This Triple-Rotor Mazda RX-8 ‘Bakkie’ Is Our Kind Of Pickup

It’s been nearly a whole week since we last checked in on South Africa’s slightly unhinged scene for modified pickup trucks – bakkies, in the local parlance – so let’s head back and see what else is going on. Ah yes, that’ll do it: a Mazda RX-8 that’s been turned into a pickup truck and had its engine replaced with a 20B three-rotor engine.

This is the work of Eugene Lawrence, who looked at Mazda’s curious suicide-doored rotary coupe and thought it was the perfect candidate for transformation into a bakkie. As he explains, this wasn’t as easy a process as he first thought – the rear doors and bootlid on the RX-8 are made from aluminium, while the rest of the body is steel, so he couldn’t just hack away and join it all up. Instead, he had to fabricate a fibreglass panel running from where the back doors used to be right up to the rear.

The fact that it’s an RX-8 pickup isn’t even the wildest thing about this build, though. That’s under the bonnet, where you’ll find a 20B motor. The 20B – a 2.0-litre, three-rotor Wankel – is the only engine of its kind ever produced for road use. It was only used as standard in the early ’90s Eunos Cosmo coupe, but it’s found its way into plenty of big power rotary builds since, and this RX-8 is no exception.

Thanks to some rebuilt internals and a rather sizeable turbocharger, Eugene explains that the engine’s currently pushing around 536bhp. That seems like plenty to us, but apparently, that’s set to “mild”, limited to protect the stock manual gearbox the car is currently running.

Mazda RX-8 Bakkie – engine bay

Eugene is planning on swapping that out for a stronger dual-clutch gearbox, at which point he reckons the engine will churn out between 1073 and 1206bhp. Gulp. Now, high-powered rotaries aren’t exactly known for their durability, which is why Eugene is also using around 20 different inputs to constantly monitor the engine, so it can immediately go into limp home mode if something goes pop.

We’re not sure what’s more impressive – the engine, or the fact that this is a homebrew RX-8 pickup truck. Either way, we can’t wait to see what South Africa comes up with next. A Ford Ranger with a NASCAR V8? A Proton Jumbuck with a Merlin engine? We wouldn’t put it past this bakkie-loving nation.