My 1994 USA tripIntroduction / Rod Millen / Rotary Racing and Reliability / Racing Beat / HKS / Mazdatrix / More Information IntroductionBack in September 1994 I went for a holiday to the USA. Back in those days
the Internet was in it's infancy and the idea of ".com" hadn't taken
off yet. Thanks to the good people on the RX7 mailing list of the day I had a
list of suitable places to visit. Rod Millen Motor sportsRod Millen is a New Zealander who moved out to the USA
in the 80s. He used to be really into rotaries.
Rod Millen's pike's peak winner (1991 ?)
was an 2nd generation RX7. Rod Millen also had a 4WD 1st generation. This is powered
by a factory race 13B mechanically injected (Bosch motor sport) engine. Finally, although not a Mazda, he also has a 912 hp 4cyl turbo 4WD Celica. They were building another car when I visited but wouldn't tell me what it was or let me take a photo. (It was only at the stage of being a tube frame with no engine anyway). Rotary Reliability and RacingRotary reliability and racing are a repair shop near Anaheim (Which is in Los Angeles, California, USA - Disneyland is in Anaheim). Their main claim to fame is writing the technical articles for the discontinued "Rotary Rocket" magazine put out by the RX7 club of America in the 80s.
The "Killer Bee" engines are a package that
was put together as a bolt in engine, with various porting options etc. Racing BeatVisiting Racing Beat was somewhat of a pilgrimage. One of the most famous rotary performance companies in the world who did a lot of early development in the 1970s and 80s.
Racing beat's Bonneville racer has a 3 rotor 13G factory
racing engine that is peripheral ported AND turbocharged (3 turbos!!),
making around 900 hp.
These photos are taken around Racing Beat's workshop. Note the "Side Housing Machine", which is the thing they talk about in their technical manual/catalogue. Supposedly this gives a better finish than the Mazda factory process. The Miata is not rotary powered so is of no particular interest. HKSI visited HKS on the way from Racing Beat to Mazdatrix, but they are only a warehouse so I took no photos. I got some copies of their catalogues but I had to pay (everywhere else gave me a freebie as they could see I'd gone out of my way to visit them). MazdatrixThe people at Mazdatrix were very friendly and let me walk around the place
by myself. While Mazdatrix have a workshop, there wasn't any interesting cars in
there when I visited. Unfortunately they had sold their 13B turbo
Miata a few months earlier. They did however have a 20B engine behind the counter.
Further reading and acknowledgements: Other relevant reading at Craig's Rotary Page (Please go via the INDEX
page): Please note that 22 of 23 pictures on this page were photographed by me. You are welcome to 'borrow' any of these pictures for websites or other publications provided an acknowledgement is made to this site. [TOP OF THIS PAGE][TOP PAGE OF SITE] This page last updated 24/3/2001 Update History: 16/3/2001 - Changed More Information section, minor page updates and spell check. Converted all text to new standard (Headings as Heading1, Some sub-headings (e.g. tables) as 14 point normal bold italic, Most text as Normal, Internal page links at top not all uppercase). Changed from Netscape to FrontPage, Background image changed to PG00_02B.JPG 23/04/1999 - Previous known update (May have been some before this) |
This site is online at tripod (The large images on many pages don't
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