I always thought it was because people were butthurt that the 787 did so good. Didn’t know it was because they were trying to align with Formula 1 rules.
probably one of the greatest myths in all of motorsports, it's really frustrating to see that some people to this day still believe that rotaries were disallowed from le mans for being 'too good', or whatever
It is also worth noting that because of the new F1 engine rules at the time, most of the field were running basically untested new cars while Mazda had been running theirs for years. Plus the other legacy teams all got a bunch of ballast which the 787 avoided thanks to a quirk of the rules and its rotary engine. So in effect you had a bunch of very fast fragile cars, a bunch of fast reliable cars with too much ballast to be competitive, and the 787b. No surprise it won
Every car cheats and bends the rules, the 787B isn't unique in that regard. You'll always hear about how the winner does it.
Most cars were running iterations of the engines they had used in previous years. Some had actually planned to run the new engines and instead ran the previous engines.
My point is that all the old engined cars bar the 787B had a substantial amount of ballast added to prevent them from being faster than the new ones. And I know everyone bends the rules in motorsport; that's not the point here. Mazda were not bending the rules, but substantially aided by them in this one particular race. All that is to say that the 787B was nowhere near as good as the legend has it to be
> The 787 was one of the slowest cars in the field, and their win was due to reliability rather than outright pace.
"Slow and steady wins the race", in car form.
absolutely, i don't want to take anything away from mazda, the fact that they managed to stick with a completely different concept to everyone else and have it pay off is nothing short of incredible. their win at le mans embodies the spirit of technology and engineering in racing. the only problem is the people who exaggerate and say that the europeans were jealous and banned the rotary because it was overpowered, it takes away from the underdog narrative of the actual story imo
While this article is full of incorrect claims, the alignment to F1 engines is correct.
The rotary has never been explicitly banned, the alignment to F1 was the only reason it wasn't allowed, much like many of the piston engines that had been racing at the time were no longer allowed.
In addition, the alignment with F1 was determined before Mazda ever won, they went into the race knowing it was their last opportunity before the new ruleset.
Rotaries were back to racing at Le Mans by 1995.
I'm curious if they could enter a GT3 since the new Toyota/Lexus GR GT3 cars supposedly shares a chassis/is derived from the Mazda RX Vision GT3 concept.
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/01/the-toyota-gr-gt3-coupe-looks-suspiciously-similar-to-the-mazda-rx-vision-gt3-concept/
The 787 was easily the slowest car in the field, it was surprisingly the most reliable car in the field so when everything else had broke it was left shrieking like a harpy.
> The 787 was easily the slowest car in the field
Now calling it the slowest is wrong in the opposite direction of saying the rotary dominated! It was a mid-pack car in terms of speed, it wouldn't have had a chance to win just on reliability.
Each of the 787/787B's had a different configuration which allowed different top speeds.
It didn't do so good though. It won LeMans out of attrition and never won before or again. The sister car in GTP, the RX7-92P was gorgeous, but got its ass handed to it every race because it just didn't have the power to hang with the turbo cars on the straights.
The sound is incredible though. I got to hear the 792ps scream through the woods at Road America when I was a kid and it was amazing.
Cool race motor and great if you want to Rev the heck out of it. Crappy motor to have to live with and should not be in a consumer vehicle. I have owned 4 fds and swapped three of them.
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It has less to do with that as it has to do with the physical size of the engine, being able to fit a whole engine in the space of half or a quarter of another engine allows you more space for other shit in the battery
I had thought it was because rotaries are very compact so they don’t have to change around their battery electric/plugin platform as much as they would have to to accommodate other gas range extenders
More likely (and what I think Mazda is doing with the MX-30) is the Rotary wikl only function as a generator for electricity, and it just runs constantly at its peak efficiency.
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