For my first review : 1995 Mazda RX-7 FD3S

2015/05/11, 6:00 am - Impossible to fall asleep and complete that night. I’m getting up, ready to pick up the RX-7 I reserved to a dutch import company. Five hours later in my parents’ Citroën C4 Picasso, I wasn’t feeling so good.

“What if the rotary engine doesn’t perform so well ?”
“I hope the compression test will be OK”
“Damn, I’m hungry as hell, is there a Mc Donald’s around here ?”

Then I saw it. And all my problems just went away. It was already in the workshop, ready to be inspected.

Compression test - check. The engine was in perfect health.
I took the RX-7 out of the workshop and left with the import company’s boss for a test drive. I wasn’t figuring out yet that this car would become one of the most thrilling machine I’d be given to drive.

Let’s go straight to the point. I brought this beauty at home. Started to gather all the information to register it in Luxembourg where I live. Attempted to get these damned license plates + registration certificate + MOT for more than a year, then failed. I sold the RX-7 several months after, and I was crying out loud when I saw her leaving my garage.

The real reason ? The rotary engine throws some different emissions values by design. Especially the lambda - it’s not close to 1 like all our classic ICE cars, it’s a bit higher than that. Due to this fact, some countries have a special clause in MOT centers that allows not to consider this value during emissions tests, so the car can pass the MOT anyway. But in Luxembourg, we don’t have this. I had to pay and wait for months to get papers coming straight from the Mazda headquarters. I took the car to Germany to get it tested by a TUV center, just to prove my car was performing right. Back to the Luxembourgish MOT center, I’ve been nearly accused to lie about the specs of my car. I spoke to every single man there (at that time, the Luxembourgish MOT was a public institution, there were only 3 centers in the whole country and all these centers were following the same instructions). Everyone told me the car wasn’t performing right, blah blah blah. I had to explain to the Director of the center how this engine was working, but it didn’t help. I was stuck, so I gave up.

And that was the end of this experience, that I sadly had to accept. I would never be able to drive a RX-7 legally in Luxembourg. But the memory remains, and here are my thoughts coming from these trips I made from test centers to test centers.

The RX-7 is an extraordinary machine. This 13B-REW engine is a real piece of art. A lot of people told me that rotaries have no torque, “more doritos = no dorifuto”, etc. Fortunately the RX-7 wasn’t concerned by that, thanks to the twin snails boosting the 13B. And that sound… it’s something you just can’t forget.

As the car starts to reach its operating temperature, you get quickly surrounded by that heat inside the cabin - yeah, you’ve got to accept that taking the RX-7 for a drive automatically means “I’ll get out of the car with a wet t-shirt” (pants might get wet too, but that’s for another reason). So, it becomes a reflex to open the windows after 10 minutes.

Handling was really good on winding roads (chassis was stock, I had no upgrades yet), and the only real regret I have is that I haven’t been able to test it on the Nürburgring. It’s a light car, and you can feel it. It was easy as hell to become one with the car.

So you can imagine how much sorrow I felt when I saw the FD going away with its new owner. Anyway, I still feel happy to have owned one. That’s the kind of automotive experience you cannot forget. And for this, I say a big “THANK YOU” to Mazda !

I wish I could tell you more about this amazing car, but I have only spent some limited time with it. So, please don’t blame me for this short review - I just tried to write it with feelings, just as this RX-7 hit me “right in the feels”.

I would like to review some other cars I own/I have owned for you. If you liked this short story or if you think some things could be improved, please drop a comment and tell me your thoughts !

Cheers, Alex