Bruce Wood calls it the “hypercar era.”
Managing Director for Cosworth Powertrain since 2016, and an employee of the English company for 37 years, Wood has seen many of Cosworth’s eras. Traditionally known for racing engines, and still a major motorsport supplier, Cosworth is now the go-to for high-revving, naturally aspirated hypercar engines.
First was the 6.5-liter V-12 for the Aston Martin Valkyrie, then a 3.9-liter V-12 for Gordon Murray Automotive’s T.50 and T.33. More recently, an enormous V-16 for Bugatti, another V-12 for a revived Bizzarini, and a V-10 for the Red Bull RB17. On some level it seems natural for Cosworth, an engine builder of the highest order, to be the supplier of choice for today’s hypercars, but getting here wasn’t simple.
“Like everything in life, there’s a bit of luck and a bit of judgment,” Wood says.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Cosworth traces its origins back to 1958 and two former Lotus employees, Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth. Despite Duckworth leaving Lotus after an hours-long shouting match with Colin Chapman, the two remained on good terms and began developing engines for the company.
Duckworth was a genius designer, first applying his magic to Ford-based four-cylinders, for road and race, and in 1967, Cosworth’s defining engine, the DFV V-8. This was, and still is, the most successful Formula 1 race engine of all time with 155 Grand Prix wins plus 10 Indy 500s in a row and even two Le Mans 24 Hour wins.
Many will also know Cosworth for designing engines for a handful of memorable road-car engines, the Ford Sierra and Escort Cosworth among them. The ownership history in the 1990s is tangled, but what you need to know is that in 2004, the powertrain and electronics divisions came under private ownership, an arrangement that remains to this day. It left F1 after 2013, with new hybrid engine regulations making it unviable for a privateer like Cosworth to continue.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
“We were kind of still looking around a bit to find our sweet spot,” Wood says of the transition. “Pretty much when the Valkyrie first arrived at Cosworth… this really fit perfectly with what we do because within motor racing, you end up with this huge vertically integrated setup. You do everything in house from forging the pistons to testing the engine to machining it.”
Still, this was not an easy transition. Toby Nation, designer of the Aston and Gordon Murray V-12s and the new Red Bull V-10 points out that Cosworth was not in the business of building production engines until it landed the Valkyrie project. “I think the thing we are most proud of now is being a production company,” he says. “It has been immensely difficult.”
And none of this work was handed to Cosworth either. “The bit that you probably don’t know is that we thought we were fighting tooth and nail for [the Valkyrie job],” he adds. Cosworth has competitors—there’s Ricardo, for one, and its next-door neighbors Mahle Powertrain, which was once part of the same company. But it also has a great reputation and strong relationships from its decades in the business. Clearly Cosworth is doing something right, because Adrian Newey is a repeat customer.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
There’s something wonderfully old-school about Cosworth’s facilities. Many date back to the days of the DFV. From its founding, Cosworth has called Northampton its home, right in the heart of the UK’s “motorsport valley,” where all the best engineers settled after the Second World War and applied their talents to racing. Cosworth occupies 12 buildings on a commercial street not too far from the town center. It’s as unassuming as you can imagine, with a couple buildings situated among small-time car mechanics and body shops. But here, Cosworth can design, test, and build an engine from scratch.
In the main engine build room, rows of technicians work away at benches. The amount of engineering beauty on display here is, frankly, staggering. A handful of Gordon Murray Automotive V-12s are in various states of assembly, cam covers gleaming in either red, orange, or yellow depending on which car they will soon find a home in. Their gear-driven timing systems look especially gorgeous.
On one bench, a racing version of the Valkyrie’s engine is getting disassembled after simulating 35 hours of 10/10ths lapping at Le Mans on the dyno, in preparation for the car’s entry to top-flight endurance racing next year. Early Bugatti V-16s are in progress as well, looking alien even next to the scores of V-12s. A camshaft shouldn’t be that long. Should it?
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
There is, of course, no automation here—everything is assembled by hand. Even all parts are hand washed in an adjacent area, as it was when Cosworth was started, because that’s the only way to ensure absolute quality. (It’s also a good place for apprentices to start on their path toward engine building.)
Even the most basic mass-production engine is a work of art in its way. Precision manufactured, thoughtfully designed, a marvel even in a world that’s perhaps moving away from internal-combustion.
Cosworth’s efforts exist on a different plane. If you have any mechanical inclination whatsoever, you can get lost in the myriad of tiny details separating mundane from extraordinary.
Nation is obsessed with components serving multiple purposes. He describes an intake plenum that integrates plumbing for positive crankcase ventilation and exhaust gas recirculation systems between its two layers of carbon fiber. It’s the sort of thing you could never do in a mainstream car engine, where cutting cost is just about the only thing that matters. But here, where internal-combustion is elevated to art, you can spend money to do away with all that is unsightly.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Each engine typically starts as an idea, fleshed out in a conversation between the client and Wood. “It’s easiest for us if a client comes with the smallest number of hard points,” Wood says. “The smaller the number of hard points, the better.”
“It could be that the customer has a very clear direction that they definitely want a V-12 or or a V-10. In that case, that’s slightly easier,” Nation says. From there, it’s a question of how much power the client wants, and once that’s determined, it’s time to start crunching numbers in an Excel spreadsheet.
“If you write it down on paper, you’ll think, ‘God, there’s hundreds of decisions we need to make,'” Nation adds. Some of those are intuitive, but when you start designing engines of a size and type you’ve never built before, you are pushing into the unknown. “Each engine is different and novel, otherwise it would be really easy, but it isn’t.”
Other complications are new for Cosworth too.
“Back in the old days, you used to design an engine and then put the fuel in,” Wood says. “Literally you could pretty much have mechanical injection, electronic injection, even carburetors, and they’d all run pretty well in terms of delivering maximum power. What legislation has driven us to is that you now start with a combustion system. You don’t design an engine, you design a combustion system.”
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Cosworth begins by creating a single-cylinder engine in computer simulation, looking at fuel-injection strategy, mixture, air motion, and more to create the combustion system. Then it’ll build a multi-cylinder mule engine to run on a test bench. The Valkyrie and GMA’s V-12s were borne from three-cylinder mules. “Once you’re happy with that, you kind of clothe it in the architecture of an engine,” Wood says.
There are other considerations specific to road cars, too. While a race engine can’t vibrate to the point where it starts rattling components to destruction, there is a certain level of vibration that’s acceptable. That amount is a hell of a lot less in a road car, so then you need to start looking at things like dampeners and component stiffnesses, which also address resonance, a bigger problem to tackle in high-revving engines. But, these things add weight, so how do you deal with vibration and resonance without going too heavy?
You also need to ensure a smooth, low idle, for emissions which, again, simply isn’t a consideration in racing engines. And then there’s drivability. Again, in a racing engine, it might not matter what happens at low revs, but in a road car, the engine will spend a lot of time at speeds barely higher than idle.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
“When we did the Valkyrie to start with, you know, power and speed: Cosworth. Easy. It really is, that’s our bread and butter,” says Liam Gorton, who runs the company’s dyno cells. “Taking that power and that speed, making it last for 100,000 kilometers and getting it through the same Euro6 regulations as a Ford Focus… it took us about two weeks to hit power figures, it took us about three months to hit emissions figures.”
And each engine truly starts from a clean sheet. Nation says that two engines might share small components like studs, and that a bearing on one of its hypercar engines came from an old two-cylinder project from Cosworth’s consulting business, but fundamentally, each of these is its own beast. Each project teaches Cosworth something new, and those learnings inform subsequent designs, but when you ask this company to build you a brand-new engine, it does exactly that.
There’s a lot of back and forth between Cosworth and the customer, trialing different designs and addressing problems as they come up. Cosworth undertakes a lot of simulation work, too. “It’s quite extraordinary, the capability of analysis now. You actually don’t even have to design a shape to start with,” Wood says. “You can tell the software, ‘I’ve got a point here and a point here, and I’ve got a load that goes between them,’ and it will then tell you to put the metal.”
Still, overreliance on these systems isn’t a good thing.
“One of Cosworth’s great skills is embracing some of those techniques without becoming slave to them. We have all those techniques, but we still look at the answers and say, ‘Does that really feel right?'”
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
It’s very Duckworthian. Keith was a long proponent of returning to first principles, going back to square one in tackling a problem, questioning even the basics. Quite obviously, it was an approach that worked, and Keith’s spirit is alive at the company today. Wood gives a lot of credit to the culture Duckworth and Costin created.
“They kind of realized from day one, particularly in motor racing, if you develop a culture where people stay for a year or two and then go to your competitors, you’re never going to win,” Wood says. “So they developed from the beginning of this kind of culture of trying to retain experience.”
Wood’s long tenure is proof that this philosophy lives on. Especially when you consider that he thinks he’s only now just broken into the list of the ten longest-serving employees.
“Cut me and I bleed Cosworth,” says Gorton. He’s immensely proud of the work, where under his watch, engines are tested to extremes.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
“We don’t believe in giving them an easy life,” he says. “Things like the Nurburgring, it’s a nice track, but it’s really not that hard on engines. It’s between 37 and 42% full throttle. We use Le Mans and we use a hard lap that we devised ourselves. It’s between 82 and 86% full throttle on a lap and it really does stress it.”
The flagship dyno cell has 1 MW wheel motors so you can test the engine and gearbox. Gorton points out that there are areas as big as the main room—which is huge in and of itself—above and below for cooling, and wind generation, respectively.
The power draw for the whole building, all three test cells, is extraordinary. Cosworth has three substations because, as Gorton said, if it didn’t, all the lights in Northampton would dim while engines were running. This is a thing that actually used to happen. Running three Bugatti engines at once would see an amperage spike as large as the London Underground at rush hour.
Photo by: Dean Smith / Motor1
Wood says he’s happy with where Cosworth is now, creating what he terms “very high value, very low volume product.” It’s a more sustainable business than, say, machining components in higher volumes for other automakers, as it’s done in the past. Given that Cosworth is space limited in Northampton, too, he doesn’t want to take on too many projects at once, but never say never to future growth.
Cosworth was perfectly positioned to take advantage of this moment. It was difficult making the transition into the hypercar era, but it had the facilities and know-how to do so. And once again, it’s making some of the best engines in the world.
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Source: Dean Smith / Motor1
