You’re looking at a Mazzei Formula Five—or, rather, the Mazzei Formula Five. It’s a one-off supercar built by David Mazzei, combining a Superlite SL-C kit car body with a homemade five-rotor engine. Strapped to the engine is a 106-millimeter Garret G57-3000 turbocharger, and as you’d expect, it makes some crazy noises. Turns out, it also makes 1,120 wheel horsepower on the dyno. Wow.
This car has been a long time coming for Mazzei. He posted back in 2021 that he planned to develop a five-rotor engine for the project, and clearly, he made good on that promise. His past car-building experience involved stuffing a four-rotor in an FD RX-7, so he was better equipped than most to assemble a beast like the Formula Five.
In addition to running a 106mm turbo, the peripheral-port five-rotor has billet housings and a six-stage dry sump oiling system. The exhaust is inconel-insulated, and believe it or not, it runs Vibrant titanium race mufflers. I can’t imagine it being any louder.
All that power from the boosted 3.3-liter is sent to the rear wheels through a pneumatic Holinger MXT sequential transaxle. You’ll notice that for sure as you hear it flat-shift on the dyno. A Tilton twin-plate clutch is used for the custom application, and if you ask me, it’s mighty tough considering the Formula Five makes 806 lb-ft of torque—an impressive number, rotary or not.
Now, what’s even crazier to me is that the dyno run resulted in 1,120 hp at the wheels on just 12.5 psi of boost. That gigantic turbo is clearly capable of more, and Mazzei himself admits that they could up the boost and hit 1,500 or 1,600 hp. He explains that, in this early stage of dyno tuning, they’re trying to solve a problem with volumetric efficiency. This could be due to the peripheral porting, as there’s more overlap where the intake and exhaust ports are open at the same time, resulting in a vacuum. The turbo is likely reingesting inert gas as a result, which means lower oxygen density.
Even with that inefficiency, the Formula Five makes one flywheel horsepower per pound, which is mental. Give it a listen:
It’s far beyond anything I would ever try to build, though that isn’t saying much since I’m frequently stumped by my 1966 Ford dump truck. Guess I’ll leave the supercar stuff to Mazzei.
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From running point on new car launch coverage to editing long-form features and reviews, Caleb does some of everything at The Drive. And he really, really loves trucks.
