It seems like forever ago since Rob Dahm’s started his four-rotor AWD Mazda RX-7 project. What originally started life as a 3-rotor speed machine evolved into a do-it-all racecar for the road with one extra rotor and two extra driven wheels, and after 6 years, it’s finally finished.
In his latest video, Dahm brought the car to SEMA, in which it went on display amongst the hundreds of other ludicrous tuner cars there. In all honesty, if you didn’t know what you were looking at, the Mazda looks quite subtle considering what it is, with its muted yet elegant paint and molded widebody kit devoid of any rivets.
Watch: Four-Rotor Mazda RX-7 With GT-R AWD System Tries To Keep Up With Ken Block’s Hoonicorn Mustang
However, all that subtlety flies out the window the moment you see flames shooting out the fenders and hear an exhaust that sounds more at home in a certain ’90s Le Mans racecar than a road-legal vehicle. Near the end of the video we get a peek at the engine bay, and unsurprisingly, it’s impressive. The turbocharged 4-rotor Wankel engine pumps out a whopping 1,240 hp (1,257 PS / 924 kW), which is over 300 hp (304 PS / 223 kW) more than what the 787B offered.
One of the other main highlights of this car is that it now sends that power to all four wheels instead of only the rear two. That AWD system was borrowed from a Nissan GT-R, and it allows the FD RX-7 to somewhat mitigate what would normally be a ridiculous amount of wheelspin at launch.