The One on the Wall

When people hear the words third-generation RX-7, two things usually come to mind almost immediately: rotary and design. Honestly, I could probably end this article right here, fill the rest of the page with photographs of an FD RX-7, and most readers would be perfectly happy. Maybe even grateful. Because just look at it. There are certain cars that require explanation. The FD RX-7 is not one of them.

I can say with confidence that I am far from alone in believing the 1990s were the absolute peak of the Japanese sports-car era. It was a remarkable period because so many manufacturers were building genuinely different cars with genuinely different personalities. They were not all chasing the same benchmark or trying to appeal to the same buyer. Each company seemed to have its own idea of what a Japanese performance car should be. Toyota gave us the Supra. Nissan had the 300ZX and Skyline GT-R. Mitsubishi brought the 3000GT. Honda built the NSX. Mazda, always a little different, gave us the RX-7.

And hanging over all of them was the NSX. Whether people want to admit it or not, the NSX was the king of the era. Maybe not in total sales. Maybe not in aftermarket tuning. Maybe not in street-racing mythology, club culture or sheer modification potential. But in terms of what it represented, the NSX cast a very long shadow.

Its value today tells part of that story, but the reputation was earned long before collectors began bidding them into another tax bracket. The NSX combined exotic construction, world-class performance, extraordinary visibility, everyday usability and Honda reliability in a way that forced the entire sports-car and supercar world to rethink what an exotic car could be. Before the NSX, owning something that fast usually meant living with something that fragile. Honda built the body from aluminum, took the prototype to Suzuka and listened when Ayrton Senna told them it needed to be stiffer, and Motor Trend reported that 8 more months of work raised its rigidity by half. Gordon Murray, then designing the McLaren F1, has said that once he drove one, the Ferraris, Porsches and Lamborghinis he had been benchmarking simply fell out of his head, and the NSX's ride and handling became the target instead. It literally changed daily drivability and reliability for the entire supercar sector, and everything that came after it owes it something. It helped prove that a supercar did not have to be temperamental, fragile or miserable to use.

But there was another Japanese sports car from the same era that approached greatness from a completely different direction. And it came from a much smaller company. A company that, somewhat unbelievably, began life manufacturing cork. Mazda.

Of all the great Japanese sports cars of the 1990s, I believe the third-generation RX-7—the FD—is the one with the most timeless design. Not necessarily the most aggressive. Not the most famous. Not the most powerful. The most timeless. The FD RX-7 somehow managed to avoid becoming trapped inside the decade that created it.

Park a stock example next to many modern sports cars and it does not look thirty years old. Strip away the pop-up headlights, and someone unfamiliar with the car could easily believe the basic shape was designed within the last five or ten years. That is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish.

The proportions are almost perfect: long hood, low roofline, short rear deck, compact dimensions, beautifully rounded fenders and almost no unnecessary visual clutter. Nothing looks exaggerated. Nothing looks decorative simply for the sake of decoration. The car is clean. And because it is clean, it has aged incredibly well.

The NSX still looks fantastic. So does the A80 Supra. The Z32 300ZX remains one of Nissan's best designs. The R33 Skyline GT-R has developed a presence and desirability that few people outside Japan could have predicted when it was new. But the FD RX-7 still has them beat. It had them beat then. And, somehow, it may have them beat even more convincingly now.

Its size probably helps. Modern cars have become enormous, which makes the RX-7's compact dimensions increasingly refreshing. There is also something to be said for the fact that the RX-7 was never quite as overexposed as some of its contemporaries. The Supra became a cultural icon. The Skyline became forbidden fruit. The NSX became Japan's supercar. The RX-7 somehow remained slightly more mysterious. It certainly had its moments in movies, television and motorsport, but it never became defined entirely by them. The car remained the star.

And that brings us to a Japanese phrase closely associated with Mazda: Jinba Ittai. Loosely translated, it means “horse and rider as one.” It describes the idea that a driver and machine should move together instinctively, almost as though the vehicle is simply an extension of the person controlling it.

Mazda has spent decades making that philosophy central to its sports cars. Steering response, seating position, pedal placement, balance, weight distribution and the way a chassis communicates with the driver are all supposed to contribute to that sense of connection. If the Miata is the most famous expression of Jinba Ittai, the FD RX-7 might be its most spectacular.

Everything about the car seems designed around lightness, balance and communication. The engine is tiny. The body is compact. The weight is low. The driver sits close to the center of the action. The twin-turbo rotary delivers power in a way unlike almost anything else. And rather than simply overwhelming the road with horsepower, the RX-7 seems to work with it.

That is what makes this car so much more interesting than simply calling it beautiful. The FD RX-7 is one of those rare automobiles where the engineering philosophy and the styling seem to be telling the same story. Light. Simple. Focused. Balanced. Different. And very, very Mazda.

Do not worry. There will be plenty of photographs in this article. It would almost be irresponsible not to include them. But photographs can only tell you so much. They can show you the curve of a front fender. The way the roof settles into the rear glass. That wonderful rear three-quarter view, where the cabin seems to disappear between the shoulders of the car.

What they cannot show you is how much effort went into making the RX-7 feel the way it looks. For that, you have to meet the people behind it. And understand just how seriously they took the idea of a sports car.

By the time development of the FD began, Mazda had an important decision to make. The RX-7 had grown more sophisticated through its first two generations, but sophistication came with weight, equipment and a broader set of responsibilities. The second-generation car could be a fast, comfortable grand tourer. There was nothing inherently wrong with that. But Takaharu “Koby” Kobayakawa wanted the next RX-7 to have a more concentrated purpose. With the MX-5 taking shape as Mazda’s accessible roadster, there was room for the RX-7 to become something more ambitious. Something that could stand beside the world’s great sports cars and deserve to be there.

The development team began by asking what a sports car should actually do for the person driving it. That question mattered more than a horsepower target. Engineers attended performance-driving schools. They drove karts. They evaluated everything from established European sports cars to machinery whose appeal lay in its extraordinary simplicity. They needed to understand how weight, seating position, steering, balance and response changed the experience from behind the wheel. You can calculate a center of gravity. Understanding why a driver falls in love with a car takes something more. Kobayakawa wanted his people to feel it.

Imagine being part of that team. Your assignment is to help build Mazda’s next great sports car, and part of the preparation involves learning, through your own hands and feet, what makes a car worth caring about. That tells you something about the FD before a single body panel has been shaped. The people creating it were being taught to notice the same things we notice.

The first movement of the steering wheel. The way a car settles under braking. Whether the gear lever makes a shift satisfying. Whether the front tires seem to respond with you, or a fraction behind you. Those small moments would become the entire point.

And the rotary engine gave Mazda an extraordinary place to start. For all the attention it receives, the rotary’s greatest contribution to the RX-7 may be what it allowed the rest of the car to become. The 13B-REW was compact enough to sit low and behind the front axle. That helped concentrate mass within the wheelbase, lower the center of gravity and give the chassis a balanced foundation. It also helped the designers bring the hood down. That beautiful nose had engineering underneath it.

The engine, cooling system and surrounding components were arranged to make the whole car lower, tighter and more responsive. The rotary was fundamental to the proportions as well as the performance. Take it away, and you change far more than the sound. You change the possibilities.

Mazda could have pursued a larger engine. A three-rotor unit was considered, but the size and weight implications pushed against the kind of car the team wanted to build. The FD needed enough power to be seriously fast while remaining compact enough to feel alive. For the original American-market car, that meant 255 horsepower from a twin-turbocharged, two-rotor engine in a car weighing roughly 2,800 pounds.

Today, 255 horsepower can sound almost ordinary. There is nothing ordinary about what it meant in that package. Especially when the entire car was being developed to make use of it.

Mazda examined weight with an attention to detail that becomes almost endearing once you start looking closely. The hood was aluminum. So were the suspension arms. The wheels were carefully engineered to combine strength with low mass. The seats, glass, exhaust and even the jack were scrutinized. Even the jack. An item that most owners would barely think about had to justify the weight it added to the car.

That is the sort of detail that makes an enthusiast smile. Someone cared about a part hidden beneath the luggage floor because the driver would carry it through every corner. Mazda’s own history identifies this extensive effort to remove weight, alongside the rotary’s packaging and the chassis’s precise response, as central to the FD’s development. Mazda’s FD RX-7 history

And the benefits accumulated everywhere. Less mass to accelerate. Less mass to stop. Less mass resisting a change of direction. Less work for the tires and suspension. The reward was a car that could make the driver feel capable, involved and eager for the next bend.

But the team also learned that removing weight required judgment. One of the most revealing stories in the FD’s development concerns its body structure. Early prototypes could be deeply impressive on a circuit and still behave poorly on rough public roads. During testing in California, harsh freeway surfaces exposed hopping and nervousness that demanded attention. Chassis engineer Takao Kijima began questioning whether the structure itself needed more support.

The solution included reinforcing the side sills, with internal bulkheads that helped them resist deformation. This arrived late enough to cause understandable concern among the people preparing the car for production. Yet the changes went ahead. Here was a team willing to put material back into a car whose development had become a relentless search for places to remove it. Because the driving experience mattered more than winning an argument with a scale.

There is something deeply reassuring about that. The FD’s reputation rests on decisions made by people who drove the prototypes, felt what was wrong and went back to work.

Its beauty received the same commitment. The familiar shape emerged from a design competition involving Mazda’s Japanese and American studios, with an outside British proposal also in the mix. The winning theme came from Wu-Huang Chin at Mazda’s Irvine studio, working within the design organization associated with Tom Matano. Chief designer Yoichi Sato and colleagues from Japan helped develop it into the finished car. That distinction matters. The FD had an inspired starting point, followed by an enormous amount of collaborative refinement.

Look at how the body changes as you walk around it. From the front, it is low and almost delicate. Move toward the side and the front fenders gather strength. From behind, the rear arches give it a muscular stance without making it look swollen. The shapes flow into one another so naturally that it is easy to underestimate how difficult they were to manufacture. Those deep curves had to become stamped metal. That roof had to become a production roof. Those surfaces had to survive the transition from a designer’s imagination to something Mazda could assemble, paint and sell.

And there were functional reasons for details you might otherwise dismiss as styling. Kobayakawa wanted the driver to see the front fender peaks from the seat, helping place the car on the road. The vents behind the front wheels provided an exit for air routed through the oil-cooling system. The subtle contours of the roof were refined with airflow in mind. The longer you study the FD, the more its beauty rewards you. A curve catches your eye. Then you discover why it is there.

The cockpit continues that conversation. You sit low, surrounded by a dashboard and console that seem to gather around the driving position. The round instruments are clear and purposeful. The tachometer occupies the place of importance. The short gear lever sits close at hand, and the pedals were arranged with serious driving in mind. There is an intimacy to it. The high tunnel, close-fitting seat and compact cabin make the car feel personal before it moves. You can understand why an owner might sit there for a moment after parking, hands still resting on the wheel.

And then there is the engine. A rotary changes the rhythm of a drive. Its smoothness encourages you to keep listening as the revs rise. The sound takes on an increasingly urgent edge, while the engine’s willingness makes the next stretch of the rev range feel inviting. In the FD, that character came with sequential twin turbochargers.

At lower engine speeds, one turbo did the principal work. As demand increased, the second was brought into play to provide the airflow needed higher in the rev range. Making that handover work properly required considerable development. The engineers were especially concerned with the hesitation that could appear during the transition. A brief interruption might look minor on a graph. Through the accelerator, in the middle of a carefully judged corner exit, the driver would notice.

Different turbo hardware, control strategies and repeated testing helped refine the response. Period road tests still recorded occasional signs of the transition, particularly in early examples and prototypes, so the system should not be turned into a fairy tale of absolute perfection. What deserves admiration is the ambition. Mazda wanted the flexibility of a responsive road engine and the upper-range performance worthy of the chassis around it. Achieving both with a small rotary involved a remarkable amount of work.

Under that clean hood was a busy collection of plumbing, valves, actuators and heat-management challenges. All of it serving a very direct request from the person in the seat: More, please.

The chassis had to answer with equal clarity. Double-wishbone suspension, carefully chosen geometry and precisely controlled movement in the bushes helped manage what each tire was doing as the car braked, turned and accelerated. That last part is easy to overlook.

A suspension mounting has to permit movement in some directions while resisting it in others. Too much compliance, and the car can feel vague. Too little, and it can become harsh or unsettled. Mazda spent its effort on the particular movements that would help the RX-7 respond naturally. The steering, too, was developed around a consistent sense of connection. The objective was for the driver to build confidence through the wheel, learning how the car would react and trusting that response.

Beneath the cabin, the Power Plant Frame linked the gearbox and differential, helping control movement in the drivetrain under load. It is an unglamorous-sounding piece of engineering. Yet its purpose reaches directly into the experience: how cleanly the car takes up power, how the drivetrain behaves as you lift and accelerate again, how connected the mechanical parts feel.

This is where the FD becomes especially compelling. So much of the effort went into things you would never point to in a photograph, but might feel several times within a single corner.

Picture the car on an open, winding road. You ease out of the throttle as a bend approaches. Apply the brakes. Select the gear with a short movement of your hand. The nose settles, the road opens ahead, and you begin to turn. A good sports car makes those actions feel like parts of one continuous movement. The FD was developed to do exactly that.

Its compactness helps you place it. Its relatively low mass helps it change direction. The driving position puts you close to the car’s responses. As the corner unwinds, the accelerator becomes part of the conversation again. You feel the work of the people who decided where the engine should sit, how the suspension should move and how much effort a control should require. All those drawings. All those test miles. Arriving through your hands and feet.

Contemporary accounts give that imagined drive substance. Paul Frère praised the new RX-7’s agility, steering and balance after driving development cars at the Nürburgring. John Dinkel’s road and track impressions emphasized the relationship among the controls, chassis and driver. Their enthusiasm matters because these were experienced observers with plenty of exceptional machinery against which to judge it. The RX-7 could make an impression even in that company.

The NSX was among the cars Mazda used for comparison, and Kobayakawa actively encouraged journalists to drive it alongside the FD. He wanted the RX-7 assessed against serious opposition. Imagine the confidence required to do that. A small company from Hiroshima, with its unusual engine and fiercely concentrated sports car, inviting the comparison. The FD earned its place through the way it worked as a whole.

Of course, living with one could expose the costs of that focus. The cabin could feel cramped. The firmest versions could be punishing on rough roads. Interior finishes drew criticism. The rotary had an appetite for fuel, and the heat and complexity beneath the hood demanded attention. Touring versions added comforts, but the elaborate Bose audio system took a substantial bite out of an already limited luggage area. None of that needs to be airbrushed away. Admiration becomes more meaningful when it leaves room for the actual car.

The FD was a demanding set of priorities made tangible. Mazda continued refining its ride, equipment and mechanical specification, while later Japanese versions kept developing the idea after the car had disappeared from American showrooms. Its commercial life was also shaped by unfortunate timing. Economic conditions changed. Exchange rates and rising prices hurt its prospects. Buyers found other places to spend their money. A car can fulfill its engineering brief and still struggle to find enough customers.

That is part of what makes the FD feel so precious now. It represents a moment when Mazda committed extraordinary care to a very particular kind of pleasure. The pleasure of a car that looks light on its feet and then proves it. The pleasure of an engine whose character belongs unmistakably to the machine around it. The pleasure of feeling a corner come together, of making one clean shift, of taking the longer road because the shorter one suddenly seems like a missed opportunity.

For an enthusiast, those moments can stay with you for years. So can the sight of the car afterward. Parked. Quiet. Heat slowly leaving the engine bay. You walk away, then turn around. There are the fenders again. The low nose. The glass curving into the tail. A shape you already know by heart, somehow still capable of stopping you.

And now you can see more than the shape. You can see the engineers who went back to the drawing board after a difficult test. The designers who kept refining the surfaces. The people who cared about the position of a pedal, the weight of a wheel, the movement of a suspension bush. You can see how badly they wanted to get this car right.

That, to me, is the true beauty of the FD RX-7. The dedication is still there. You can feel it when the car moves. And you can see it when you turn around for one more look.

Tom Matano said not long ago that his team had proved its point after 30 years. He was being modest. Park an FD beside anything built since and the point proves itself again, every time, in every parking lot. The NSX changed what a supercar could be. The Supra showed what a Japanese engine could take. The 3000GT showed everything a car could carry. The RX-7 showed what happens when a small company decides that the best thing it can give a driver is less: less weight, less size, less decoration, less between you and the road, until all that is left is a horse that knows what you want before you ask.

Close your eyes and you can still see it. Low at the curb, nose tucked down between its fenders, the tail a single dark band, the whole car crouched as if it has been waiting for you. Turn the key and the rotary settles into its busy, eager idle. Ask for more and it rises, smooth as a turbine, and at 4,500 rpm the second turbo arrives and the road starts coming at you twice as fast. You place the nose by the peaks of the fenders, you feel the rear settle under power, and somewhere in the middle of a good corner you stop noticing where you end and the car begins.

That is Jinba Ittai. That is the FD.

I said at the start that I could have published one line and a gallery of photos, and you would have been happy. I believe that more now than when I wrote it. But I hope the rest was worth it, because the shape on the bedroom wall was never just a shape. It was a cork company's argument that small could beat big, weighed to the gram, signed off by a supercomputer, proven on the fastest roads in the world and spun at 8,000 rpm.

It still wins the argument. Now, the photos.