l know one rare rotary Mazda is cool, but having two of them together is like finding a Tassie Tiger in the wild and then discovering that what you’ve stumbled over is actually an albino Tassie Tiger.
But get this: The two little darlings on these pages are actually owned by the one guy. George Karabinas is the lucky bloke in question, and rotary-engined Mazdas have kind of been his thing for a long, long time.
“I started out with R100s and RX2s and 3s,” he tells us. “See, growing up, I wasn’t one of those guys who followed the crowd.
“Rotaries had always fascinated me; the history of Wankel and then Mazda making it work … it all fascinated me. I suppose I was hooked on the tech and the backstory. Anyway, because I didn’t have a big budget, I figured a Mazda rotary could give me what I wanted and be different.”
Seems fair enough to us. Then again, a Cosmo is hardly a small budget car, but about a decade ago George’s buying and selling of early rotaries finally set him up to go Cosmo hunting.
“It’s kind of a funny story,” he begins. Where have we heard that before?
“For many years, I lusted after a Cosmo. And after a few years of other rotaries, I decided it was time to get serious. I searched Japan, South Africa, New Zealand, and I just couldn’t find one. Not for sale, anyway. I sure as hell couldn’t find one in Australia, either. Then, somebody told me that there was a guy in Melbourne that had one, but they had no number for the bloke, just an email address.”
So, George emailed the supposed bloke with the supposed Cosmo and made his intentions pretty clear: “I wanna buy your car.
“He emailed me back and said, it’s not for sale. So I emailed back and said: ‘I’m afraid it is.”’
Having established that he was a serious buyer, George had finally broken the ice and within a short space of time, the two had met, had a chat and the deal was done.
“But that’s the funny part,” says George. “Here I was looking all over the world for my dream car, and it turns out one had been sitting in a shed a couple of suburbs away.”
These days, the Cosmo has 60,000-odd kliks on the odometer, but George has no idea whether it’s still on its first or second trip around the clock. Doesn’t matter, either, because the car is in terrific nick and although it shows the odd sign of being used, it’s still an amazing time capsule.
And as a Series 2 example, George’s car has the five-speed gearbox, IRS, and 15-inch wheels, so it’s certainly the best driving variant. Speaking of which …
“Do I use it much? Not really. Only on nice days. But I absolutely love the thing and every time I get in it, I smile, and that’s all that matters.”
It’d make us smile, too, because the Mazda Cosmo is a seriously cool, seriously out-there piece of kit. Of course, you probably know that the Cosmo was the first Mazda production car to use the Wankel rotary (in this case, a 10A version of the little chook-cooker) but less well recognised is that, unlike subsequent Mazda rotors, the Cosmo was not a rotary-engined version of a piston-engined Mazda.
Nope, the Cosmo was a rotary-only platform and it wouldn’t be until the original RX-7 of the late 1970s that that process would be repeated.
Like a lot of Japanese cars in the 1960s, the Cosmo looked a fair bit more cutting edge (engine aside) than it really was. As in, it might have looked like a spaceship, but it still used a four-speed gearbox and leaf springs and drum brakes on the rear end.
Better was to come with the Series 2 that George’s car represents, with that five-speed box, IRS and 15-inch wheels we were talking about, not to mention an extra 150mm in the wheelbase.
Performance got a shot in the arm at this point, too, and while the original Cosmo was good for a -sub 17-second quarter mile and a top whack of about 180, the later version would cover the first 400m in just under 16 seconds and would run out to about 190km/h which, back in the 1960s, was brutal. And alright today, to be honest.
We’ve already heard how George reckons the Chase for the Cosmo was when he got serious about rare rotary-engined Mazdas, but we reckon he was already there. Because back in 2012, a couple of years before the Cosmo arrived in his shed, the other car here, was already enjoying George’s TLC.
And if the Cosmo’s status as a rotary-only piece of design makes it special (and it does) then the other Mazda is the philosophical opposite. As in: Take a ho-hum piston-engined Mazda grocery-getter, plumb a rotary into it, plonk on an RX badge and count the money. Well, it would be, but again, George has come up with the albino thylacine.
Even though it’s somewhat visually familiar to Aussie eyes, the reality is that the Savanna GT you see here is far rarer than the car it so closely resembles; the RX-3. Oh sure, it’s based on the same bodyshell and platform as the RX-3, but the Savanna GT was actually a Japanese-only model and stands as the absolute pinnacle of the RX-3 family.
Okay, so the JDM thing has often thrown up lip-smacking models that went above and beyond compared with the cannon-fodder versions we got here, but even by those standards the Savanna is capital-S special. Er, Special.
That all starts with the rotary in question and, unlike the 10A some RX-3s were fitted with, the GT got a 12A. Sure, it was still carburetted, but it was now the twin-dizzy version and was good for 92kW, pushing the little car well beyond 180km/h. But there was a lot more in the transformation from Savanna (the Japanese name for the standard RX-3) to Savanna GT.
That started with lower suspension and wider steel wheels measuring 5.5 inches across. The tail-lights were specific to the GT (so the neighbours wouldn’t miss it) and inside, there were vastly superior front chairs and a round-dial gauge set-up in the centre console, angled towards the driver. The five-speed transmission was icing on what was by now a potent little cake.
George reckons he was late catching on to the Savanna GT, but when he did, he knew he had to have one. And what an example he found …
“Once I started looking for a GT, one popped up in Sydney. I was hounding the guy for months, but he never returned calls. Apparently, he was sick to death of time wasters and tyre kickers, but one day he was silly enough to pick up the phone when I rang. The conversation was along the lines of: ‘I wanna buy it. What do I need to do?’”
You can guess the rest.
The GT was originally imported to Australia by the guy George bought it from, making George the car’s second Aussie custodian. And to suggest both previous owners plus any Japanese owners had been careful with the car is an understatement.
“It’s had a paint job many years ago, but everything else is factory original. Even the exhaust. When you see it on a hoist, it’s like a time warp. Everything is untouched. Not a single nut and bolt has been changed. It’s also showing just 60,000km, so it’s what I’d call almost showroom condition.”