I've always been attracted to engineering oddities. You know, things that get the job done in a different way than most. And I'm especially partial to out-of- the-ordinary engines. So it just seems natural that sooner or later I'd own a car with a rotary engine. And I do: a Mazda Cosmo Sport. "A what?" you say.

The two-seat Cosmo is a '60s-era small sports car powered by a 110-hp, two-rotor Wankel engine. The rotary was the brainchild of Felix Wankel, a self-taught German tinkerer who never went to college. He made the first rotary prototype in the late '50s for NSU, a German motorcycle and car manufacturer eventually bought out by Volkswagen. For a while in the '60s, it looked to some like the rotary would be the engine: light, small and only a handful of parts. Several carmakers paid Wankel for the rights to use the rotary. But they all ran into the same problem: The seals on the edges of the rotors didn't last. As the seals wore, power went down while fuel consumption and emissions went up.

Everyone but Mazda gave up trying to get the rotary to work in the real world. The company spent a great deal of money on the problem and, as the story goes, one engineer looked at the carbon at the end of his pencil and thought, "Maybe carbon seals would work." It's an interesting comment on the culture of the company that the engineer who led the rotary team, Kenichi Yamamoto, would eventually rise to be its chairman. The rotary became reliable and a staple of Mazda products. The company is still developing the rotary and is even working on alternate-fuel versions.

But back in the '60s, the rotary was considered an automotive novelty. So was the Cosmo. Chances are you've never even seen one. Very few made it to the United States. For one thing, the Cosmo was built for the Japanese market--that means righthand drive. I saw my first Mazda Cosmo Sport 110S at an auto show. But it was overshadowed by the Toyota 2000 GT, which was featured in the 1967 James Bond movie You Only Live Twice--complete with a TV in the dashboard. So, at the car show, the poor little Mazda Cosmo sat alone in a corner, with its strange rotary engine and styling that was a mixture of American and Italian with a few Japanese elements thrown in. I was fascinated by it.