Join The Rotary Club: My Mazda Rx-7 Is A Prettier, Punchier Mx-5

It's perhaps more accurate to call this a love-hate relationship rather than one of unblinking adoration. This tenuous emotional tightrope can be attributed to the fact that in 2020 I took the bold step of buying a Mazda RX-7 - rather than the vastly safer and more sensible course of action, which would have been to gawp for a while then turn heel and run in the opposite direction.

You would have done the same in my position, though. Mazda had invited a bunch of journalists to Germany to celebrate its 100th anniversary by zipping around the Bavarian countryside in various classics and spending an evening at Automobil Museum Frey, a family-run concern with the best public collection of Mazdas outside the manufacturer's Hiroshima home town.

Parked at a sunny pavement cafe, I caught wind that Mazda UK might soon be offloading some of its heritage fleet, and it turned out its Vintage Red, third-generation 'FD' RX-7 was among them. Before my brain had a chance to stop the words tumbling out, and much to the bemusement of my colleagues around the table, I announced that I'd buy it on the spot.

By early December that year one of my dream cars was parked in my garage. Predictably, though, that was not to be the happy ending but the beginning of a saga. I knew it would need some work, and in 2021 the inevitable engine rebuild beckoned. On rotary engines this isn't as alarmingly expensive as it can be with piston engines, provided you only need to do it once during your ownership. Unfortunately, while diagnosing some subsequent issues, a second specialist discovered the first specialist had bolted things together incorrectly, so in 2023 the 13B was rebuilt once again - correctly, this time.

Throw in a full underbody restoration in 2022 after it failed an MOT for rampant corrosion, and the impending fitment of aftermarket coilovers (the OEM suspension, now tired and with a broken front spring, is in effect no longer available), new tyres and new brakes, and the car has spent altogether too long off the road - while my credit card is smoking like a blown turbo.

And yet none of this can quite overshadow the things the RX-7 does brilliantly. It remains one of the most elegant cars Japan has ever made, and I'd argue it is one of the most beautiful of all time - a credit to chief designer Yoichi Sato, Wu-Huang Chin from Mazda's Japanese studio and the late, California-based Tom Matano, whose contributions included the double-bubble roof.

The twin sequentially turbocharged bi-rotor engine is a masterpiece, revving with V12 smoothness well into the redline (when I'm not carefully running in new engines, anyway) and strong performance even today, thanks in part to Mazda's lightweighting efforts: the FD RX-7 was considerably lighter even than the all-aluminium Honda NSX.

Think of an MX-5 with all its abilities turned up by 50% and you're in the ballpark of how the FD RX-7 feels to drive. Similar lack of cabin space, too: Mazda has never let things like accommodating an 85th percentile adult stand in the way of engineering a car how it wants. But the view over the flowing front wings is glorious, and there's satisfaction in knowing so many of the team that worked on the car were also involved with the 787B that took Mazda's historic Le Mans victory in 1991, a feat that demonstrated among other things that rotary-powered cars can be durable as well as fast - it covered 3059 miles in the 24 hours. My RX-7 may sit idle a fair bit, but I have at least beaten that figure.

By Antony Ingram, the author of Mazda RX-7: The Complete Story published by The Crowood Press.