The INSANE H16 Formula 1 Engine!

this is an h16 engine yep when others were designing V8 to V12 brm went mad and designed a three liter h16 engine and it was genius allowing for more power and better weight distribution than other engines however all of that was in theory the reality was an engine with Incredible potential but it loved to blow up so why did they look at the V8 V12 and go nah 11 h16 please so in 1965 the engine regulations were weird for this period the engines had gone down to a maximum displacement of 1.5 liters from 2.5 liters before that and a 1.5 liter naturally aspirated engine is never going to be that powerful cars produce 150 to 225 horsepower at the time meaning that the Le Mans sports cars of the time were way faster brm British racing motors were running a 1.5 liter 16 valve V8 which was performing well with such a small capacity the engine had to be super efficient and they had to spend a lot of time developing the engine and making sure the combustion chamber was as effective as possible but in 1966 Formula One then moved to 3 three liters increasing Power by a lot every team had to design a new engine to suit the new regulations and they all went in different directions absolutely amazing Ferrari ran a 60 degree V12 underrung a 90 degree V12 mclarenran a Ford V8 engine and Repco designed their own V8 the V12 seemed to be the way to go producing around 100 horsepower more than the V8 brm made one of the boldest calls in F1 history they made an h-16 but how did they get that idea they looked into a V8 which would be nice and compact but we need to rev to 10 000 RPM to produce comparable power to the v12s and that kind of rev range was tough to achieve with the materials at the time they also looked into a v24 yep a v24 and that got them more power but was just way too long to fit into their existing chassis imagine two v12s end to end so the two remaining options were 12 cylinder or 16 cylinder and engine and the team actually hedged their bets and had a team working on each but first why were the teams pushing so melee cylinders it's actually easy to explain the other way so imagine making a three liter one cylinder engine the Piston would be really heavy the Conrad would then need B finger and the same with the crankshaft meaning that the torque would be high everything is heavy it would tear itself to pieces if it revs too high if you add cylinders each assembly gets smaller and lighter you have less reciprocating Mass meaning you can rev the engine higher and in a small naturally aspirated F1 engine this is what you want however it does mean that the components get weaker but that's the dance lightweight against strength more cylinders also mean more valves so typically they allow for free or flow through the engine 12 cylinder team began working on a V12 and the 16 cylinder team started with a V16 but there was a problem the engine was verging on being too long and they were worried about bending the crankshaft as you make the engine longer longer you put more and more strain on the crankshaft meaning they were getting heavier limiting engine revs and increasing the likelihood of bending them but really the main issue was around the length of the engine a V16 would be too long as would a flat 16. the engineers as always got creative and came up with an 8 16 and this engine is mental they essentially took their 1.5 liter V8 from the year before and flattened it making a kind of flat eight they then took two of these and stacked them on top of each other in the car making a formation that looks like a capital H so they named it the brm h-16 it meant it was short enough to fit in the car and gave them the power figure they wanted look at this shot of the cylinders it's literally two cylinder blocks cast together but to get this to work they needed to narrow the engine right up so the engine wouldn't be too tall they brought the valves in with a narrower valve angle and had to get creative with the inlet and exhaust but we'll come back to that later some of you would have noticed this a tiny gear in the middle of the engine so with these two engines fused together you have two crankshafts and you can't drive one gearbox with two crankshafts so they added a small idler gear to link the two crankshafts together and then the gearbox would be driven off the lower crank now you can see that this thing is getting complicated so with this Design coming together let's go back to the battle of the engines V12 team estimated their engine could produce 475 horsepower with the engine being 30 inches long that's three quarters of a meter and it was going to weigh about 160 kilos then the h16 team record their engine was going to produce five to six hundred horsepower with a length of 24 inches and weighing 170 kilos meaning it was slightly heavier but produced more power and was easier to package in the car it came with other benefits too the h16 would be able to be used as a stressed member in the chassis whereas the V12 couldn't this is where the engine essentially forms part of the chassis so the suspension is mounted straight onto the engine rather than a separate chassis that the engine would sit inside so brm went for it they made the first h16 engine ever and it was possibly the most over complicated engine design in F1 history in F1 terms a V12 is complex but it's nothing compared to this h16 and it all stems from the fact that it's essentially two engines in one the first challenge was getting air in and out of this thing a flat engine like a Subaru or a Porsche typically has air coming in the top of the engine an exhaust coming out of the bottom but this becomes an issue when two engines are stacked together given the exhaust nowhere to go so the brm engineers moved the inlet trumpets to the top of the head and then the exhaust coming out the side and it gave the final car a really weird look you can see the inlet Trumpets on the side of the car then you see the bizarre exhaust setup with two pipes at the top of the engine and two out of the bottom then to activate the valves they needed eight camshafts yes eight camshafts on top of that it had 16 throttle bodies 64 valves and two oil coolers the numbers were mad and of course you can see the complexity stacking up here then think about coolant they managed to join the coolant channels together so that the coulomb was shared across the two engines but it needed two water pumps to keep the pressure high enough then the oil was a similar thing they managed to join the two engines together but needed roughly double the oil and the V12 competitor engine but they did get the h16 working during the design phase they were estimating five to six hundred horsepower which was game changing Ferrari V12 at the time was running around 400 horsepower and the Honda was doing about 380 but the brm engineers did know that their engine was going to be a little bit heavier however they were soon shocked to see how far off their guesses were first the weight the context the Ferrari V12 weighed 130 kilo the brm came out at 250 almost double and when Lotus took delivery three of their first h16 it took six men to carry it into the workshop but that's okay as the power would more than make up for it well the power only came out of 400 horsepower so no more than the Ferrari on top of that and as you can imagine with such a complicated design the engine was extremely unreliable during testing the engines just kept blowing up even at engine speeds as little as 2000 RPM they eventually figured out it was a vibration issue coming from the crankshaft so they added weights to the cranks to eliminate these issues then during early Races they had issues where the weights would come off the crank circulate in the oil then caused the engine to blow up and there's more the RM used cast iron cylinder liners as they were a quarter of the cost of Steel and produce marginally more power as they read the engine higher sometimes the valves wouldn't return in time and they would hit the piston and of course this is an issue but if only done a couple of times the engine is normally okay in this case that would cause the cylinder liners to shatter the piece soon with flail around and then the engine long story short they like to blow up but there was even more to this story the drivers really didn't like the extra weight but it was more that the weight was high in the car raising the center of gravity and ruining what handling the car had then there was the fact that the car drank fuel using upwards of 10 more than the equivalent V12 that meant in the fuel tank in turn had to be larger which meant they had to push the engine even further back over the rear wheels and that ruined the handling even more Jackie Stewart said it was unnecessarily large used more fuel carried more oil and needed more water all of which added weight and diminished the vehicle's agility despite this they did get the engine to rev to an impressive 10 500 RPM and it made a great sound just listen to this it kind of sounds like a Subaru but screaming like a proper F1 engine it's a really interesting noise anyway you won't be surprised to hear that the engine was isn't that competitive it was okay on Raw grunt but it just didn't like finishing races in fact it retired from 30 of its 40 races it did win One race Watkins Glen but that was when the unit was in the back of the lotus after Colin Chapman bought the engine to fill the gap before his next engine was finished the next year brn went back to a V12 and later in the 90s F1 Engineers got these engines up to 20 000 RPM and we made a video all about that just here thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Driver61

Views: 402,740

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Coaching, Motorsport, Engineering, F1, Racing, Incredible Motorsport, Driver61, Scott Mansell, Callum McIntyre, BRM, BRM F1, Engine, H16 Engine, BRM P83, Lotus 43

Id: V3ixj3iuq7w

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023