Watch this Mazda 1300 rotary's flywheel grenade through its bonnet

Photo of Iain Kelly
Iain Kelly

Contributing Journalist

1 min read

All too often we forget that there is a heavy buzz-saw sitting near our feet in our car.

Your flywheel spins at thousands of revolutions per-minute, as a large rotating mass of metal attached to the back of the engine, ready to carve through the thin sheetmetal around it if anything goes wrong, which it can given the forces of inertia at play as RPM increase.

No production cars get near the RPM of a tuned-up Mazda rotary, so the stresses on the flywheel and clutch assembly don’t get much more severe than in these little triangle motors of doom.

And, at Rotary Revival 6, held last Sunday at Sydney Motorsport Park, it all turned wrong for a car known as APE100. After bashing the rev-limiter for a few bursts, the flywheel and clutch spectacularly come apart on deceleration, to the point part of the clutch cover is sticking out the bonnet!

Iain Kelly is the rotor head behind The Creators Online.

Is this the worst flywheel explosion you've ever seen? Let us know in the comments.

Photo of Iain Kelly
Iain Kelly

Contributing Journalist

A love of classic American and European cars drove Iain Kelly to motoring journalism straight out of high school, via the ownership of a tired 1975 HJ Holden Monaro.  For nearly 20 years he has worked on magazines and websites catering to modified late model high-performance Japanese and European tuner cars, as well as traditional hot rods, muscle cars and street machines. Some of these titles include Auto Salon, LSX Tuner, MOTOR, Forged, Freestyle Rides, Roadkill, SPEED, and Street Machine. He counts his trip to the USA to help build Mighty Car Mods’ “Subarute” along with co-authoring their recent book, The Cars of Mighty Car Mods, among his career highlights.  Iain lends his expertise to CarsGuide for a variety of advice projects, along with legitimising his automotive obsession with regular OverSteer contributions. Although his practical skills working on cars is nearly all self-taught, he still loves nothing more than spending quality time in the shed working on his project car, a 1964 Pontiac. He also admits to also having an addiction to E30 BMWs and Subaru Liberty RS Turbos, both of which he has had multiple examples of. With car choices like that, at least his mum thinks he is cool.
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