Last month's "How It Works" story gave you the basics of the four-stroke cycle, describing the motion of the intake and exhaust valves in relation to the piston moving up and down in the cylinder.

The language of import performance can be strange. Sometimes it's a verbal stew of numbers and letters--RX-8, NSX, and MR2, for example--that seem randomly tossed together. At other times it adopts ...

In the first two installments of this series on engine fundamentals, we've covered the subject from its absolute beginning. An internal combustion engine is a machine that converts the energy of a ...