Auto Racing and Aircraft Engines

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C

Conslaw

Senior Airman
627
449
Jan 22, 2009
Indianapolis, Indiana USA
Tomorrow is the 103rd running of the Indianapolis 500. Even many aviation enthusiasts don't know that James Allison set up his engine shop in Speedway, Indiana not to make aircraft engines, but to make racing engines for the cars in the Indianapolis 500. When WWI came, Allison received government contracts to make parts for the Liberty engine, and the aviation side of the business grew. In 1928, James Allision died, and General Motors took over and embarked on a task to make a 1,000 horsepower engine. That project eventually came to fruition in the famous V-1710 that powered so many WWII fighters. I wanted to open this thread not so much to the discussion of James Allison and Allison engines, but about the cross polination between racing piston engines and aircraft engines in general. Feel free to post anything you think is ineteresting, including techie stuff about superchargers, valve design, fuel, etc.
 
Most of the cross pollination in design came by the end of WW I. Valve arrangements and so on.

Fuel had very little cross over as many races or race series allowed alcohol based fuels (or others) and not gasoline. Record setting planes could use fuels similar to race cars but commercial or military planes could not due to weight, temperature, vapor pressure at altitude and storage considerations (and quite likely some others).

Detail design or parts like valves and valve springs tended to flow from aircraft to cars, if a race car swallowed a valve the driver could walk back to the pits, not a option for many pilots.

Metallurgy tended to start with aircraft engines too. It was hard enough to make money making race car engines in the 20s and 30s without trying to fund R&D into different alloys and heat treatment. Besides, nobody really cared if race car engine A was 20lbs heavier than engine B as long as it made a bit more power. That and most race car engines didn't have to last more than a few hours. Look up the Indy 500 races in the 1930s and see the number of finishers vs the number of starters. AND this was for engines that weighed more per hp and at times were running on alcohol.

Another big difference was that most race car engines were displacement limited. Most power per unit of displacement. While a few small air races tried using that sort of limit for commercial or military use there was no limit to engine displacement, airframe designers were interested in volume of the outside of the engine or frontal area and the weight.

A couple of examples,
A 1937 Offenhauser 4 cylinder engine, 270 cubic inches, dohc, 4 valves per cylinder, 15:1 compression ratio (alcohol fuel) was good for about 325hp and max rpm of 5500. It weighed about 500lbs.
A Wright R-760 radial & cylinders, 756 cu in, push rods , 2 valves per cylinder, 6.3 compression ratio (ground supercharger) 73 octane gas, 300hp at 2250rpm max and 285hp at 2100 rpm max continuous (All day long as long as the fuel held out). around 570lbs. This engine had started out in 1928 as a 225hp engine.
But then a 1932 Miller 4 was 255 cu in and only 250hp although quite bit lighter (325lbs)
 
A sideline to this was large diesel engines. Though much of American rolling stock in WWII was pulled by steam engines still, the Deiselization odf American Railroads had begun, with assistance from The USN. The intent was to help develop and get into large scale production diesel engines suitable for submarine use. At this they were quite successful.

Where automotive applications and aviation applications begin to diverge was in RPM. One road to more HP is to turn a smaller displacement engine to higher RPM. Clutch and gearbox used to keep the torque applied to the wheels in a desirable manner, but more RPM generally also a better top speed. In Aviation application propellers require a lower speed for efficiency due to tip speed limits. The more power and the larger the prop, the more this can be an issue. Weight and complexity work against this... Shifting your P-38 "gearbox" with two clutches? Also the cylinders size for the high displacement aero engines created some issues with flame front propagation speed. This is one of the reasons (besides redundancy) that aero engines featured two spark plugs per cylinder.

Certainly the USA large automotive industry was responsible for turning available research and technology into a viable industrial base. Casting and forging technology, as mentioned earlier all important valve train design. All these things cross pollinated, certain Prat & Whitney for instance weren't working in an industrial vacuum even though radial and inline and automotive engines differed greatly.
 
There were several American automobiles powered by aircraft engines, like the Cord (by Auburn) that used a Lycoming L-8 and V-8, the Tucker 48 that used the Franklin O-335 H-6.
And the Tucker is connected to the Indy 500 as they tested several 48's on the Indy track for speed and endurance.

Quite a few companies built race cars equipped with aircraft engines just for racing, like Sunbeam, Renault, Fiat, Rolls-Royce, Hispano-Suiza. Some of which competed at Indy, too.
 

Lycoming was a company that built automotive and aircraft engines; the engines it sold to companies like Cord were strictly automobile engines.

It is interesting that most aircraft engines in Europe were made by companies that also made automobiles: Napier, Bristol, Fiat, ALFA-Romeo, eRenault, Daimler-Benz, Rolls-Royce, etc but the two primary US engine makers had no automotive interests.
 
If my memory is correct, Ferdinand Porche built a four cylinder opposed in 1918 for aircraft before thinking of putting it into cars.
 
Milosh said:
Wasn't the hemi head first used in an airplane engine?
Click to expand...

1913 Peugeot Grand Prix engine.

Chrysler may have used the hemi head in an airplane engine as the first Chrysler hemi but it was far from being the worlds first Hemi engine.
In fact P & W and quite possibly Wright radial engines used hemispherical combustion chambers.
Even the Jacobs radial (trainers and light transports) used a hemi combustion chamber
www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdAwewLdZRE

As for the Lycoming engine in the Cord

I believe Lycoming also supplied the engine for the Auburn line of cars including the V-12 and the 851 Speedster.

Straight 8, L head, cast iron block and head. Please notice the centrifugal supercharger under the carburetor.

The opposed engine was nothing new either in basic layout.
 
The Novi engine, a 4-valve/cylinder V8 with Centifugal supercharger, first raced in 1941 at Indianapolis as the "Winfield", but after the war came back as the "Novi" and became the talk of gasoline alley because the sound of the engine stood out at the time. The Novi never actually won at Indianapolis. The dominant engine at Indianapolis for nearly 50 years was the Offenhauser, a 4-cylinder 4/valves per cylinder (generally of the same displacement as the Novi of the same era). The sturdy Offenhauser block really took to turbocharging, and it was boosted up to 109 inches of mercury in its final form, generating about 1,200 horsepower out of 2.6 liters displacement.
 
nuuumannn said:
The Napier Lion is the only engine to have powered land, sea and air speed record holding vehicles.

Sea Lion..................................
Click to expand...


Except, of course, the Rolls-Royce R.
The R held the air speed record from September 1931 to April 1933, when it was beaten by The Macchi MC72.
The R held the land speed record from February 1933 to November 1937 in Campbell's Bluebird, and from then until September 1938 and from September 1938 to August 1939 by Eyston's Thunderbolt (he lost the record for one day in September 1938, raising the record the next day).
Seagrave held the water speed record with the R from June 1930 to March 1931 (Miss England II), Kaye Don from April 1931 to February 1932 (Miss England II), July 1932 to September 1932 (Miss England III) and then Campbell held teh record from September 1937 to June 1950 with the Blue Bird K3 and K4.


No Lion powered vessel is listed in the official record holders of the water speed record
Water speed record - Wikipedia
World Water Speed Record - WWSR ∞ Jet Hydroplane UK ∞ Longbow

The various Miss Englands of the period were powered by Rolls-Royce Rs.
Later Miss Americas were powered by Packard V12s or Miller V16s. Can't find what earlier models were using, but that was before the date specified in your link.
 

Designed by Harry Miller's former employee Leo Goosen and parts manufactured by Fred Offenhauser.

Offenhauser also worked for Miller, and bought Miller's company when it went bankrupt. The Offenhauser L4 was originally a Miller design.

Miller's DOHC straight 8s inspired Bugatti's own DOHC straight 8s.
 
The Miller/Offenhauser/Goosen engine (it is difficult to apportion credit for the later engines, even before Miller sold out Goosen was actually doing a lot of "engineering" as in deciding what size bolts to use to hold things together or material thicknesses, Offenhauser had some input both on those things and how easy/hard a part might be to make. Both men kept the engine "practical". ) was a great race car engine, but it lived in a world of restricted displacements.
Unsupercharged race engines could have one displacement, often around 4 to 4.5 liters. Supercharged race engines had a lower displacement often around, 2.6 liters. Engines based on a production engine block (but different heads?) were allowed greater displacement at times. Over the years the displacement limits were juggled around a bit to prevent (it was hoped, but rarely achieved) one type of engine from dominating.

Other US race organizations had similar rules.

While Indy was the American premier race, there really wasn't a lot of money in it and that is why, in order to get a field of 33 cars, some cars showed up for a number years. During The 40s and 50s advancement was slow.

Pretty much by the end of the 40s the Aircraft piston engine was a done deal as far as R&D went so any cross pollination that might have existed stopped. (materials/alloys excepted).
 
Today the cross pollination between F1 and road cars is in the batteries and motors of the power recovery systems, while the computer systems have use in finance.
 
Engine R27 holds the particular distinction of setting the world airspeed record and later the land speed record
 
pbehn said:
Today the cross pollination between F1 and road cars is in the batteries and motors of the power recovery systems, while the computer systems have use in finance.
Click to expand...

Todays F1 cars are a far cry from yesteryear. They don't even look nice anymore (IMO). More like a 4-wheeled device controlled by computers with an engine that's smaller in capacity than a rally car and which bears no comparison in sound to the various V12's & V10's of days (sadly) gone by.

So much for The Pinnacle Of Motorsport. The priorities have all been changed.
 
Technically it still is it just doesn't look or sound very good. I stopped watching years ago, when one driver in one team dominates and cars just cant pass each other it may be a technical marvel but its an utter bore.
 
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