The first Chevy Nova was not a sports car, although it did not take long for racing fans and General Motors alike to start equipping the workhorse Nova with all sorts of big engines and performance packages. The Nova is amazingly versatile, and we’ve seen just about every engine combination imaginable under the hood.

We say “just about,” because we never expected to find a Chevy Nova with a Mazda rotary engine in the place of an American V8. But that is what Nick Holms, of Houston, Texas, built for himself.

“Dare to be different” is a pretty common phrase, and it doesn’t get much “different” than an American muscle car powered by a Japanese rotary engine. For the uninitiated, a rotary engine is a much different design from your standard piston engine; in fact, there aren’t even any pistons to speak of.

We could spend 1,000 words going into the differences between a V8 and a rotary motor, but we’ll leave it at this; they don’t make a lot of them for a reason. Rotary motors are mostly relegated to Mazda fanboys and airplanes.

Nick’s Chevy Nova does away with the big V8 in favor of a Mazda 13B turbocharged rotary engine, an engine many would consider the pinnacle of rotary power. And though it sounds like a weedwhacker, it actually makes over 530 wheel horsepower…enough to yank that big front end in the air while making the run down the quarter-mile in 11.03 seconds @ 125 mph.

Rotary engines may not be popular, but in the right hands they are just as capable as any big American V8 of making a whole lot of horsepower. We’re sure this Nova will have its haters, but to us this is different done right. If you want more info on what kind of work went into Nick’s Nova, check out this detailed build thread over at RX7club.com.