What is it?
It looks like something Sonny Crockett might have turned down for being a bit too much of the old 1980s excess, but this Mazda RX-7 - despite being a second-generation 'FC', a model line which was gestated, born and spent the largest portion of its life in the decade that gave us 66 per cent of the Back To The Future film franchise - actually hails from the exact year that a very famous car won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. A very famous rotary car. A very famous green-and-orange car with 'Renown' decals slathered all over it. All right, we'll stop being coy: we're talking about the magnificent, the stupendous, the downright flippin' fantastic 787B quad-rotor Group C racer, a car which was the first Japanese machine to win overall at the Circuit de la Sarthe when it took the flag in 1991, and a high-revving motorsport legend which remains (to date) the only vehicle that didn't use a reciprocating 'piston' engine to win the gruelling endurance showpiece.
Which means there's something of a 'race it on Sunday, sell it on a Monday' vibe about this '91 FC RX-7 Convertible Turbo II, which uses a twin-rotor Wankel engine enforced by a pair of sequential turbochargers. But it's not the 13B-REW that powered the later FD RX-7 to devastating effect; rather, it's a 13B-DEI. Which means 200hp and 265Nm from its tiny 1.3-litres of capacity, instead of the later outputs of 237hp and 294Nm. Oddly enough, though, because this open-topped FC weighs nearly 150kg less than the FD coupe, Mazda claims a marginally quicker 0-62mph time for 'The Don Johnson Express' at five seconds dead and also a top speed which is 2mph greater than that of the majestic Mk3.
It's also, as the FC, the only RX-7 which had two body styles instead of one, but this second-gen rotary sports car perhaps suffers from Middle-Child Syndrome, in retrospect. It's not as pure and as lightweight as its FB (or SA22C, if you prefer) predecessor, which arrived in 1978, nor is it as desirable nor dedicated as its FD successor. So what gives in 2020, nearly 30 years after this Turbo II was on sale in the UK for a then-equivalent price of about (deep intake of breath, folks) £55,000?
Why are you driving it?
It was another of the hallowed cars at Mazda's reorganised centenary celebrations held in Augsburg, Germany, the European site of the largest collection of Mazdas in... in... well, in the world, apparently. The Frey Museum is a fabulous place and you really must go there some time, when restrictions obviously permit. Although we can't guarantee that there will be a white soft-top RX-7 Turbo II available for you to drive, as you rock up wearing a Hugo Boss suit over the top of a pastel-coloured T-shirt while sporting some socking great mirrored sunglasses on your Chevy. All possibly overlaid with some music from Jan Hammer playing loudly in the background... no? Is this just our fantasy, then? Oh. Sorry.
Is it any good these days?
It most certainly is, but before we get onto the dynamics, a word on the styling and the interior. On the former note, the brilliantly wedge-shaped FC has pop-up headlights, so that's the end of that discussion: as it quite plainly looks superb. As to the cabin, it is a 1980s riot of wonderfully, wilfully wacky detailing, such as carbuncular switchgear dotted around the sides of the instrument binnacle and orange-faced dials in the cluster and that weird pistol-grip-shaped gearlever and great vertical cliff faces of black-plastic dashboard. Just sitting in the RX-7 Convertible is a special event as a result, the ambience only enhanced by the fact your bonce is exposed to the elements in the open cabin. This definitely feels very Miami, no doubt about it, especially on a warm, sunny day.
On the move, though, and the RX-7 soft-top is surprisingly delightful. It's quite softly sprung, as so many 1980s/'90s performance cars tend to be, yet the overriding sensation is not one of tremendous comfort but of quite bonkers speed. Whether it's the fact the 13B rotary engine is less acoustically isolated here than it would be in a coupe RX-7, or whether it's those on-paper performance metrics which are playing on your mind, but the 200hp FC Mazda feels more potent, more insistent and more demented than a 237hp 1994 FD RX-7 we drove earlier on exactly the same day. There's a hard-edged, yowling whirr to the Turbo II's engine as it clambers into its top-end rev-range that's utterly intoxicating, and with a slick throw on the gearbox it's no difficulty to enact rapid-fire changes up and down the transmission to get the absolute best of that majestic rotary powerplant. It also doesn't feel a massively laggy car, either, by the forced-induction standards of its contemporary age.
Another marvel is the way it feels solid and of a piece. You might imagine that a 30-year-old convertible from a company that, at this point, had only been making the MX-5 for two short years would be operating at a driving-career-defining level of abysmal scuttle shake and woeful chassis flex. But the RX-7 feels nothing of the sort. Sure, it's not as rigid and firm as some of the very latest soft- and open-top cars of the most recent years of automotive history, but neither is it some hideous blancmange in the structural department, so you can actually lean on beautifully weighted and positive steering in the corners and get the Mazda turned in sweetly if you so wish. Or, to put it another way: for the highly enjoyable test drive we had in this Convertible Turbo II, at no single microcosmic point in time did we wish we were in an FC Coupe instead. It was a genuine delight to be in from start to finish, even if we were missing a bit of Crockett's Theme blasting away on the stereo as we flew through the German countryside.
Is it a genuine classic, or just some mildly interesting old biffer?
We could easily shunt this thing into 'mildly interesting old biffer'. As we've already said, the FC is between a rock and a hard place in the RX-7 lineage, as it is neither as desirable as the car which came before it nor the one which superseded it. Back in 1991, it was a ridiculously expensive oddity on the UK motoring scene and it would appear the market doesn't view it as anything special now, as we saw a couple of FC RX-7s for less than five grand and even one tidy-looking Convertible Turbo II of similar vintage to this one up for about £7,000 when we were researching this piece.
However. To (bizarrely) paraphrase Miss Tibbs from Fawlty Towers, 'an RX-7 is an RX-7, Mrs Fawlty'. This is still one of Mazda's legendary rotary-powered sports cars, when all's said and done, and surviving, clean examples of the RX-7 are rapidly assuming cast-iron 'classic' status in all their varied formats. Not only that, but this is a twin-turbo RX-7 too, and one in which you can enjoy the elements all year round while listening to that out-of-this-world twin-rotor unit working its magic... er, possible rotor-tip issues put conveniently to one side, of course. So we're going to say it's a classic - an affordable classic, maybe, but a classic nonetheless. Now fire up a bit of Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder (yes, he of Cizeta V16T fame), we're off for another drive into the rose-tinted past, thank you. Book 'em, Danno! [That's the wrong TV cop show, you buffoon - Ed.]
The numbers
Model tested: 1991 Mazda RX-7 Convertible Turbo II (FC)
Price: when new in 1991, £25,542 (circa £55,250, inflation-adjusted for 2019); used examples of FC RX-7 anything from £5,000-£15,000 today
Build period: 1985-1992
Build numbers: 272,027 (all FCs)
Engine: 1.3-litre twin-turbocharged twin-chamber rotary petrol
Transmission: rear-wheel drive, five-speed manual
Body style: two-door convertible
Combined economy: c.23.3mpg
Top speed: 158mph
0-62mph: 5.0 seconds
Power: 200hp at 6,500rpm
Torque: 265Nm at 3,500rpm
Weight: 1,163kg
* With thanks to Keith WR Jones for assistance with the figures in the tech spec.
