Is This One of the World's Craziest Engine Swaps?

Welcome to the 21st century, where "strange engine swap" has completely lost its sense, as nowadays car enthusiasts are working on increasingly more crazy builds.
While this is would be a totally normal thing at a drift event, where you never know what kind of an engine you'll find under any given hood, the swap we're talking about today is something that sent a shockwave through the world of petrolheads through its sheer madness.

Most of you will be familiar with the name Rob Dahm, as over the years he's made good use of his passion for fast cars via his social media. Some of you may have heard about his 3-rotor RX-7, or his even crazier 4 rotor one, which we've talked about in previous articles. Some of you might be fond of his yellow Lamborghini Diablo or his older Cadillac CTS-V. But in recent years he decided to get his hands on more rotary engine coolness, albeit while pissing off some purists in the process.

If you'll ever ask a rotary enthusiast, the biggest sacrilege in terms of engine swaps for a Mazda RX-7 would be an LS swap for sure. It's been done over and over again, and although this kind of swap comes with a series of benefits, the RX community , or at least the majority of it, will just not accept that kind of swap. But here's where Rob took the spontaneous route, and did something few people have even dared to think of.

Rob went out and bought a Chevrolet Corvette, a C5 Z06 to be more specific, got rid of the V8 under the hood, and made way for a 13B rotary engine instead. Sure, the Vette community didn't take the news lightly, even more so when Rob decided to drive the car to LS Fest, soon after finishing the built, where his car was immediately "sent to jail" for not abiding the local V8 only unspoken rules. God that must have been fun for him! Imagine expecting that specific V8 growl of a Corvette and being greeted instead by the brap-ing sounds of the little, but feisty, 1.3 -iter developed by Mazda engineers.

For those of you that have been doing more research on the Corvette, or are passionate about strange concepts, this news might not hit as hard, as Chevrolet actually went on to build a rotary powered car back in the 70s, under the codename of XP-897 GT. Oh yes, the Wankel did stir up some attention back in the 70s, and Mazda was certainly not the only manufacturer to get more research done on the topic.

There's plenty of footage and photos to be found online with the build, so we won't go into all the technical details of it, but you might also be interested to hear that Rob's Corvette rotary swapping days aren't really over, as he might be going for a 4 rotor swap in a new gen Corvette C8. Yes, you read that correctly, and yes we might be documenting that build in the near future!