Lie back on your sofa, put up your feet, close your eyes, and imagine this scenario. You’re a bloke who’s pretty well indelibly linked to racing rotary-powered weapons around various strips of tarmac across New Zealand, and occasionally abroad.
Your chosen steed? A highly developed, superbly balanced, and above all, wicked fast FD RX-7, dripping in carbon, aero, with flames belching from its backside at every lift of the loud pedal. And that 20B up the front is loud, all right. This is peak rotary racing, surely?
Eventually though, those svelte lines start to show their age. Season upon season of serious competition takes its toll on a racecar. An antidote is required, to recharge, and reinvigorate the racing mind.
You’re prescribed a small-wheeled, grip-limited small capacity rotary, dripping in a lairy paint job you might’ve seen rifling through your grandad’s slides, shot sometime in the late 1970s.
It’s everything your FD isn’t, it seems like a backwards step. But au contraire, this is what absolute coolness feels, smells, and looks like.
For much-loved Kiwi rotary nutcase Andy Duffin, this is now his retro reality.
If the name’s not totally familiar, perhaps the words ‘3 Rotor Racing’ might jog your memory a touch. It’s Andy’s alter ego, a brand structured around campaigning one of the quickest circuit rotaries in the country — his iconic, carbon-clad FD3S RX-7. In various guises, the RX-7 took Andy to SS2000 championships, endurance racing podiums, and has even graced Aussie tarmac three times at World Time Attack Challenge.
“We had a lot
