A classic example of late ‘70s tape stripes, flares, and spoilers.
I felt the need to stash my cherished Mustang, and to find something cheap to drive to college and to leave in the harsh environment of the open parking lots. My Mazda RX-2 experience had been a very good one, with great reliability, and all the happy little frission generated by driving the rotary engine. However, by this time (1980), it was getting more difficult to find good low mileage examples of the rotary, as most of them had been sold in 1972 and 1973, and were getting up in years and miles. The newer ones were rare birds, and also generally more reliable, so people kept them or sold them at prices above my budget.
In the meantime, Mazda had introduced a rotary engine exchange program. You couldn’t actually buy an engine, but you could take your car in to the Mazda dealer and have the engine exchanged for an identical rebuilt one. This was because Curtiss-Wright owned the U.S. license for the rotary engine (it had some sort of international patent on it), and would not permit outright sales, but rather exchanges only. They got a small bounty on every new rotary engine vehicle sold in the U.S. The more I shopped and thought about it, the better it sounded to buy a cheap Mazda with a dead engine, and then go through the engine exchange program. This also solved the problem of sellers trying to pass off dead or dying cars as healthy. I could simply buy from a seller who had given up, and just wanted the car out of his driveway at some nominal price.
I shopped for another RX-2, but only came up with RX-3s. I finally bought a ‘73 coupe, and went through my trusty used car used Lincoln dealer, to get the engine exchange done wholesale, $700 instead of $1,100, and no sales tax (shhh). A complete car with an essentially brand new engine, for under $1,000. My kind of deal.
My “new” RX-3, with a new set of tires and freshly debadged. Too much jewelry on an already busy styling exercise. The slotted aluminum wheels came with the car, yay!
At this point, you might note that the CC title is for a ‘77, and the car is a ‘73. Like Fiats and Corvairs in the old days, if you were a tinkerer and had the space, people would start giving you cars or “finding” cheap cars for you. That was certainly my case, and I owned six various RX-3s in the space of a few years. However, I kept one of them, and let the rest go, and the one I kept is the subject of the title. I am pushing my RX-3 series of street cars into one COAL.
The RX-3 wasn’t as nice of a car as the RX-2, as it was more jouncy on its leaf sprung rear axle, and the styling was a much less efficient use of space, never mind that the RX-2 didn’t have all the rather dated early ‘70s “coke bottle” swoops and angles to it. But the RX-3 got me to school and back, and around town, mostly anonymously, and with little concern on my part about where I parked it or how it might be treated. I also got that nice rotary engine, the maintenance and care thereof, meshing nicely with my rather obsessive following of all of the maintenance schedules and rules of operation.
A word on the rotary engine. It is a marvelously engineered and manufactured device, but the entire engine is both a series of wear parts, and also of a construction that is particularly intolerant of neglectful maintenance practices or other forms of maltreatment. Regular maintenance is the responsibility of the owner, but something like a rock pinholing the radiator, causing overheating, is really Fate, and mostly out of the hands of the owner. Failure is failure on one of these engines. Fault can’t always be laid on the owner, but it usually can be.
Frequent topping up of the oil (it burns off oil, by design, as it runs) and oil changes are critical, as is never overrevving the engine (it will generally willingly do it, a few times, until lightning strikes), never overheating the engine, and warming up or cooling down the engine at idle before or after working it hard. Obey all the rules, and it will last for 80k miles or more, until all the wear parts (seals and housing surfaces) simply wear out. That is the life and times of the rotary. Incidentally, improvements in the engine have extended the maximum life of them. I have an original later RX-7 engine, at 140k miles, that is just now starting to lose compression and becoming a bit hard to start at times.
I mentioned in the last post that my next choice of cars, this one, was one that “made all the difference…in unexpected ways”. An old friend, and by then my sister’s boyfriend (later husband), introduced me to autocrossing. Heck, I used to race my Hot Wheels and model cars all the time, this was right up my alley. Not only that, but the RX-3 seemed to fit right in. It appeared to be a great choice for autocrossing, as RX-2s and RX-3s were out there going at it, along with a just-introduced RX-7 or two. Friend Rick had a Fiat X-1/9, but it turned out, against any reasonable assumptions, that my RX-3 was actually a better, faster choice than the Fiat. Rotaries appeared ideal for autocrossing.
Paint the centers of those slotted wheels black, and let’s go racing!
Well, I found my calling (not that I was any good at it, at least for a while). But the RX-3 actually rewarded overdriving a bit. It was simply a matter of keeping the revs up, and you could throttle steer the thing, if you threw the car headlong into the corners. Woo-hoo, lots of dramatic tire squealing and sliding around. After a while, I actually got rather good at it, and brought my times down into a competitive range. That meant it was time to clean up the car and paint it a racy red.
Race car red, with yet another slightly Mustangish look to it.
A year and a half of running every autocross event I could find in Southern California, and I was ready to take an SCCA driver’s school. This was in late 1981. I upgraded the RX-3 with suspension parts, safety equipment, and so on. I would drive the car to and from the SCCA events. This created its own dilemma. Running auto crosses with your daily driver is one thing. Graduating to real race tracks, against other cars, was something else entirely. The way to go about this would need to be thought through…which is another story for another day.
In the meantime, to carry forward the RX-3 street car story, I did drive my race cars on the street, and raced my daily drivers. I brought home a series of “found” and “given” cars for spare parts. Met the person who would later be my wife, and she needed a car. One of the derelict RX-3s was actually a nice ‘73 in perfect complete condition, minus a blown engine, so a spare engine from my stash completed the car, and it became her daily driver, and later, her father’s daily driver. It was cherry and perfect, in a sort of pumpkin orange color. I finally sold it in 1992, for $100. That’s what you did with the things, pre-internet. Nobody wanted them. As rare and valuable as these cars are now, it would probably be a $30k car today. Oh, well. Last I had heard at the time, the buyer wrecked it soon after buying it…
About the time I sold the orange RX-3, and I was truly out of the RX-3 business, I stumbled upon a ‘77 RX-3SP. Like a stray puppy, I needed to bring it home. It had been basically stripped out to a bare shell by the previous owner, to make an SCCA racer out of it, and the project was then abandoned. It was fate that this was to happen. For years, I had been shopping for a ‘77 as a side project. The ‘77s were the IMSA RS racers, Jim Downing and Roger Mandeville and all that (I had pit crewed for some of the racers competing against them in the West Coast IMSA races in the early ‘80s, so the RX-3SPs were dear to my heart). Even though they were mechanically almost identical to all the other RX-3s, they had a special racing cachet.
I had found two of them, side by side, in a local junkyard, and I had tried to buy one of them. You can’t do that in California, as the titles are cancelled when they go in the lot. So, I did the next best thing, as ticked off as I was about it. I stripped them both to the bone, for all their unique ‘77 parts, interior, trim, badges, taillight assemblies, wiring, manifolds, the fiberglass exterior add-ons, the window louvers, all of it. Filled boxes and boxes with parts. Spent quite a bit of money, as the lot itemized everything out and added it up, with a bit of a volume discount applied at the end—thanks guys. So, when I found the shell of the car, it was kismet. I had everything for it, plus one set of spares. (Daniel Stern would be proud). Those expensive boxes of weird parts came home to a car. All was right with the world.
These cars are weird, and I don’t really like how they look. But they are special. The quarter panel badge is wrong, it goes on the right side only, but no one knows that kind of stuff any more. The repro spoiler stripes are not quite right either…. This car sold for $55k Australian in 2020…they aren’t cheap throw-away cars any more, because they all got thrown away.
I threw in a ‘74 big port 13-B engine (rotary code-speak, bigger engine, max stock horsepower of all the ‘70s iterations of rotary), and the thing scooted. I drove it to work as a daily for a while in the mid ‘90s. I kept it Q-ship, without the add-on bells and whistles (though I have two sets of them, mind you). I just happen to know that it was the equal of a SHO Taurus from 20 to 80 or so. I don’t race on the street, no siree, but one has to get up to speed on those freeway entrances, right?
So the ‘77 is my COAL entry for the RX-3, my second big-time COAL after the Mustang. I still have the ‘77, too. It needs a lot of work. I will probably ultimately go for a half-and-half of the add-ons. The rear window louvers but not the sides. The fiberglass spoiler and air dam, but not the stripes (repro stripe kits are out there). Impulse Blue. Oh, and the kicker, these cars, and only these among the early RX’s, as far as I know, got plaid seat inserts. The late ‘70s plaid and houndstooth seat inserts are just about the coolest Malaise Era things going, in my mind. Can’t tell you why, but I just love them.
Needs lots of work, but it is all there, with tons of spares, which is the hardest part of dealing with these cars. Many ‘77-‘78 parts are unique to those two years.
About 3,000 of the ‘77 and ‘78 RX-3SPs were built. A bit over half of them, about 1,800, got the stripes and spoilers kit. The kits were fitted, after the cars were offloaded in Long Beach, at the local facilities of Chastain, the outfit that did most of the rear window louvers of the era. Out of about 250,000 RX3s worldwide, including four-door sedans and wagons, the SPs are quite unusual. But none of the RX-3s are seen much any more. There are, however, rabid RX-3 followings in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and in Puerto Rico, of all places.
Plaid seat inserts for the win! The shift knob is the wrong year on this one. No one knows what is right or wrong on these cars any more…
Next up are my early RX-3 SCCA experiences. Can you really regularly track race your daily driver and make it work? Well, uh, maybe, if you try hard enough…
Thanks for the memories! In 1980, my final year racing my SCCA Showroom Stock Ford Fiesta, I was gridded ahead of a rookie driver in an RX3 SP. MyFiesta was in the SSC class, the Mazda in SSB but we all raced together on track, including the RX7’s and 280ZX’s in SSA, though technically we were only competing against the other cars in our class for points.
Anyway, as expected, the Mazda sailed past me as we got the green flag in this race at Sears Point (Sonoma Raceway) and led me up the hill through turn 2, approaching the right hand turn 3. My 66HP Fiesta lost a lot of speed on the grade, and my standard turn 3 technique was a quick downshift to 3rd but no brakes and take turn 3 at full throttle, then lifting again for turn 4. But the RX3 driver braked – hard – and we made pretty good contact. As I recall I got past him and finished ahead in the overall standings, but I was reprimanded by the Stewards for unsafe driving. My arguments that I should be blameless for hitting a faster car from behind going uphill on a straight section of track, fell on deaf ears. So I held a grudge against RX3 SP’s for a while. I think after 42 years I can now appreciate them as a great example of a certain era, along with the Plymouth Fire Arrow. But I can still see those brake lights flash on, then BAAAMM! and thinking WTF??!! By the way, the Fiesta’s aluminum energy absorbing bumper took the impact better than the Mazda’s rear end. I did apologize to the other driver afterwards.
The RX-3 was not a good race car, especially in showroom stock form (but it obviously got the job done anyway, in capable hands). The McPherson strut norms of the day, along with packaging constraints, made for relatively “straight up” struts without much camber or caster engineered into the suspension. Combined with a heavy weight bias to the front of the car, a relatively narrow car with skinny stock tires, and undersized brakes for racing, the car didn’t corner well, or brake well for long. Add to that a driving rookie who likely didn’t know well how to carry speed through a corner, and, well, there you go.
From my racing experience, the overtaking car is always considered at fault, unless it can be proven that the car being passed simply ran the overtaking car off the road once the cars were side-by-side. Not always a true or fair assumption, but there it is.
People underestimated the value of those big bumpers in racing situations, and also the value of the telescopic shock absorbers used as bumper brackets, to break the “shock” of a medium-sized impact at speed.
You’re right -these are very rare today; I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one.
These were very common back in the day, although their piston-engined equivalent, the 808, was probably more common.
I was at the drag races in Gimli, ’82 or ’83, and an RX-3 moved up to the starting position for a solo run. The announcer said “We got a rotary engine here – when he winds that thing up, it’s gonna sound like a bumblebee in a tin can!”
Sure enough, it did.
I’d heard somewhere that the rotary engines lasted a lot longer if one added a bit of 2-cycle oil to the gas tank.
Agreed on the RX-2 (and its piston-engined sibs, the 616 and 618) – gorgeous cars!
It would’ve been wild to be at Gimli the day someone brought the 767!
Dutch, awesome stuff! Really cool you were saving the Japanese cars back when everyone thought of them as being totally disposable.
Adding oil to the fuel certainly wouldn’t hurt. If you uninstall the oil metering pump, oil in the fuel as a pre-mix becomes a necessity. The engine doesn’t draw oil from the sump any more, but you still would need to add oil to the fuel every fill-up. One way or another, just keep adding oil to the thing, to stay out of trouble.
Yes those have a huge following in NZ but the actual cars are quite rare now most got hotted up and crashed beyond repair years ago.
I’ve really been enjoying your series; very well done.
I can totally relate to your obsession with rotaries, even though I was never thus afflicted. There’s something very compelling. I only drove a good friend’s gen1 RX-7 a few times, and found it very seductive, although not so much so in the bowels of LA traffic. It needed the open road to properly sing its song.
I’d totally forgotten about the SP version of the RX3. Thanks for the re-education.
It would be fun to do a survey of all the ‘70s cars that got the factory sponsored “tape stripes and add-on fiberglass and plastic bits, but no mechanical improvements” treatments. It appears that there were quite a few, across most manufacturers, and most of them were not common.
The only reason the RX3-SP treatment has any legitimacy at all, is that the underlying car had a bit-more-than-decent engine in it already.
These are cars that you either get them or you don’t. I never did, but this has been an enjoyable read to help me understand that small group of you who loved them.
How cool that you still have that 77. That will eventually be a great project. And then when the last rotary engine in your possession wears out, you can electrify it without guilt. 🙂
I have a couple “something elses” all queued up for EV retrofitting. Stay tuned.
“Getting” rotaries has helped me understand how people “get” VW Beetles, Corvairs, or Fiats, even though I don’t “get” any of them. It’s a “to each his own” thing.
Great story! I have owned over 20 RX2-RX3-RX4-RX7 (first gen) including the RX3sp. I also started racing autocross with them at first with an RX2 before switching to the RX3. That all changed in 1979 when I took a ride with Rod Millen in his SCCA RX7 Rally Car. 3 weeks later I had stripped my RX3sp, caged it added seats, lights, Tokico susp, etc. and began a life long addiction to rally racing. Over the last 43 years I have driven (including 3 World Rally Championship events), co-driven, organized and volunteered. I am still active as an organizer, volunteer and co-driver. My obsession with little rotary cars changed my life forever…
My count (2,3,4, first gen 7) is a bit over 15 (parts cars underfoot don’t really count). Getting the count up was easy when the cars littered the landscape for cheap. Harder and much more expensive now. The confluence of the racing bug and the rotary bug was a powerful thing, as each could serve as a gateway to the other.
A ride from Rod Millen makes you some sort of anointed person. I have never gotten a ride-along with a “name” driver. I bet he hammered it and it was a thrill.
Or I might grimmace in sympathy…
…and grin.
Daniel, I get the sense that you like to save odd parts, so that they will continue to exist and not just get scrapped, and it makes you happy to see the rescued parts go to good use. I saved and reinstalled my parts all by myself, back in the day, but thought of them reading your Lancer postings. Mix, match, see what goes together and see what works.
Guilty as charged!
Nice story! I have a hand full of Rx3s still alive and brapping.
The rust beast ate a lot of these. In the early 80s in college in upstate a friend had recently scrapped an RX-3 due to terminal rust but had stories of racing Corvettes from toll booth to toll booth because malasie era Vettes were heavy and slow and rust just made an RX-3 lighter and quicker 🙂
Hi. Im the new owner of the Yellow SP pictured in this article. At the moment its away getting the engine reconditioned with a secondary bridgeport with fuel injection. I have the round tail lights in it at the moment as the original SP ones looked a little wierd to me but perhaps I should change it back to the way its suppose to be.