This year's "Hoods Up" fest at the Revs Institute* in Naples, Florida launched on June 10th and will conclude on July 19th. It's also called a "Hoods Off" event, because for many of the race cars on display, you remove the hood altogether to see the engine. We're beginning our tour with this Gurney Eagle Formula One car from 1967. In that year, driver Dan Gurney's Belgian GP victory with his Eagle was the first win for an American constructor in Formula 1, and only the 2nd GP win by an American driving an American car. Jimmy Murphy won the 1921 French GP with a Duesenberg, but it wasn't called Formula 1 back then. And Gurney was the first American to win with a car from his own firm, in this case All American Racers. While the Eagle Indy racers for 1967 used a 4-cam, 4.2 liter Ford V8, the Eagle GP car ran with a 3 liter, 60-degree V12 with 4 valves per cylinder designed by Aubrey Woods and Harry Weslake at Weslake Engineering in England. It produced 410 to 420 hp at a lofty 10,000 rpm, enough to turn the 1,192 pound Eagle into a road rocket. Prior to that victory at Spa in Belgium, Gurney had lightened the F1 Eagle (which shared its chassis with the beefy Indy Eagles) by employing more magnesium and titanium in this version.
The Weslake engine's valve layout would prove to be predictive of the next trend in GP engines. When the Cosworth Ford DFV debuted with Jim Clark's Lotus victory in the 3rd race of 1967 at the Dutch GP, it combined 4 valves per cylinder with a lighter weight than the Weslake. It would soon become the dominant engine in the 3.0 liter phase of Formula One.
Six years before Gurney's Eagle F1 effort, another American, Woolworth heir Lance Reventlow* had built a trio of GP Scarabs with bespoke 2.5 liter desmodromic-valve fours in what looked like an attempt to prove Briggs Cunningham's dictum that you can make a small fortune building racing cars, but only if you start with a large one. By the time development delays allowed the Scarab onto F1 tracks in 1960, the car's front-engined layout and mechanical hiccups had doomed the effort, and in 1961 Formula One changed to 1.5 liter engines, of which Scarab had none. This 1961 Scarab Intercontinental shows what Reventlow's RAI might have done with a mid-engined F1 car. It used a modified Buick aluminum V8, and eventually finished 4th in a Formula Libre race in Australia in the hands of SCCA star Chuck Daigh, behind former World Champ Jack Brabham, John Surtees (Champion in '64), and Bruce McLaren. Not bad for a first try...
Scarab built 8 cars including 3 sports racers with Chevy V8 power in front (they won the SCCA Championship in '58), those 3 F1 cars, a successful mid-engined V8 sports racer, and this Intercontinental. All showed careful attention to workmanship and detail, but this Intercontinental is an essay in what might have been. If chief engineer Phil Remington had followed the mid-engined trend, or Reventlow himself had applied what he'd learned in a brief fling with a Cooper F2 car, Scarab might have had a mid-engined GP car. We're supposed to be concentrating on engines here, so below is a shot of the Leo Goossen-designed, leaned-over inline desmodromic four that powered the front-engined F1 Scarab in 1960...
Cooper earned its place in the history books not by providing anything special in the engine department, but by placing the engine behind the driver and ahead of the transmission. This allowed the driver to sit lower in the car, and provided a lower center of gravity along with better weight distribution for more responsive handling. Supply of the 2.5 liter twin-cam inline four was outsourced to Coventry Climax, which also powered the first Lotus GP cars, which were front-engined and less successful than the Cooper. But then again, few GP cars were more successful; Jack Brabham won back to back World Championships in 1959 and '60 driving Coopers like this '59 T-51.
Though Cooper would take the first F1 Driver's Championship for a British car in 1959, it was the almost-famous Vanwall* that would win the first Manufacturer's Championship for a British team in 1958, when Stirling Moss and Tony Brooks each won 3 races. The Vanwall, combining the names of team owner / bearing manufacturer Tony Vandervell and his Thinwall bearings, was both an example of the British talent for muddling through, and a prediction of the global car industry to come. In the muddling through dept., the inline four was composed of 4 water-jacketed cylnder castings, each 500cc, from Norton Manx motorcycles (Vandervell was on Norton's board), a special twin-cam alloy head design, and a crancase adapted from a Rolls-Royce military engine but now cast in aluminum. Displacement was bumped up from F2 specs. to 2.5 liters for F1. The driver sat on the transmission in Colin Chapman's chassis design, so Frank Costin was hired to clean up the aerodynamics on the resulting tall racer.
It worked, though, because despite giving away power to more complex engines from Maserati and Ferrari, the Vanwall's aerodynamics made it the fastest GP car in a straight line. And Vandervell was not afraid to go global in his search for effective components. Vanwall made its disc brakes based on designs licensed from Goodyear's designs for aircraft brakes, and Vandervell pressured Daimler Benz into allowing the use of Bosch mechanical fuel injection because they were, after all, clients for his bearings, and they woudn't want the supply of bearings to stop...
We're concentrating on engine designs here, but showng the body of Lancia's D50, designed by Vittoriano Jano in 1954, because context is everything in this case. If you look closely you'll note that the engine is at an angle to the longitudinal centerline of the car, about 12 degrees. This was so that the driveshaft to the 5-speed transaxle could run at that angle too, leaving more space to get the driver down and out of the wind. If you're wondering why Jano didn't just place the engine behind the driver, as Cooper would soon do, the answer is that Lancia had powered a mid-engined F2 car designed by Enrico Nardi*(they even tried disc brakes), but decided to relate their F1 car to the front-engine, rear-transaxle approach on their Aurelia production cars...
He may have missed the boat on the mid-engined trend, but engineer Jano spared no effort on the 2.5 liter, 4-cam alloy V8 sitting at that funny angle in the engine bay. Along with sparing no effort, the Lancia design team spared no expense, and this, along with the 4-cam V6 racing sports cars that took 1-2-3 in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana, helped bankrupt the firm. Gianni Lancia handed the D50 cars over to Enzo Ferrari's team, where Juan Manuel Fangio fulfilled their promise by winning the 1956 World Championship with them.
Fred Frame took 2nd place in the 1931 Indianapolis 500 with the 1930 Duesemberg engine below. It was an inline eight with dual overhead cams and four valves per cylinder, showing how the influence of pre-WWI French engineer Ernest Henry percolated through American designs from Harry Miller to become mainstream racing practice.
In its final version, the engine in the Fred Frame Deusenberg made 200 hp from 168.7 cubic inches with the aid of a centrifugal supercharger. The car received a new chassis and body in 1933 to go with single-seat specifications. After the car's racing career was over, it disappeared for a while, only to be found in a Santa Rosa barn by Briggs Cunningham.
Arthur Duray's 2nd place finish in the 1913 Indy 500 with this 3 liter Peugeot had a bigger influence than the Delage that won with twice the displacement. Ernest Henry's design for Robert Peugeot was an example of how to get more with less. A year before hidebound, traditionalist thinking led to the catastrophe of World War I, Henry's fresh approach to problem-solving brought us twin overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, a counterbalanced crankshaft, and dry-sump lubrication. As we shall see, just five years earlier a Mors GP engine had required 12.5 liters to produce just 10 hp more than this Peugeot's 90. In the years after WWI, most successful engines at the Indy 500 were patterned after this Peugeot.
The Coupe de l'Auto Peugeot is jewel-like in its detail refinement...
We'll finish our tour with a look at an even earlier French design for a GP engine, the Mors Grand Prix engine from 1908. The inline four with pushrod-operated overhead valves (and visible valve springs) produced all of 100 hp from its 12.5 liters. It's astonishing to realize that the pioneering Peugeot twincam racing engine was only 5 years in the future when Mors ended racing in 1908. A victim of the financial panic of 1907, the firm was reorganized under a guy named Andre Citroen. The world would hear more from him in years to come...
*Footnote: For more shots of racing engines taken during a previous "hoods off" session at the Revs Institute, see "The Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 1: Classic Era (Delage, Bugatti and Alfa)" posted August 18, 2019, and "The Beauty of Racing Engines, Part 2: Postwar Era from Abarth to Offy and McLaren", posted August 25, 2019. A photo of the mid-engined Nardi-Lancia Formula 2 car appears in "The Etceterini Files Part 14---Enrico Nardi and His Cars Present at the Creation", posted Feb. 26, 2018. For a survey of the other Scarabs built by RAI, see "Timing Is Everything: Reventlow Scarab Saga", posted June 2, 2017. And for more on the Vanwall GP cars, including the aerodynamics that made them successful, see "Air Craft: Vanwall and the Formula One Championship", posted Aug. 31, 2017.
Photo credits:
All photos were generously provided by Paul Anderson.