Forget the six-wheeled Ferrari Testarossa and McLaren 720S with a Mercedes CLK GTR body – the undisputed champion of this year’s SEMA custom show in Las Vegas was Rob Dahm’s Mazda MX-5, which looks like an immense engine with a Matchbox car welded to it.

Dahm, who has a habit of creating scarcely believable Mazdas, has won almost 1.3 million followers on YouTube thanks to his insane car builds, and this is arguably the wildest yet with 13 rotors, four turbochargers and weight distribution that favours the front end just a touch. 

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The rotors are divided into two lots: a dozen of them up the front, where the engine leaves the driver with just about no field of vision; and a single-rotor engine underneath the monstrous 12-rotor set-up. The latter actually drives the car, with videos proving it can get around under its own power.

That 12-rotor engine was created by Tyson Garvin for use in boats. He believes the 15.7-litre unit is capable of producing 5000bhp (3728kW) on the right fuel, and it weighs more than 410kg with the three turbos Garvin added attached.

The fourth turbo is on the one-rotor motor, which made 155kW on the dyno, just a tad off the 12-rotor unit’s dyno mark of 1130kW. To be clear, the motor with the dozen rotors doesn’t actually power the car at all – that’s the sole job of the one-rotor unit – so it’s basically like the world’s most eye-catching hood ornament. 

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As you can imagine, the resulting weight distribution is insane. Clips on Dahm’s social media show him easily lifting the rear end by himself. Judging by its looks, a sparrow landing on the boot could make it do a wheelie in traffic. It’s so unbalanced that Dahm and his team had a nervous moment as it slid down the ramp when they tried to load it into a trailer.

Even the gearheads at SEMA, which is famous in car circles for featuring some of the craziest builds on the planet, were shocked by the 13-rotor, first-generation MX-5. Haltech actually asked Dahm if he could park the Mazda on its stand with just its one-rotor motor, so it’s safe to say everyone got a little more car than they bargained for.