OT.? Mazda Rotary 2022

Piston engines go chug, chug. Rotary engines go whrrrrrrr.

There goes some of the fun of being a teenager. Muscle cars with glass pack mufflers and four speeds were the thing to have way back when. The restored ones go for serious money. I'm talking 20 or 30 times what they originally sold for. I had a 1969 Roadrunner, 383, Hurst shifter. Beep, beep horn. It was slow compared to others.

When I was shopping for a replacment car, I answered an ad for a late model Mustang, red, with extra deoration, in beautiful condition. He had a 17 year old son, who didn't know how to drive a stick, and didn't want to leearn. How sad.

I didn't buy it either mostly because it was a stick, but that's different. At least I know how to drive one.

I grew up on a farm. Most of the people I knew were farm types. That's probably still true. It was almost 2nd nature to operate clutches and gearshifts.

I remember when the first Wankels hit the SCCA races at Limerock, CT. Racing sewing machines... I cut my teeth on outlaw dirt tracks, and I don't mean NASCAR. Wasn't quite the same.

After my father died my mother went shopping for a new car. I had to convince her she could drive an automatic. She was close to 70 and had only been driving since 1922 or so. Being one of those kids into newfangled stuff, she'd taught her father to drive in a bit of role reversal.

Once exposed to AT, power steering, and power brakes she thought they were pretty slick.

I think I was in high school and I thought it was important that I know. I learned, believe it or not, from reading a book about it. And from having a bicycle. Then when I was 21, 3 of us took a trip, but the guy who owned the car couldn't go right away, so he took the two of us out for 10 minutes and taught, at least me, how to actually diive one. So I drove the car to Pittsburgh from Chicago** and the owner hitchhiked there a couple days later.

No, they go "zoom-zoom!"

Take the muffler off a rotary and it makes more noise than an unmuffled 383 magnum.

I was trying to recall what the Mazda commericals at the time said. I know it wasn't chug chug, but that's all I could coe up with. It wasn't zoom-zoom either. :-)