And also, those cars have excellent weight transfer with that small engine. 50/50 i believe

yeah, hardly any torque, dont they just **** fuel to?

Not at all. And the torque doesnt really matter. Those cars can fly.

The early ones got lousy mileage and not much torque, but Mazda'* got them pretty tuned up now. Since a rotary doesn't have any valves/valve train, it'* torque and hp curve is almost perfectly level from 1000 to redline.

What'* incredible about the rotary engine is it'* simplicity and power.
When the rotor makes one revolution, each of the 3 sides of the rotor has a power pulse. So there'* 3 power pulses in one rotation of the rotor, and there'* normally 2 rotors in an engine.

By comparison, one piston has to make 2 up and down strokes for one power pulse. That'* part of the reason why a rotary can make twice as much power as the same size piston engine, another reason is there'* no valve train to rob power from the engine, and the mass of the rotors spinning is a fraction of all the pistons and crankshaft in a piston engine.

It'* an incredible design. Mr. Wankel dreamed it up in the '20s. Mazda was hoping back in the late 60'* that it would replace the piston engine. If not for politics and the energy crunch of '74, it just might have.
If that would've happened, we be discussing things like street ports, bridge ports, J ports, and 3mm seals vs. 2 mm seals instead of things like ER rockers.

The rotary has three sides, so three "strokes" for each revolution, thats why its got so much HP, it just spins, but torque is hard to create that way. They are nice cars, and it'* a very nice engine. One of the infamous 4 rotors was the Relentless 787b . One of THE BEST cars in GT3, and one of the best of all time. it'* more like 1000 HP... Just crazy... I've seen some RX-8'* around here, and i'd love to drive/have one.

Theoretically, that engine is supposed to never stop increasing RPM'*. I say "never" quite sparingly, however. That'* a big word. But, as brought out above, 13,000 is quite a bit. But the finer tuned ones can do much more than that now. Rice bike I-4'* can do 13grand.

Check this out. Here'* a breakdown:

http://travel.howstuffworks.com/rotary-engine4.htm

Saw an RX-8 in a darker gray today... those things sound "different" for sure... very cool

One of the few foreign cars that I like. Also liked the last few years of the RX-7.

Then rotory engine is very different for its simplicity. It never saw much production simply because the regular pushrod came out first. I personally think that its a better engine. That and Mazda is not a very popular car company.