On May 30th 1967, Mazda sold its first rotar-engine powered car and simultaneously, the world’s first dual-rotar, rotary engine vehicle, the Cosmo Sport. 40 years latter and while most manufactures have long abandoned the idea of developing the innovative but also problematic, rotar-engine, Mazda continues to believe in Felix Wankel's dream. Tomorrow, May 30, 2007, Mazda will celebrate the rotary engine 40th birthday by opening a dedicated website -we’ll have more details on that later on. For the time being, Mazda has released an exclusive blog widget that allows comments. Simply copy the code below (replace XXX with <), and paste it to your blog –be sure though that your service provider permits JavaScript. Here’s the piece of the code:

XXXscript src="http://www.mazda.com/mazdaspirit/rotary/blogparts/rotary.js" type="text/javascript"> XXX/script>

Don’t really care about widgets? Well, we thought about that, so in compensation we added 50 (yes it took as a while) high-res images of all the rotar-engine powered cars that Mazda has produced the past 40 years; from the luscious Cosmo Sport to the weird, Holden Kingswood based, Roadpacer and from the Parkway bus to the dual-fueled (gasoline & hydrogen) RX-8 Hydrogen RE. -Follow the jump for the high-res image-gallery

Technorati: Mazda, Rotary, widget, cars, Carscoop, cars, autos, vehicles

Cosmo Sport/Mazda 110S

Famillia Rotary/Mazda R100

Luce Rotary Coupe/Mazda R130 Coupe

Capella Rotary/Mazda RX-2

Savanna/Mazda RX-3

Luce Rotary/Mazda RX-4

Parkway Rotary 26

Roadpacer AP

Cosmo AP/Mazda RX-5

Savanna RX-7/Mazda RX-7(1st)

Savanna RX-7/Mazda RX-7(2nd)

Luce(4th)

Eunos Cosmo

Mazda RX-7(3rd)

RX-8

RX-8 Hydrogen RE