Less is more (was: 2.0 V6)

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

Nick Koleszar, burning the torch for Amilcar (yes! Sweet machines!) adds brief
comments on circa 1.5 sixes from Maserati, Riley, MG, and slightly larger
offerings from Mazda, Triumph, BMW, and goes on to say "Once you get to 2
litres, there's a whole slew of 6 and 8 cylinders engines plus the odd 12 and
16."

Which almost demands a nod, still at 1.5 liters, to one of the oddest twelves
- although strictly speaking it was a six cylinder engine, but still a logical
twelve.

It was the Fiat Type 451, an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful attempt
to build a two-stroke engine for the 1926 1.5 liter GP formula. It was a
vertical I layout, a sort-of anti-boxer, with an upper set of pistons driving
the upper (intake) crankshaft and a lower set of pistons driving a lower
(exhaust) crankshaft which was twenty-one degrees ahead of the intake in order
to play a fancy game with the timing and overlap of the intake and exhaust
ports which were uncovered by the pistons at the end of their strokes. The
problem which Fiat was unable to overcome was that all of the cooling of the
incoming charge was spent on the upper pistons, and the lower pistons
suffered.

Opposed-piston engines have been used before and since, usually for diesels-
it offers among other things a great way to get very high compression ratios
with as spherical a combustion chamber as you want, as well as an inherent
balance shaft- but the only other opposed-piston car engine I know of is the
even odder Gobron-Brillie, a French car which was briefly the holder of the
land speed record at the turn of the century at just over 100 mph; the odder
part about it is that it managed an opposed-piston design with a single
crankshaft. Play with that one a while -

Fiat's short-term answer to the failure of the 451 was to build, for the 1927
season, a 1.5 twin six (i.e., two vertical blocks with the two cranks in a
common crankcase), a system which has been used at various times with varying
degrees of separation by Bugatti, Miller, Maserati and Alfa. The car won its
only race, after which Fiat management reversed course, dumped the program,
and had the car destroyed. It would have been nice to see it at the
Biscaretti.

In the second of his two AD8-714 posts George Graves says "Never heard of the
Ferrari 156." I suspect he did, perhaps under the Dino name and just didn't
recognize the number. The 156 was the shark-nose Ferrari which dominated the
1961 GP season; it was the car in which Phil Hill took the World Championship.
The engine was a Carlo Chiti design, and Enzo Ferrari disliked it, barely
tolerating it because it was successful; when the sixes had outlived their
competition usefulness they were unceremoniously scrapped, as the Fiat had
been thirty-five years earlier. I believe a 'replica' has been built, but that
none of the real ones survive. (May be wrong, if so, tell me.)

The history of that Chiti Ferrari mentions that Chiti was friendly with a
Milanese engineer named Aldo Celli who in 1951 had designed a beautiful 750
cc, 120 degree V6. I had never heard of it, and don't know what it was
intended for, but it brings to mind cars like the Morettis, and reminds that
Alfa made its splash in this market in the fifties as a relatively major
company's relatively affordable and sufficiently commodious productionized
translation of the Morettis, Oscas, Cisitalias, Siatas, Stanguelinis, and
other delectable Etceterini. There were certainly somewhat parallel
performance cars in England, France, and elsewhere in the 500 cc, 600, 750,
even big 1100 cc cars, but Italy built some of the best and most attractive of
them. I will grant that a Berkeley or a GN or a DB Panhard would get mashed on
a California freeway today, but in terms of the concept of the Giuliettas
which originally made Alfa's place in this market, all this
get-a-bigger-engine stuff seems pretty gross. One of the most attractive (to
me) cars in my area is basically a Giulietta in which the steel hull and most
amenities have been replaced by a light spaceframe and an alloy shell. There
are undoubtedly people who would like to stick a three-liter in it, and a
turbo, but I feel that they have missed the point.

Enjoy yours,

John H.
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