The Indy 500 engine they had to outlaw

the Indianapolis 500 is one of the world's most prestigious races in 1994 the Penske team won in this the PC 23 but it's not about the car it's about the engine that was inside that makes this such a fantastic story it was powered by an Almond design 3.4 liter twin turbo v8 engine but there was something very special about it a loophole that Penske was able to take advantage of to try and win that race they called it the beast but just what was so special about it so to try and get a few more small American independent manufacturers through the door the USACE left a little bit of a loophole open with the engine regulations if you were a stop block engine manufacturer and you had pushrod valve timing you could run more as opposed to the overhead cam systems that everyone else is running at the time and that's something that Penske knew about and so in late 1993 Penske went to ilma in the UK to try and push that engine through they convinced the company that a pushrod engine was worth having with all the extra boost pressure and got some funding from Mercedes to go and put it all together and so when the engine was being designed a number of detailed designs were looked at to try and keep as much friction out that engine as possible and to benefit from all of that torques on the extra turbo boost pressure the push rods were made quite a lot shorter than they would conventionally be a number of detail designs such as looking into the bearings to try and draw that friction out were put into place and of course Penske had to make sure that nobody else knew about it turning their own truck warehouse into a secret engine shop the team was hired to work in complete secrecy by Candlelight the employees started their days as the people in the truck warehouse had finished their day shifts even many of pence keys regular employees have absolutely no idea what was going on and more incredibly this was all darling correspondence with Elmer in the UK which manufactured the parts when flying those parts out to the US they had to buy seats on Conchords to bring them over as quickly as possible eventually as the production of the engines began to accelerate the team unveiled the secret Mercedes project to all of its team members and from there on it was all hands on deck to get the engines built for Indianapolis but the Penske Chiefs took a very hard line approach to keeping that secret under wraps if the Mercedes project was kept secret and if Penske won Indianapolis everyone on the team would be richly rewarded but if it is banned beforehand the threat of slash paychecks was mooted clearly enough incentive for the team to stay quiet but the problem was the engine was very very unreliable at the star they could barely get double-figure laps on board when it first went testing eventually Penske and Mercedes was able to get up to the 500 mile mark in testing of Michigan and so it was set for the Indy 500 where it showed it's absolutely searing pace and in qualifying for the Indy 500 our runs our junior was the only driver in the field to break the 228 miles an hour lap barrier taking pole position beating Rafael and teammate Emerson Fittipaldi but it was unser that one even though he was behind Fittipaldi in the race fits a Powell he crashed into the wall it was our Lanza Jr's day and he took it with both hands and so after that crushing display in the Indy 500 the engine in the back of this car the mercedes-benz 500 I was banned it was too good for everybody and Mercedes knew it but they also crucially knew that it would get banned after the race anyway but it was such a display of dominance such a display of using the rules to your advantage to go all-out for the prestige of winning the Indy 500 but it would never do so again [Music]

Channel: Autosport

Views: 947,533

Rating: 4.312438 out of 5

Keywords: Indy 500, Penske, Indy 500 beast, Indy 500 banned, Indy 500 illegal, Penske Beast, Penske PC23, Indy 500 1994, Al Unser Jr, Indy 500 engine, Mercedes Benz Indy 500, Indianapolis 500

Id: oZ9uoNPhZ04

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AnnoyingAxolotl]

If you want to read more about how this engine came to be I would recomment you guys to read Beast by Jade Gurss