instead, the RX is best enjoyed in the classic coupé style. It rides on 185/70 R13 tyres and has a loping, docile ride quality that makes it an easy companion, and it steers naturally and rolls up to a modest cornering limit. It’ll hold a motorway cruise with ease and, as classics go, it’s remarkably usable and, from less than £5000, not expensive – if you can find one.

Do so and you’ll have a car that feels at home enough in modern traffic conditions and has bags of mid-to-late 20th century character, but with an engine that feels every inch at home in the second decade of the 21st century. Now we’ve just got to hope that Mazda will assemble a car whose entirety is fit for today, and tomorrow. Start putting the pounds to one side. You never know when they might finally push the button.