AWD 4-Rotor Mazda RX-7 Took Six Years to Build and It's Finally Ready

Six years have gone by since Rob Dahm introduced his plans to build the ultimate rotary-powered vehicle. He had already experimented with a triple-rotor RX-7 before but wasn't fully satisfied with the build. The car was exciting to drive and quite fast, but it had lost the balance it came with originally.

With a growing community behind him, he took the first mock-up of the car to the SEMA Show in 2016. The project was named "Ahura", and it instantly generated a wave of reactions across the world of automotive enthusiasts.

Rob planned to build a turbocharged, four-rotor Mazda RX-7 with AWD to provide stability in all given circumstances. Initial predictions revealed a required budget of about a quarter of a million dollars, but we're not sure how far things have gone since.

He encountered some initial drawbacks, as reportedly UPS had lost the four-rotor engine during the shipping process. That attracted even more attention to the project, but it didn't take long for everything to get back on track.

In August 2019, Rob announced that he would be installing a Garrett 106mm billet wheel turbocharger on the car. Reportedly, that's big enough to take a normal piston engine up to 3,000 hp. But the planned output for the RX-7 would be slightly less than half of that figure.

Not long after that point, a $20,000 sequential transmission would come into play as well. The car would go back to SEMA in 2019, and it looked as if it was already completed. In December 2020, the Hoonigans posted a video of the 4-Rotor RX-7 drag-racing the Hoonicorn.

In a way, these cars are related as Rob drew inspiration from Ken Block's Mustang to start working on his car. But the RX-7 wasn't quite dialed in yet at the time they went head-to-head and you can probably guess what the outcome was.

Six months ago, we saw one of the first big shakedowns of the project on a new Top Gear YouTube series called American Tuned. But the clear goal for Rob Dahm was to have the car ready for SEMA in Las Vegas. 149 episodes and six years into the making, that moment has come.

And it's amazing to see the result of all those years of hard work and solving seemingly endless problems. It makes you wonder how many people could have pulled this off, not just from a financial perspective. One thing you have to appreciate about this build is that it stays true to the original lines of the FD RX-7.

Even though this is a completely custom machine, you can still tell it's a third-generation RX-7. And it's nice to see that the owner wanted to somehow pay tribute to the original Montego Blue paint job with this final design. There are still probably some things to figure out with this insane project, and we can only hope Rob will choose to demonstrate its potential via a legendary racetrack like the Nürburgring or Tsukuba.

Seeing that David Mazzei is building a rotary-powered race car of his own, we can only begin to wonder how Rob is going to match that within the next few years. There are rumors of a six-rotor car being built at present time, but we will follow up on that story when we have more details about the whole thing.