It was Terry Hoard's skill, much more than his RX3, which eventually led to the removal of rotaries from conventional NHRA Drag Racing. Hoard competed in (the original) Modified Eliminator which used indices created by NHRA Tech Officials for handicapping purposes with no breakout enforced. Under normal circumstances, NHRA Tech tried to keep the quickest runs in any given class around one second quicker than the class Index.

Hoard's RX3 originally fit into the C/Modified Compact classification but quickly proved to be much more than a second quicker than the index. The Modified Compact classes included a variety of foreign four-cylinder powerplants. However, NHRA knew revising the Index to fit Hoard's performance would simply obliterate every other car in the C/MC class so they simply moved the four-rotor RX3 combination into B/MC, one class higher.

Hoard destroyed the Index in that class, too, so NHRA moved him to A/MC. He bombed the competition again. By this time, (early 1980), NHRA was finally admitting they had no clue how to accurately classify the Wankel against standard piston-engine combinations other than to throw a ton...okay, maybe a half ton...of weight into the car to slow it down and equalize it with the four-bangers.

Eventually, they put Hoard in the AA/MC class in which he was forced to run against turbocharged four-cylinders, (Buddy Ingersoll's turbo Pinto was the killer at the time), but Hoard had to run without a blower. He still romped.

When NHRA killed Modified Eliminator at the end of 1981, they disseminated all Modified classes into either Competition Eliminator or Super Stock Eliminator. However, the NHRA was so tired of chasing Hoard's Mazda they simply wrote the combination out of the rulebook. To this day, nobody has developed an equitable method of comparing the power potential of Wankels versus piston engines in conventional NHRA racing.

And that, children, is how the Grinch stole Triangles.

This shot is of Jim Mederer from Oregon winning Modified Eliminator at the 1978 NHRA Winternationals. One year later, Terry Hoard and his Samurai Warrior '77 four-rotor began a string of wins which made sure rotaries were banned from NHRA Drag Racing forever.