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

The 3rd-gen Mazda RX-7 has it all: beauty, performance, a Le Mans tie-in, and a sales failure. Like so many other legends, it’s everything we want in a sports car. Which made it a hard sell in its time. The FD RX-7 was developed at the same time, by the same man, as the 4-rotor 787B that won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It was a lightweight, fast, focused sports car that walloped its competition on the road and on track, thanks to a sequential twin-turbocharged rotary engine and a obsessive lightweighting. But it might have gone too far. The 13B-REW engine is fragile and finicky, and the chassis was one last-second reinforcement away from being too light to be structurally sound. Then again, what sports car doesn’t suffer from a few problems? At least the RX-7 had incredible performance and looks to kill. It was designed to be a classic, with forms that would make it one day appear on the lawn at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Given how well it’s aging, there