PAC: the Rolex of rotaries

8:03am

First stop: PAC Performance and instant regret regarding car choice. Burbling up in the Trackhawk, the hostility radiating from shop owners Rocky and George Rehayem is toxic.

See, these two are a proper pair of Wankelers. Since the early Nineties, they’ve been producing the most powerful (up to 2,000bhp) and fastest rotary-powered Mazdas on the planet. So bulldozering my way into their incredible facility with pistons, valves and cylinders is a brave move. No, not brave. What’s the word? Ah, yes... Stupid.

Why? Well, Australians don’t get into car brands through massaged marketing messages – they’re born into them. Car ownership is a tribal landscape, one where the roots run deep, and Rocky and George are rotary ’til they die.

“I grew up racing motorbikes,” Rocky, the brains behind the operation, says. “One day someone told me there’s a car engine with a powerband like a two-stroke. ‘Bullshit,’ I thought. But then they took me out in an RX-3, and I had to have one.” So the next day he bought one and fell in love with its simplicity.

If you’re not familiar with rotaries, imagine a triangle spinning inside an oval housing like a rotisserie Dorito. This whizzes around creating chambers that expand and shrink, so when you pop the fuel and spark in at the perfect time (which Rocky is a black belt at) you have a three-phase version of suck, squeeze, bang, blow – just every spin is a power stroke. Getting this process right produces mightily effective, lightweight motors – especially when Rocky adds turbos the size of bin lids.

To get his revenge for my V8 arrival, George takes me out in a raucous seven-second street-legal RX-3 drag car. Idling with more braps and anger than a grime MC, he plants his foot and the monster turbo sludges its way through the lag, hits boost and takes off like a tasered ferret. Scared, I eye up the parachute release in the roof. Laughing from his ape-like driving position, George turns to me with a grin, “Still want that silly V8, bro?”