This is a single cylinder F1 engine – 20,000rpm, 300cc, 90bhp!

there are two clear front runners for the most special modern production engine and they're both developed here at cosworth the 6.5 litre aston martin valkyrie v12 and the 3.9 liter gordon murray t50 v12 big high cylinder cart engines are barely still in existence but what if i was to tell you that these two naturally aspirated v12s seemingly from a bygone era started life as something much much smaller these are very special little things this is a three-cylinder version of the valkyrie v12 and this is a three-cylinder version of the t-50s engine now i did a video on the subject matter last year during lockdown called something like how do you develop a v12 in 2020 but today i get to get my hands on the physical bits and pieces that can make a v12 happen and through in another room hidden away is something even more special i've never seen anything like it before and i can't wait to show you guys it's probably the title of this video with so much demand now being on keeping emissions down developing a performance engine these days must be incredibly difficult not only do you need to make it powerful and sounding great so that the customers are happy you have to make it efficient and clean enough to hit those emissions targets that are becoming ever more stringent back in the day a place like cosworth would develop an engine from the bottom up they would pick a power figure a rough engine layout and then develop everything to be able to cope with that amount of power these days you have to start from the top down you have to create a combustion system that hits all of your targets for power and efficiency and then build the engine around that there's no point in developing an entire v12 and then finding out the numbers it creates you're much better starting small nailing your combustion system and then expanding up from there and that is where these come in so this is quite literally a quarter of the valkyries 11 100 rpm v12 engine three cylinders its own plenum it's not attached right now but there would be an entire exhaust system and its own catalytic converter so this multiplies up by four to create the 6.5 liter valkyrie v12 and the power gain from one to four is remarkably formulaic this creates 250 horsepower a naturally aspirated three cylinder that creates 250 horsepower and is multiplied up to form a 1 000 horsepower v12 the gma mule engine works in the exact same way multiplying up to 654 horsepower for the v12 with the goal being more about weight to power rather than power to weight lightening every aspect as much as possible which has in turn led to it revving to a ludicrous 12 100 rpm [Music] this division can be done because fundamentally a v12 is two straight sixes joined together onto a common crank then you can go further a straight six is fundamentally two in-line threes attached onto a common crank so once you build one of these and you get your power fuel efficiency and emissions numbers and you're happy with them you can then simply multiply up by four to get your v12 the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that this is actually a four-cylinder engine but let me explain this engine block originated from the jaguar cx-75 that crazy jaguar supercar from around 2010 this originated as the 1.6 liter twin charged engine you can see here this is the blanking plate from the supercharger for that engine so it is a three-cylinder engine but this cylinder at the end is just a blank so there's a four-cylinder crank going on but there's only three cylinders attached to it hold back a bit further in cosworth's history and they were making engines that sounded like this [Applause] the three-cylinder mules are awesome but with those glorious formula 1v10s cosworth had to go even smaller ending up with this what you see here is a single cylinder formula one engine this was used to develop the full three-liter v10s and i've got one behind me this is the cosworth tj v10 over 18 000 rpm around 900 horsepower used to power teams like the jaguar formula one team my favorite so you use this to prove the concept and then develop it into one of these before we learn more about this amazing little engine our channel would not exist without our awesome group of sponsors so i'd like to introduce our partner for this video nordvpn a vpn is a virtual private network which allows you to safely and securely surf the internet knowing that no one is going to see what you're doing online or which websites you're visiting it also allows you to place your ip address and therefore your devices in any country in the world to watch content that would otherwise not be available to you for example if you are into sports you might have seen this content is not available in your country before with nordvpn you can make sure you can watch your team play no matter where you are in the world with nordvpn plugging you into any of over 5 000 servers around the globe it'll also help you find cheaper rates on streaming platforms and can be used on up to six devices be that your phone laptop tablet or smart tv nordvpn also says it's the fastest vpn on the market so you won't be left buffering when your favorite new show is reaching its climax if you'd like to support the drive drive youtube channel download nordvpn onto your own devices by clicking the link in the description below or head to nordvpn.com forward slash drive tribe to get a two-year plan plus one additional month with a huge 73 discount this holiday season they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee therefore you can try the service risk-free now by clicking the link below okay back to the engines so a three liter v10 divided up means this thing is 300 cc's but apart from that that is pretty much all i know about this amazing little engine so let's get someone in that was around at cosworth at the time so bruce here is the managing director at cosworth we're looking at what is one of the most unique little engines i've ever seen i didn't know they went this small so why did cosworth back in the day go this small with a mule engine or maybe why are those three cylinders why aren't they single cylinders so this this obviously predates significantly the multi-cylinder mules and this engine we developed in 98 99 with the express purpose of helping us develop what was then our new formula one engine which was the tj v10 last of the last of the line of v10s so at the time you're trying to do slightly different things with with both them obviously at this point we had no interest in emissions this was just about performance development so by making a single cylinder that's just the the quickest cheapest way to get to a set of pieces you can test and and you know we could run through tests enormously quickly you know we could have a range of different piston ring heights lined up three different pistons three different tests so it's just all about how quickly could we get results because remember back in those days there wasn't engine homologation in f1 so you could develop your engine between the races you know you could have a better race engine in two weeks time you were allowed to so so speed of development was was key okay so we've divided that engine into 10 that's about 900 horsepower and i know that the three cylinder engines has been very formulaic in terms of what was created in the mule engine and it multiplies up into your thousand for the v12 is it the same with this is this a 90 horsepower single cylinder yeah absolutely yeah what about the revs is this being able to reverse size that yeah this rev is at 20 000 rpm and it has two because otherwise it's pointless you know this is one cylinder of that exactly as you say you know every element in the combustion systems is identical the positioning of the camera shafts the lobes the finger followers the ring heights we're not worried about the bearing sizes and such like at the bottom this is combustion system single cylinders historically sound horrendous so what does this sound like at 20 000 rpm it's not uh it's not a thing you'd want to spend time with that no it's pretty brutal if we take a dump truck soundtrack and then just crank it up like four times the biggest thing with it was that um torsionally it's horrible a single cylinder at that speed because you don't have all those other cylinders you know you just have one impulse and i say it's small it's small for an f1 engine but actually considering there's only one piston in here yeah normally yeah really so four yeah one by ten we'd be the other side of the room you take us through the anatomy of what everything is here so so part of the fact that it's disproportionately big for a single cylinder as you say is is the fact that you still have to have one of all your ancillary parts so you know all of this front element is all the gear drive for the camshafts well you've got to have that same set of gears whether you've got a single cylinder or you've got a v10 or a v8 or a v12 same with the actuators for the throttles and such like and then just the fact that it's it's largely machined from billet we weren't worrying about size and weight and it's just just about speed yeah so it's chunky yeah and again you know we didn't want it to break so you weren't going to put the thinnest wall sections in let you guys see the fly feel on it and this thing has basically sat in a cupboard for the last 20 years so how much work we need to go into this to get it recommissioned and working is it quite a lot because these are notoriously high tolerance entities yeah um well if i'm completely honest i don't know exactly what's inside this one it may be empty in there but if it's if it's a full engine in there then then there's no reason why it couldn't fire up um far up reasonably straightforwardly so i want to propose something to you richard hammond wants to completely restore his 1960s opal cadet called oliver and it's got this tiny little 60 horsepower four-cylinder in it tiny little engine bay and looking at this this would fit perfectly so could we get the guys here to recommission this and put it in 60s cadet revving at 20 000 down ross on my high street i'm not sure ross on why city council will appreciate it uh uh we we have as interestingly there's been a lot of interest in the three cylinder uh mule engines yeah for uh that's hot hatch material yes yes yes on paper yes in reality you'll have to find a gear box that's going to take 20 000 rpm and um and put it into um and and the power band of these things is uh you know you'd probably have to get up to 14 to get off the line wow okay yeah on paper it looks like a proposition in reality i think put it this way unless richard's car is extremely extremely valuable i think he would be sinking an awful lot of money into it if we find the right sponsor sponsors out there this is insanely cool let's make this happen let's get this in oliver bruce thank you very much pleasure i love stuff like this things in miniature aren't just cooler we all get to see the final end result the big full engine but thanks to cosworth they've let us see the behind the scenes and especially this thing out of a broom cupboard this led to a three liter v10 and i just think it's one of the coolest little things i've ever seen so if you like this video give it a thumbs up i've been mike don't forget to subscribe to drivetrain guys can you give me a hand with us you

Channel: DRIVETRIBE

Views: 3,485,641

Keywords: jeremy clarkson, richard hammond, james may, cars, top gear, the grand tour

Id: gZs-R6cfCKc

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 26 2021