At 51 years old, Nick Thomas is not the man you’d expect to see behind the wheel of the three rotary beasts you see here. Throw in his proper British accent and high-power executive demeanor, and any cop pulling this car over is in for a bit of a surprise when the tinted windows roll down. But there’s a reason for this. Thomas is the modern-day Sisyphus, smitten by the rotary gods and damned to collect and restore rotaries for all eternity.
This automotive version of a Greek tragedy started more than 30 years ago, when Mazda and the Wankel rotary engine they’ve adopted were still an automotive oddity like today’s fuel cell power vehicles. Back in 1975, Thomas, at the time an apprentice engineer, purchased his first car. At the age of 18, he was much like us, desperate for motoring freedom and dreaming of a fast car, but he was completely poor. So like any good gearhead lad, he decided on a used ’72 Mazda RX-3, which in those days already had a reputation as a sports coupe and was one of the first mass-production sports cars to use the rotary engine. For a modest 650 quid (approximately $1,000), Thomas now had a set of wheels.
There was one minor problem, though. Even with just three years of life, this RX-3’s early generation rotary engine was already blown. Despite his best efforts, Thomas just wasn’t able to drum up the funding to rebuild or replace the exotic Japanese engine. His tragic downfall came when he opted to install a 1600cc, four-cylinder, pushrod, Ford cross-flow engine out of an early ford Cortina into his Mazda. It wasn’t what he wanted, but it was better than having a hunk of steel on four wheels for driveway decoration. Had he known then the price of this folly, Thomas might not have gone forward with this act of sacrilege.
But the rotary gods stayed their hand and bided their time to properly punish Thomas. For 30 years, he thought his act had gone unnoticed by the fates. And in those three decades, he went about building a multi-national aerospace service empire. It was in 2005, shortly after Thomas finally immigrated to the U.S. to run the American branch of his empire, that rotary karma came knocking.
America’s vast network of open roads, storage space, rust-free cars and gasoline heritage reignited Thomas’ passion for the rotary, and it was then that the rotary gods finally demanded punishment. Whether an act in search of redemption or a punishment from above, Thomas began his mad cycle of collection and restoration of everything that is rotary.
Today his collection consists of 16 Mazdas, all powered by the Wankel rotary. From several RX-3s, the car that started this madness; to the coveted third-generation RX-7 FD; to a super-rare three-rotor, twin-turbo JDM Mazda Cosmo; Thomas continues to acquire these cars from all over the world and stuff as many rotors as will fit underneath the hood.
Thomas brought out three of his current cars to meet us. Not trying to seem vintage, he left his RX-3s and -4s at home and brought out two FDs and an FC to appeal to our younger tastes. But these aren’t just cars sporting fancy paint and body work. As a sign of his devotion to Felix Wankel’s rotary invention, Thomas has thrown out the original two-rotor 13B turbo engines in the white FC and black FD in favor of the twin sequential turbocharged, three-rotor 20B engines as the foundation of his modifications.