Thirty-four years after it screamed across the finish line at La Sarthe and into the history books, Mazda’s 787B is crossing the Pacific for a proper American audience. The 1991 Le Mans winner — the only Japanese car to ever win the twice-around-the-clock classic, and the only rotary-powered machine to do it — will headline the 2026 Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, August 12 through 15.
This isn’t a static museum piece roped off behind velvet. Mazda is promising demonstration laps and live engine fire-ups across all four days of the event. That four-rotor 2.6-liter Wankel, the R26B, will sing its banshee aria through the Laguna Seca hills — the kind of sound that converts bystanders into believers.
The 787B will anchor a JDM Mazda Exhibit in the paddock courtyard, but Mazda isn’t content to let one car carry the whole story. Flanking it will be six decades of rotary racing hardware: the 1967 Cosmo Sport that started the whole Wankel adventure, the 1989 767B-002, the 1990 787-002, the 1991 RX-7 GTO, the 1992 RX-792p, and the 2019 RT24-P prototype. Line them up in chronological order and you’re looking at a timeline of stubborn, beautiful engineering defiance — a company that bet everything on a technology the rest of the industry abandoned.
The driver roster matches the machinery. Yojiro Terada, a Japanese endurance racing icon with deep ties to the Mazda program, will pilot the 787B during Friday and Saturday exhibition sessions. Tristan Nunez and Tom Long will campaign the 767B and 787 in Group C competition.
Tommy Kendall, an IMSA legend who won back-to-back GTU championships in 1986 and 1987 driving an RX-7, will be there with that very car.
The Monterey week doesn’t end at Laguna Seca. Both the 787 and 787B have been invited to display on the main lawn at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance on August 16, slotted into a Japanese Motorsports class. Fewer than 200 cars worldwide earn that invitation.
Mazda’s head of design, Ikuo Maeda, and North American marketing chief Brad Audet will serve as guest judges at the Concours — a signal that Mazda sees Monterey Car Week as brand theater on the grandest possible stage.
The timing is no accident. Mazda has been stoking the rotary flame again, first with the MX-30’s range-extending rotary generator and now with persistent whispers about a proper rotary sports car successor. Rolling the 787B onto American soil, letting that engine shriek for a crowd of enthusiasts and media cameras, is the kind of move a company makes when it wants the world to remember what made it different.
The 787B’s Le Mans victory in 1991 came just before the FIA effectively banned rotary engines from Group C competition by changing the equivalency formula. Mazda won, and then the door slammed shut. That bittersweet narrative — triumph followed immediately by exile — is part of what makes the car so magnetic. It exists as proof that the establishment feared the thing enough to legislate it out of existence.
Tickets for the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion are available at weathertechraceway.com. For those who can’t make the trip, the track will livestream the event on Facebook and YouTube. But a livestream can’t replicate what the 787B really delivers: that unmistakable, visceral, four-rotor howl bouncing off the California hillsides, reminding everyone within earshot that Mazda once beat the world on its own terms.
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