ONE of the wildest machines at the WA Hot Rod & Street Machine Spectacular was the FD RX-7 of Aaron Middleton. This car always had a crowd around it, and grew even bigger whenever it was fired up.

You might wonder why people would flock to listen to a rotary, but this is no ordinary Wankel. It’s a quad-rotor 26B, an engine that Mazda only raced at Le Mans and a handful of other race tracks, and sounds more like a high-revving piston donk than a regular chook-cooker.

The car itself has a fair bit of history, having previously been raced twice by Ric Shaw at the Nürburgring as a production car. In more recent times it competed in the World Time Attack in the Open class, but since being purchased by Aaron the car has undergone a major transformation at the hands of Hugh O’Brien and his team at MotorElite to set it up for the Pro Class in Time Attack. They have built the RX-7 to the absolute limits of the rules, so there’s not much left of it admittedly, but what they’ve replaced it with is totally radical.

The body is made entirely of carbonfibre and weighs just 23kg, and with around 650hp available from the naturally aspirated motor – plus a hefty nitrous installation – the car should be close to making one horsepower per kilogram! There’s also a whole bunch of tricky MoTeC gear onboard to fine-tune the nitrous and handling characteristics of the car, so this should be a real contender once it hits the track.

Check out the video for our chat with Aaron and to get a closer look at the car.