Just curious which phase of the development process took so long...

 

Good question, but as far as I can tell the development cycle is only about 1 year over the normal. Most of that was because it was hard to make engine management work with the '8s ECU, and secondly because this is a brand new motor to the world market. The last rotary was almost a decade ago and was very different, so tuning shops couldn't exactly take an existing kit and slap it on with slight modifications.

 

the high compression engine and the reputation of the old ones caused a lot of people to be VERY conservative about developing and tuning.