Automotive drawings and art – Page 4 – Autoprova

The 1924 Alfa Romeo P2 Grand Prix Engine: Vittorio Jano’s brainchild…

May 5, 2018Posted in Automobilia, Automotive drawings and art, Pre-War ClassicsLeave a comment

Dear reader, we now take you back to the twenties. To the days where engines counted most in a racing car. Aerodynamics and chassis design, tyres and brakes where timidly starting to develop, the focus was on the engine. A true genius designed it for Alfa Romeo. His name was Vittorio Jano.

Actually, he was born as Viktor János in San Giorgio Canavese, in Piedmont, son of Hungarian immigrants, who settled there several years earlier. He began at the car and truck company Società Torinese Automobili Rapid owned by G.B. Ceirano. In 1911 he moved to Fiat under Luigi Bazzi. He went with Bazzi to Alfa Romeo in 1923 to replace Giuseppe Merosi as chief engineer.

There is also a truly wondrous story to tell about the designers of Fiat and their engineers in the period between the two world wars, and it will be subject of a later series where we will present drawn portraits of the men and women who marked our automotive history.

Here one sees the carburettor side of the engine, its architecture being an example for all Alfa engines to follow, right until this day… On both drawings, some watercolor was added.

His first design with Alfa Romeo was the 8-cylinder in-line mounted P2 Grand Prix car, which won Alfa Romeo the inaugural world championship for Grand Prix cars in 1925. But he was going to do much, much more for Alfa. In 1932, he produced the sensational P3 model which later was raced with great success by Enzo Ferrari when he began Scuderia Ferrari in 1933. We will also bring a special about this marvelous engine.

Jano also definitely established Alfa’s engine architecture, and indeed made Alfa technically what is Alfa all about. For the Alfa series production cars, Jano developed a series of small-to-medium-displacement 4-, 6-, and 8-cylinder inline power plants based on the P2 unit that established the classic architecture of Alfa engines, with light alloy construction, hemispherical combustion chambers, centrally located plugs, two rows of overhead valves per cylinder bank and dual overhead cams…

Indeed, this straight 8 engine is the architectural forerunner of what a classic Alfa engine is right until this day.

This 1,987 cc engine had Twin Roots Superchargers and 2 Memini carburettors, developed 140 bhp (104 kW) @ 5500 rpm in 1924, and 155 bhp (115 kW) a year later. As the P2 did only weigh 614 kg, it was fast enough to win 14 grand prix until 1930, and embodied together with the Bugatti 35 the most iconic grand prix cars in the twenties.

Its designer Vittorio Jano would in 1937 move to Lancia, and later to Ferrari, where he designed the V6 and V8 engines, which are still a technical basis for the Ferrari’s today…

Hans Knol ten Bensel

The formidable V16 Auto Union Type C engine…

May 2, 2018Posted in Automobilia, Automotive drawings and art, Classic and Vintage Cars, Pre-War ClassicsLeave a comment

Without any doubt, the powerful rear engine Auto Unions were ahead of their time. Their sheer “Leistung” or power was absolutely legendary. Just tires couldn’t cope, and the sheer chassis dynamics and even more importantly aerodynamics were not fully understood at the time. So the cars had no downforce at racing speeds, and the narrow tires with their still softer construction and not so adhesive compounds did not help.

The V16 engine of this Type C was a Porsche design, and started off in the type A with a displacement of 4360 cc. But it was originally meant to be a 6 litre engine, and this it was in the Type C. The two cylinder banks were angled at 45 degrees, and one central camshaft operated all the 32 valves. That is why the engine has this typical look of 16 pushrods in their gleaming chromed shafts connected with the exhaust valves, while the intake valves were actuated by the camshaft through rocker arms. So we see three valve covers on this beautiful engine.

The engine was laid out to develop massive low end torque, and for a racing engine, it revved quite low, as the rev counter clearly tells.

All this torque, a hefty 853 Nm being available at 2500 rpm, was very difficult to handle for the narrow rear wheel tires, and a limited slip differential was badly needed to stop the inner wheel in narrow corners from spinning fiercely through under full throttle, even in the dry!

The impressive two-stage Roots compressor at the back of the engine, fed by a battery of two carburetors…

Maximum power ranged from 485 to 520 PS or 357-382 kW during the racing seasons, and whether the race was to be long or short. It was achieved at – at least for a racing engine –a very lowish 5000 rpm. A two stage roots compressor was used, with 0,95 bar pressure.

One last item, which one tends to forget when talking about the sheer performance of this engines, is that the 200 L tank did not contain ordinary fuel. A (secret) mixture using amongst others ethanol and methanol was used. This did allow higher combustion chamber pressures and temperatures, without problems of knocking or lack of cooling. One needs to flush the system after races because the mixture is corrosive.

In our next edition, we will go for the equally stunning Alfa Romeo P2 straight 8 compressor engine…

We just let you look here at our drawings!

Hans Knol ten Bensel

A new series on pen drawings of famous engines… The Jaguar D-type

April 28, 2018Posted in Automobilia, Automotive drawings and art, Classic and Vintage CarsLeave a comment

After having made a pencil drawing of the Jaguar XK engine, we got more and more carried away so to speak, and decided to start with a series of famous racing engines, which made automotive history. Of course, we continued first with the D-type theme, as we felt it deserved further attention.

So here it is…

Engine capacity of this XK engine in this racing version is still the original 3442 cc, with also the original bore and stroke dimensions of 83 x 106 mm.

With triple Weber carburetors and a 1:9 compression ratio it developed 253 PS or 186 kW at 6000 rpm. Torque was very impressive for a normally aspirated engine, being 328 Nm at 4000 rpm.

It had dry sump lubrication, as the superb roadholding of the D-type triggered G forces which would let the engine starve for oil had the original sump been retained. It also allowed a larger oil quantity, lowering oil temperature on the grueling long Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, where the D-type would run at speeds in excess of 170 mph, or 270 km/h. There was also another practical reason, which might have been even more important: the D-type is very low, so to reduce the engine height, a dry sump layout was chosen.

The D-type itself was structurally designed by Jaguar’s William Heynes Technical Director and Chief Engineer. It applied aeronautical technology. The cockpit section was of monocoque construction, mostly comprising sheets of aluminum alloy. It was about five years later that John Cooper started to use the same concept for his Formula 1 cars…

The aerodynamic bodywork was largely the work of Malcolm Sayer, who had joined Jaguar following a stint with the Bristol Aeroplane Company during the Second World War and later worked on the C-Type. The D-Type required a minimal frontal area. To further reduce the XK engine’s height, the engine was canted at 8½° from the vertical, which made the typical offset bonnet bulge necessary. It might also have been needed, according to Philip Porter, in his book Jaguar Sports Racing Cars, to provide extra space for the ram pipes feeding the three twin-choke Weber carburetors….

You can see clearly in the drawing the rampipes of the Webers, and the fact that the engine is canted…

Just enjoy the drawing. The next one will be the famous Auto Union V16 engine…

Hans Knol ten Bensel