This is amazing. Thank you for the effort. I feel like I've learned a lot about both tradition piston and rotary engines!
Special rotary engine nerdery foonote
There is another, far older, type of "rotary engine" - used exclusively in aircraft, this was a piston engine design in which the entire engine rotated about a stationary central shaft - you attached the propellor directly to the engine.
This example is the Clerget 9B, as used in the WWI British Sopwith Camel. The 9 is for how many cylinders it has.
Because there was no way to maintain a central oil reservoir or sump with this design, each cylinder had a total-loss oil system that fed oil into the engine, through its parts, and then out into the air, hosing down the pilot in the exposed cockpit with castor oil. Castor oil, among its other properties, is a highly effective laxative. To counteract the tendency to explosively shit their pants after excursions, pilots took to drinking lots of gin before each flight.
Incredible.
This is way and completely off topic from racing cars, but I'd always thought: if you just needed a range extender, or an engine to recharge a battery, why not use a turbine? Smaller, more compact, vastly fewer moving parts.
Believe it or not, Chrysler were seriously considering mass producing turbine driven production cars in the 1960s.
In fact, they actually did build a number of them - and gave them to various families to trial for a year.
It was a selling / brag point that they'd run on all sorts of unclean fuels, like alcohol and cooking oils.
If you have a spare hour, Hagerty did a terrific documentary on them, where they interview people who were on the trial, the engineers that built them and people like Jay Leno, who owns and still drives one!