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The Mid-Engine Revolution: Challenging the Mercedes-Benz W196 · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  Break Fix's History of Motorsports Series is brought to you in part
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  by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
• 0:07
  Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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  Commerce, and the Argo Singer family.
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  How to beat the Mercedes-Benz W 1 96.
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  An alternative history accelerates the Mid-engine
• 0:22
  Revolution by Carl Heinz Mertons.
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  The new two and a half liter formula of 1954 raised the bar for
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  engineering excellence and cost of entry to the pinnacle of motor racing.
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  With Mercedes-Benz, leaving the shadows of World War II and becoming an
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  accepted participant in motor racing, again, the Grand Prix community had
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  to anticipate a full out effort of a new generation of Silver arrows.
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  Indeed, new standards were set with a series of W one ninety six variants
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  born out of vast corporate resources supported by components suppliers
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  like Continental Bosch, and so.
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  In this story, the imaginary Italian UNE automobile previously formed of
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  National Legacy Manufacturers other than Fiat takes on the role of Auto
• 1:02
  Union Ag of the 1930s as an antagonist of Mercedes-Benz and Promoter of the
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  Midian layout, a probabilistic SWAT analysis reveals what it would take to
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  beat the mighty opponent for s Stuttgart.
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  This is the start for a motley crew of Australian and Italian
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  engineers led by Robert Ein Hors to create a victorious challenger.
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  The prescribed engine configuration is a compact V six and homage to the launch of
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  brand breaking with Italian traditions.
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  Emphasis is put on chassis development where innovations and tires breaks,
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  and aerodynamics will provide decisive competitive advantages.
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  Dr. Carl Hinz.
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  Mertons holds degrees in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in
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  mechatronics and engineering from the technical University of Berlin, Germany.
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  In more than 35 years of engineering and business experience in Europe and
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  the us, Carl has focused on product innovation and new business incubation,
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  applying cross-disciplinary methods with cross-cultural considerations.
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  His work included experimental work on intelligent mobile equipment and
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  wind energy systems in multinational corporations and startups.
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  His enthusiasm for F1 goes back to the 1961 season.
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  Like many people in racing, I'm bending the rules a little bit here,
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  speaking to a society of historians.
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  I will talk a little bit about the real history, but then we are often to an
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  alternative history and give a picture of what could have been instead of what was.
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  So, uh, the question is how to beat Mercedes-Benz at the time
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  when it wasn't quite clear.
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  That they would enter the um, 2.5 liter formula one race season in 1954.
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  And so the model designation of W 1 96 wasn't known yet.
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  So it's kind of blanked out here in the title.
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  Let me give you a timeline of where this all starts, and then I will talk a
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  little bit about what happened here on the left side before we get to 51 in 51.
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  And all this is somewhat relevant to the story that I will tell in,
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  uh, 51 Mercedes got back out of the destruction phase into the reconstruction
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  and started building cars again.
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  But not just any car.
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  They started unveiling the, uh, 300 W 180 6 as an internal code,
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  and it was a challenge to Rolls Royce to Packard, if you want.
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  So they wanted to really reestablish the company as a provider of luxurious
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  cars and, and set the standard.
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  Shortly thereafter in this presentation happened at the, uh,
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  Frankfurt Automobile Show in April.
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  Shortly thereafter, the board approved that the company should go back to racing
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  and there was a green light given for.
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  A sports car project.
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  First, the 300 SL to ease into motor sports again after World War ii.
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  Now, what happened before, other was of course, the World War II and
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  before it ended, there were plans, particularly in the us the Morgenthal
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  plan that foresaw that, uh, Germany should really be brought back to
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  the Middle Ages and should have no.
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  Industrial capabilities anymore.
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  The facilities that had survived the World War should be dismantled or destroyed,
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  and, uh, it should be an agrarian society that, that would go forward and not
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  be a threat to mankind going forward.
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  Well, that plan, fortunately, didn't come to pass.
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  Instead, there was of course, an activity, some of that on the table,
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  and some of it was under the table.
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  There were of course some of the, uh, Mercedes engineers that formed informal
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  networks, and they were thinking about plans of what could they do and how
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  could they survive, and at some point go back to the former glories again.
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  That happened and that led to things like the Unimark, of course, a utility
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  vehicle, kind of an agricultural tractor, and of course that kind of
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  responded to the Morgan for plan.
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  Of focusing on agriculture and not on things like racing or luxury cars.
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  That machine, uh, was very successful.
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  It was developed.
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  It was very little means and, uh, with external help and the binger brothers
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  chipped in and there were other.
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  People that had allocations of sheet metal out for milk cans and and so forth.
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  And they all contributed because at the time, in 45 when the war was lost, Germany
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  was under military rule and the area around Stuttgart was about the American.
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  Administration then, and so material were scars and had to be applied for and to
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  be a good reason as to why you wanted some material and you couldn't ask for
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  material for race cars, for example.
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  Wouldn't have been a good proposition.
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  Moves on from there.
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  Pretty quickly, the Arkansas plan gets replaced by the Marshall Plan.
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  Money flows into Europe and the reconstruction is pretty fast and furious.
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  So there were some activities already at the beginning of 51.
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  A couple of the, uh, pre-war one 60 fours.
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  We're brought to, uh, Argentina to run in one Cyrus at a couple of races.
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  And the idea was, well, we were so successful with those pre-war
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  silver arrows, we could probably just dust them off and use them
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  again in, uh, this new age.
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  It turned out they were not that successful, was the, uh,
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  moving force behind all this.
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  He had a, a delegation going to Argentina with these cars engineer responsible for
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  those who, how was not in the delegation.
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  So things were probably not perfectly set up, but those cars, three liter mercedeses
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  were beaten by two liter Ferraris.
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  And it was kind of a shameful event from a Mercedes perspective because
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  the DNA of the company was indeed.
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  You make the best cars you can make and when you go racing, you go for the win.
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  You're not settling for second places.
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  They had to rethink the solar operation and scale back a little bit.
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  Go back to building a sports car and focus only once the dust settled
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  and it became clear how Formula One would be organized in the future,
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  that there would be indeed a new one.
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  A formula that would give preference to naturally aspirated engines,
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  and it would start in 1954.
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  It became clear.
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  Now, that was the new goal for Mercedes, but in the interim, they
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  were working on a race car that they could build out of this luxury car.
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  Kind of a clumsy way to do it, but nevertheless, it turned out
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  to be quite successful around the same time, at the end of 1951.
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  Alfa Romeo, who had had two very successful years with the LF Fetas,
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  decided that that wouldn't be a long term proposition going forward with those cars.
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  They were at the end of their development potential, and you couldn't increase
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  the uh uh, compression ratios and the supercharger pressures and so on,
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  and you couldn't deal with the fuel consumption that increased exponentially.
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  So the abandoned racing.
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  Completely.
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  Now if, if you are a competitor in this Grand Prix racing scene
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  and you think about, well, I have to compete with Mercedes again,
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  they're not doing things half baked.
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  You have to have the financial strengths.
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  And you have to have the intellectual strength to build a
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  true competitor, a good car that can indeed meet and beat Mercedes-Benz.
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  It takes something.
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  So here is where I, we are off into La la land if you want.
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  So during 1952, where could a group come about that would make a
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  challenge for Mercedes, not in France?
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  I think, you know, the CTA arsenal was.
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  Rolling disaster and would not have yielded a real competitor in England.
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  BRM was a, uh, bureaucratic mess, and it wasn't really going anywhere
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  fast, and it was also too much looking backwards to the 1930s technology wise.
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  So I could see that scenario in Italy.
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  If you reconstruct something like the ion that had been very successful in Germany
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  and had provided this competitive product to Mercedes in form of the, uh, mid-engine
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  silver arrows that were initially designed by failure net Porsche and.
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  Engineering office and then, uh, Nan Ho in particular insourced
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  more and more of that activity.
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  So I suggest something like this, and.
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  Bil should, uh, happen in northern Italy and it would be where, you know, out in
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  Germany was pretty much mandated by the banks that they had to support the capital
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  in Italy, the IRI, the state holding.
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  To which Alpha Romeo already belonged, would be a good vehicle to provide some
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  serious competition to fiat, which totally dominated the uh, Italian auto scene
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  volume wise and value wise, something needed to be done because frankly, I
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  think people with some foresight knew that companies like ER and Alpha Mayo.
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  By themselves couldn't survive long term.
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  Hindsight tells us that they didn't, but we're back in 1951 ish, two ish.
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  This could have happened.
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  We could have had a conglomerate of different, uh, brands that would cover
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  different segments in the marketplace.
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  They could even have an, um, a foreign branch in France.
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  ARD would be a, a good candidate.
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  In those days, you couldn't trade easily across country boundaries.
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  So Fiat had sim.
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  In France, we would have ARD and uh, we would have a luxury segment
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  where Luncher would play a big role.
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  Ista Fch would also be integrated, the name rights would be acquired,
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  and you would establish the luxury and the top end of the range.
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  With that brand, there would be an entry also, in terms of a tubial.
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  Vehicles and the scooter, a pretty rugged scooter from is O was available.
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  So we have already the low cost entry brand is O auto vehicle that makes this
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  ISTA and they also made the scooter.
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  So we cover that.
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  And also in addition, goes back to last year's presentation.
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  We also have a branch that deals with ag tractors 'cause that helps.
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  Uh, developed the metso join region in Italy, and that's,
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  uh, one of the motivators why.
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  IRI will support the sole effort.
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  This sole effort needs also to be joined by Pelli, which has an
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  interest in promoting their tires.
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  And altogether, this could be a competitor or could be the financial
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  resource, intellectual resource to provide a real competitor to Mercedes.
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  So we have a few individuals here that will constitute the core team.
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  But the head would be Robert Horst, who had ample experience in
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  mid-engine cars at Ion before the war.
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  After the war.
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  He was involved in the Alia 360, which also was designed and outsourced and
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  relocated team of Porsche engineering.
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  Fer.
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  Porsche was incarcerated at the time in France, but his son and some of the
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  old team members were working there.
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  I put here Kois as kind of the project manager in place
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  as the right hand of Iran.
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  Horst, who was certainly the intellectual mastermind, but not necessarily
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  involved in all the nitty gritty.
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  So Nico is, will take care of that.
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  He has, um, experience at the Alfreda program and we bring in.
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  Different generations.
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  I think from my own professional experience, I think it's always
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  very helpful when you have multiple generations on a team, not just an inbred
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  group, so to speak, of gray beards.
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  You need some of them, but you don't want to have the.
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  Whole team of them.
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  So we recruit and those are real people.
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  Of course, as you know, Kalo Kitty and Choto Sini, both
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  are already at Alpha Romeo.
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  It makes sense to rely on them a lot for chassis and for
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  development and test and so on.
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  They're enthused and they come very importantly from the University of Pisa.
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  So they have at least in, in.
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  Case and degree in aeronautical engineering, and we'll see later on
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  that taking license from or learning from aeronautical designs and skills and
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  technologies makes a lot of sense when you want to build a world beat a race car.
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  On the engine side, we lean more on the ER personnel.
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  There is of course Francesco Lio, who pretty much developed
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  the V six engine at Luncher.
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  The principles, at least the angle of 60 degrees.
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  It goes back to him.
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  He analyzed the dynamics of various V angles and when you look at the history
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  of Blanche and you know, they experimented with everything from 11 degrees.
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  Downwards or upwards and 60 degrees is obviously the ideal, but there's also
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  a solution with 120 degrees later on.
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  Dillo found that already in the 1940s, so he is obviously a member of the team.
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  Then, uh, the kina is maybe a more practical engine designer who can detail.
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  An engine war, and he has shown that already as, as a long term
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  launcher engineer, I couldn't get any biographic information on him.
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  Maybe that's where some librarians can help me in the future.
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  And then of course, this fellow here.
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  We'll learn more about him.
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  Jose Mika, who retired in 1950 from the Porsche engineering team.
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  We'll rehire him as a consultant because he's a specialist in aerodynamics, and
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  we understand aerodynamics will play a big role if we want to beat Mercedes.
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  And it's also important to work very closely with the tire manufacturer.
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  So we want to have somebody.
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  I'm not particular about the name from Pelli, from the tire partner
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  because suspension, layout and design will have to be very closely
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  coordinated with the tire capabilities.
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  And so you want to have the tire people on your side.
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  It's one of the lessons also from the Solar Arrow pre-World
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  War II, where Mercedes worked very closely with Continental and
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  that was very helpful to them.
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  Porsche and uh, ot.
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  We're not quite as engaged with Continental, and it was
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  to their detriment sometimes.
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  So the first task of this newly formed team was before you start
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  designing anything, you know, go by this ancient wisdom here.
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  If you know you're enemy and you know yourself.
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  You need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
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  So find out as much as possible about Mercedes.
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  Where are they going?
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  What can you expect from them?
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  Rather than focusing just on your own thoughts and say, we know best
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  how to build the best race car.
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  Anticipate what your enemy or your competitor will
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  do, and then not copy them.
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  The goal is not to copy them.
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  You cannot out Mercedes.
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  Mercedes, you know, if you try.
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  It's a losing battle.
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  You have to do something.
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  You have to look for unfair quote unquote advantages, and you
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  have to do something different.
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  For example, mid-engine layout as opposed to what is most likely
• 17:15
  mercedes's solution, the front engine.
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  And then as mentioned before, aeronautics holds.
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  A lot of nuggets of wisdom and a lot of technology pieces you want to adopt.
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  So you won't send out people like Ka Kitty to snoop around what's
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  going on in aeronautics and at the universities that still teach that
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  there wasn't too much actual building and designing going on after World War.
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  'cause of restrictions by the Allied forces.
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  So what can you expect reasonably from Mercedes-Benz?
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  Well, we know the company wanted and did indeed, uh, recover from the ashes.
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  There was a lot of rebuilding going on because Mercedes had a very loyal
• 17:57
  workforce and a lot of people that had survived World War II went back
• 18:01
  to remove some of the rubbles and to secure some of the machinery
• 18:05
  and repaired and to improve on it.
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  Uh, it's pretty obvious that AU and Auer will stay engaged.
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  Auer already in his sixties, you can imagine, tend to relive the old days,
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  the glory days of thirties, and that's why he pushed for, you know, this
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  early engagement in Buenos iris in 51 because you thought, Hey, we have
• 18:29
  the goods still here, and why don't we just refresh a little bit when we.
• 18:33
  Uh, had been successful with, I think Rudolph, by his nature, was
• 18:38
  more interested in a clean sheet design and be more in the times
• 18:43
  then rather than looking backward.
• 18:45
  What you know about Mercedes is they are very methodical in their development.
• 18:50
  They're not just going from the drawing board quickly to the foundry.
• 18:54
  And to the machine shop and then assemble and go to the racetrack.
• 18:58
  That's not their way of doing things.
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  They will work on components, test the components to death, assemble the
• 19:05
  components to subsystems test again in the lab, the systems and subsystems to death.
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  When that all works out, then they have a car, and then they will also test it
• 19:16
  first on a lab with a rolling surface.
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  And before they ever hit the tracks, they will know a lot about the vehicle
• 19:23
  and its capabilities, and then they will go out to the track finally.
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  And then there's only small modific.
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  Necessary some tuneups.
• 19:32
  And this leads to a situation, this is one of my rocking horses here that I like
• 19:38
  to think about and talk about, and that's the evolution strategy as it applies to,
• 19:43
  uh, technical systems and developments.
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  The speed of progress.
• 19:47
  You can say it depends on the mutation size.
• 19:52
  How much do you change you?
• 19:53
  You start typically with some known platform, state of the
• 19:57
  art, and if you do very little, there's practically no progress.
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  If you move on, you get onto a pretty steep curve of rapid progress.
• 20:07
  And, and there's certain window within you can operate.
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  If you're too low here with two small steps of improvement,
• 20:14
  you're not accomplishing much.
• 20:15
  If you're going overboard, you end up here, you end up in a alia
• 20:20
  situation or in, um, a Monaco TRS comes to mind in a freeboard design
• 20:26
  of a, uh, grand Prix car, which was basically a, an airplane without wings.
• 20:31
  You know, the, there was a, uh, a radial engine at the front.
• 20:35
  It was.
• 20:35
  Hanging over the front exel and mass distribution was something
• 20:38
  like 70% front and 30% rear, which is a recipe for disaster.
• 20:43
  Of course, you don't have to be a specialist in engineering to see that.
• 20:47
  So that was a design that fell somewhere into this part of
• 20:50
  the, uh, evolution window.
• 20:52
  Clearly overshot.
• 20:53
  You want to avoid that.
• 20:55
  Mercedes was more in this conservative pioneering mode.
• 20:59
  Some people have characterized the company as.
• 21:02
  Conservative pioneers, they're going for progress.
• 21:05
  One example would be that we learn in real history later on, you know, they go
• 21:10
  from carburate to fuel injection and it's an incremental improvement, but it's one
• 21:15
  that's solid and it brings some progress.
• 21:17
  It's very measurable, but they wouldn't go completely to a rotary
• 21:22
  engine or something right off the bat.
• 21:25
  There will be a tight budget.
• 21:26
  Don't expect any state subsidies or payments.
• 21:31
  Directly or indirectly, because Germany didn't have much surplus to throw around.
• 21:37
  They had hardly been able to cover the basics.
• 21:40
  But there would be technical inputs, of course, from suppliers that Mercedes had
• 21:45
  a tradition working with like Porsche Continental and then the fuel supplier.
• 21:51
  It was important too because the fuel in those days was free.
• 21:54
  Formula didn't prescribe commercially available gasoline.
• 21:58
  You could brew your own mix, which they certainly did.
• 22:01
  And then there was of course the engineering force within the corporation.
• 22:04
  You could always ring up a colleague or meet over lunch
• 22:08
  and get some inputs and so on.
• 22:09
  So there was quite a bit of intellectual property and capability there.
• 22:15
  Now Mercedes obviously lost the uh, local nemes.
• 22:19
  Out on Yon, there was no chance that out on Yon would get back racing.
• 22:23
  They hardly survived and they were cut into two pieces.
• 22:26
  One in East Germany and one in West Germany, or one in the Soviet zone.
• 22:31
  The other one in the American Zone.
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  Uh, so there was no chance for that.
• 22:35
  So when they did something, it, it would have to have some benefit for their
• 22:41
  serious production side of the business.
• 22:44
  And so it's very likely, very probable that they would stick to the front
• 22:49
  engine because all their commercial.
• 22:51
  Products would be front engine taken a little dive via Edmund MLA in the 1920s.
• 22:58
  The, um, say this or the Bens our age var, but that didn't last very long.
• 23:04
  And so very unlikely that they would make a jump that would to them look like going.
• 23:10
  Potentially, uh, down the drain, they would probably hang onto the swing
• 23:14
  AXLs or pendulum AXLs because that was also their bread and butter product.
• 23:19
  Now, one would expect that they would modify this thing a little
• 23:22
  bit because we know swing AXLs and we'll get to that in a moment, are
• 23:26
  not the ca meow for Good Road ho.
• 23:29
  So a case in point for all this, looking more toward what they have
• 23:33
  and what they want to commercialize is the uh, W 1 94 project.
• 23:38
  This 300 SL first generation, that's an excellent model to study.
• 23:44
  If this case for this question that we have in front of us here, you see this?
• 23:49
  AU on the 300 representative car and very luxurious and expensive and a dream car.
• 23:55
  You know, for most Germans, it was totally an Tanium, and yet it
• 24:00
  showed, you know, we're back again and that would be the basis for
• 24:04
  this sports car that would go race.
• 24:07
  So they had an engine and they had to live with this engine because unlike
• 24:11
  Italians, they didn't jump right into making five different engines.
• 24:15
  Very quickly, they stuck with the block and with what they had to work with
• 24:19
  rather than tooling up very quickly.
• 24:21
  I'm amazed, and some people have written with amazement and with
• 24:25
  appreciation that, for example, designed 25 engines in five years, which was
• 24:30
  nuts for a small company like that.
• 24:33
  Mercedes had this one engine.
• 24:35
  Which was already an overhead camshaft engine.
• 24:38
  So a good start, but it was heavy, a boat anchor if you want.
• 24:41
  So it had to be augmented with other designs that were within
• 24:45
  the realm of possibility.
• 24:47
  And one was obviously aerodynamics.
• 24:49
  And that brings me to this image here, because in 1939 when the, uh, Italians,
• 24:56
  when they thought they were smart in prescribing, that the uh, grand Prix
• 25:01
  of Tripoli was for water tourette.
• 25:03
  Cars instead of regular concrete cars.
• 25:06
  They thought, well now our feas will have a good chance to win this race.
• 25:10
  Mercedes, at that time when they still had the pockets designed, the
• 25:13
  purpose built W 1 65 and sent to cars to Tripoli and, and ended up one two.
• 25:19
  But during qualification, they had to learn the better lesson that a four
• 25:24
  cylinder Maserati with a streamlined.
• 25:27
  Body work got the pole position.
• 25:29
  It was faster than the Mercedes cars.
• 25:31
  Unexpected in a way because the engine was clearly inferior.
• 25:34
  So I think they must have gotten a bit of a lesson there that, hey, we have to look
• 25:39
  at the, uh, drag reduction and, and so on.
• 25:42
  Also, again, to, um, study subsystems and obviously roof
• 25:49
  came up with the, uh, space frame.
• 25:52
  Concept, a very light frame to offset the high weight of the engine, but
• 25:56
  it was an unknown quantity and not many people have had built these
• 26:01
  types of delicate space frames.
• 26:03
  So they built a very quick mule car to test this concept early on before
• 26:08
  they ever went too far down the pike and designed this final 300 sl.
• 26:13
  Super light, but they did.
• 26:15
  And then to reduce the drag coefficient and to reduce the uh, frontal area,
• 26:20
  they angled or tilted the engine at about 55 degrees from horizontal
• 26:26
  to simply reduce the hood height and thereby increase there speed.
• 26:32
  And here you can see Charles Faru and Alfred Auer looking into the engine
• 26:37
  bay of that final product at the mall.
• 26:41
  So continued lessons to be learned from this.
• 26:43
  First of all, you learn Mercedes.
• 26:46
  They don't go full four out and design everything from scratch.
• 26:51
  On the other hand, they're willing to stretch the envelope,
• 26:53
  you know, to design solutions.
• 26:55
  Again, somewhat dictated of course by the space for want to have
• 26:59
  a deep door sill and threshold.
• 27:02
  They came up with the first iteration of the.
• 27:05
  Following doors that just reached down to the lower edge of the
• 27:09
  window, and you had to kind of wiggle yourself into the driver's.
• 27:13
  When it first got to the Elia in 52 with this scar, the, uh,
• 27:19
  inspectors were a little bit.
• 27:21
  Leery to accept that as doors and, and so it was a test for the subsequent
• 27:26
  LA Mall array, and I think they got into the lia was this type of door,
• 27:32
  quote unquote, later on for lamo.
• 27:34
  They changed it to the tall wing doors as we know them today.
• 27:38
  And that was in reaction to and knowing that they would.
• 27:42
  Meet less leniency with the French authorities and with
• 27:46
  the Italian authorities.
• 27:47
  Of course, in those years we're talking 1952, they also experimented
• 27:52
  with something that was a little bit out of the ordinary and a little bit
• 27:56
  advanced or too advanced for Mercedes.
• 27:58
  One could say this aerodynamic brake system.
• 28:01
  Some people will argue that was mostly shown during the time trials
• 28:05
  to confuse irritate competitors.
• 28:08
  It was never meant to be really used in racing.
• 28:11
  This was a little flimsy and it was taken down before the race began.
• 28:17
  But we also learned from this development that Mercedes was
• 28:21
  willing to accept imperfection.
• 28:23
  For example, when you look at the engine compartment, it has no ventilation.
• 28:27
  There is no way to get the air out in an ordinary or in a very optimized way
• 28:32
  where you help reduce overall drag.
• 28:35
  They fix that later on by having some openings, yet the side, but not in this
• 28:40
  first generation of the, uh, 300 ssl.
• 28:43
  So that was one, and then they stuck to this somewhat questionable.
• 28:48
  Pendulum rear suspension.
• 28:49
  Nevertheless, they were victorious in LA Mall and then particular at the
• 28:53
  car Pan Americana, which was quite an achievement for something that was
• 28:58
  built from bits and pieces that were originally meant for a luxurious car.
• 29:03
  Working.
• 29:04
  On the other hand, what learned from there for the on automobile team is we prefer
• 29:10
  chassis over engine power battalions.
• 29:13
  Typically, were interested in, for Ferrari in particular, the race car was
• 29:17
  a big engine, very powerful, and the rest was just a means to move forward.
• 29:23
  Chassis was never really his.
• 29:24
  Preference in those days, at least in this case, our team will think
• 29:29
  differently and will work with Pelli closely to introduce the radial tires,
• 29:34
  which Pelli had developed at that time.
• 29:37
  Not for racing, but for passenger car applications.
• 29:40
  Uh, sports car applications, Chira.
• 29:44
  Let's see, 67, and we add on a competition on version of that tire.
• 29:49
  We'll use it for our dream car.
• 29:52
  Yeah, of course.
• 29:53
  That also means the driving style has to be adapted to that.
• 29:58
  It's not totally easy from people who grew up with cross supplied tires.
• 30:01
  They have some difficulties and that will require also very methodical testing.
• 30:07
  Let's look at other components that are important.
• 30:09
  The chassis frame itself is very important 'cause you want to have a very stiff
• 30:14
  chassis, and the flexibility has to be in the suspension system and not
• 30:19
  like letter frames or the frame itself was the spring system for most parts.
• 30:25
  We have some lessons to learn from Alia, for example, but this Porsche design
• 30:31
  very strangely has this space frame, but it doesn't make use of triangulation.
• 30:38
  You don't see that any of these, uh, square gaps are broken
• 30:42
  up with some triangulation.
• 30:45
  Very strange.
• 30:45
  I'm not sure.
• 30:46
  What their motive was 'cause they were not under weight restrictions.
• 30:51
  Really, to me that seems like a half-baked solution, knowing the quality
• 30:56
  of the engineers that were involved.
• 30:58
  Alpha Romeo with the feta, particularly when they ran to the end of its
• 31:03
  usefulness and modified it to the uh, 1 59, which had the rear axle had also.
• 31:12
  At least some specimens had this additional framework here.
• 31:16
  So you see the original letter frame, oval profile here, and then you can
• 31:21
  see they already made some augmentation added basically, and upper gird and did,
• 31:27
  uh, the reinforcement between the two girders quite well, but there was only
• 31:32
  a partial solution because it didn't have any lateral connection really.
• 31:36
  But it was better than nothing.
• 31:38
  What makes more sense is a true 3D space frame, as you can see in
• 31:42
  some of the airplanes of the time.
• 31:44
  That's where one of our references to aviation comes in the space
• 31:49
  frame of a Boeing Stamen plane, which was a training plane.
• 31:53
  For the most part, it gives us a good idea of spatial triangulation of the frame.
• 31:59
  Then, of course, we can even go further.
• 32:01
  But this is one bridge too far.
• 32:03
  I would argue for race car designers, you could use the geodesic fuselage
• 32:08
  of British airplanes were successful in World War II and were very
• 32:13
  immune against partial destruction.
• 32:16
  They could take a lot of damage and could still go back to the base.
• 32:20
  You see some spinal framework here that is then cla it by aluminum or fabric.
• 32:27
  Whatever the material of choice was.
• 32:29
  This is a little bit too much for race car.
• 32:31
  It's also not as easily scaled down from the airplane size to the
• 32:36
  car size, so this is a more likely and more successful solution.
• 32:41
  This could be foreshadowing of Mono Cox structures, but again, that's one
• 32:47
  or two bridges too far for the time.
• 32:49
  Keep in mind, race car designers are also people and they work and concern
• 32:54
  themselves about their daily lives and their continuation of their careers.
• 32:58
  If they go too far away, it goes back to that evolution function.
• 33:03
  If they veer out too far from the known.
• 33:06
  They risk that they have a big failure, and having a big failure with something
• 33:10
  that's a traditional design is tolerable.
• 33:13
  You can always say, well, everybody else did something like that.
• 33:16
  If you risk and stick out your neck too much with something that's totally unique.
• 33:21
  And it fails everybody and their brother will say, well,
• 33:25
  you shouldn't have done that.
• 33:25
  Right?
• 33:26
  Could be a career modifying event, but we're talking
• 33:30
  about wheels and suspensions.
• 33:31
  Let's start with wheels.
• 33:32
  First state of the art were wire wheels, and particularly Bani was
• 33:38
  one of the favorite suppliers for that, but that was also a fairly
• 33:42
  flexible wheel, and it needed tuning and adjusting and maintenance.
• 33:47
  Cooper early on after World War ii.
• 33:50
  Changed over to cast electron wheels, and part of the reason was that it was
• 33:56
  easier to get aluminum mag magnesium in England after World War II than steel
• 34:01
  still was rationed and a lot of aluminum was found from war efforts and equipment.
• 34:09
  So that was one thing.
• 34:10
  And it was also good for Cooper spare part business.
• 34:14
  It was a an OEM wheel that couldn't easily be replaced as something else.
• 34:18
  But more importantly, in the US Heli, brandand had introduced already and proven
• 34:24
  the, uh, magnesium cast wheels machined then to fit, and that won the 1952 in
• 34:31
  the 500, and it became commonplace.
• 34:34
  So I'm wondering why people in Europe didn't look at those.
• 34:38
  Developments and said, Hmm, there is an advantage here.
• 34:41
  We save some unsprung weight and we get a more rigid product.
• 34:47
  That is obviously proven on high speed oils.
• 34:50
  And then let's look at suspension systems quickly.
• 34:53
  ER had already introduced with the first generation of the aurel,
• 34:58
  a semi trailing independent rear suspension, uh, which you can see it.
• 35:04
  Top view of here would be the a coil spring and the attachment
• 35:08
  points to the chassis, and it's the drive shaft the wheel.
• 35:13
  So this would be a start, we think for.
• 35:16
  Uh, development for an optimized rear wheel suspension, independent suspension.
• 35:21
  For a race car, it has its pros and cons as well, but you can play
• 35:25
  a lot with the different angles and orientations of components.
• 35:29
  You can do that in 3D and get some reductions in tow, in and in Canberra.
• 35:35
  Change with the, uh, spring deflection.
• 35:38
  So there's probably something to be found.
• 35:40
  Now we assume that a Mercedes must stick with the pendulum axles, maybe in this
• 35:47
  format, but it, it's the one that gives you the highest roll center, and that's
• 35:52
  not very popular really for race cars.
• 35:54
  You can really get to the point where you check up the one wheel
• 35:58
  and it leads to instabilities.
• 36:00
  You have pretty steep kember angle changes.
• 36:04
  It's not the best thing for a race car, so we assume that it as well
• 36:08
  modify that you try to make the, uh, pendulum lengths as long as possible.
• 36:13
  So you could do something that goes underneath, uh, could even
• 36:17
  to the opposite side, and you could crisscross the links there.
• 36:21
  So I would expect they're putting myself into it.
• 36:25
  1952 that it would work on some of this stuff.
• 36:28
  And what we see here is an interesting car from New Zealand and it dovetails
• 36:34
  quite well with people that came back from World War ii, had aircraft experience
• 36:39
  where aircraft mechanics, a couple of folks in New Zealand built their own car.
• 36:45
  They had studied and read about the Aon.
• 36:49
  Mid-engine configuration and they said we can build that too, and we can go to
• 36:53
  the scrap yard or to the, um, auction places where you can buy cheaply.
• 36:58
  The surplus from the army and from the air Force, and that's what they did.
• 37:03
  So they built their own interesting car and it had a very low pivot swing
• 37:09
  axle arrangement, which is shown here in a, in a picture of the renovated
• 37:15
  or restored version of this car here.
• 37:17
  This is, looks almost like it's over restored, but it's interesting.
• 37:21
  You see very long arms of this swing axle.
• 37:25
  They almost merged to, to a single axis of rotation down here, very low.
• 37:30
  And they also pilfered some Lio struts from airplanes and
• 37:36
  used them as spring and damper.
• 37:38
  Very innovative and very interesting.
• 37:40
  Car.
• 37:40
  Not too much is known about this.
• 37:43
  RA four vineyard, which worked with a four cylinder standard Vanguard engine,
• 37:48
  slightly supercharged, and it had 2088.
• 37:52
  C. So it was a formula Lire car and didn't qualify for a Grand Prix,
• 37:58
  but it was pretty much only raised in New Zealand, but it has been
• 38:02
  restored in England and it will come to a couple of events in Florida.
• 38:07
  One is uh, Moda Miami and the other is Amelia.
• 38:12
  So you will see if you get there, you will see the sky in real life.
• 38:18
  And can see more than from these pictures, but an interesting way that tinkerers
• 38:23
  worked on something that made a lot of sense and they had a lot of fun with it.
• 38:28
  One of the mechanics was then the driver, and he managed to participate
• 38:33
  at Lady Wig Ram Trophy runs for several years was modest success.
• 38:39
  Brakes of course are important for the race car.
• 38:41
  What can you do there?
• 38:43
  Obviously, ventilated drum brakes were the industry standard fin processes
• 38:48
  were often used to bond strongly and have a low thermal resistance between
• 38:53
  the iron liners and the aluminum body.
• 38:57
  With fins, different shapes of fins.
• 39:00
  But by 1952, disc brakes became already a possibility for race cars.
• 39:06
  And again, that's a technology that comes from airplanes.
• 39:10
  Yeah.
• 39:10
  During World War ii, a lot of airplanes, British American used already a form of.
• 39:15
  Disc brakes and there were several manufacturers.
• 39:18
  Dunlop was one of them.
• 39:19
  Dunlop worked with Jaguar on, on sports cars and growing with BRM
• 39:24
  and got that to science already.
• 39:27
  And then, uh, Tony Derval, who had already started his own activities with
• 39:31
  the thin wall specials that I want also to have the latest technology in brakes.
• 39:37
  And he worked with Goodyear and got some disc brake systems there.
• 39:41
  But we can assume that that technology was off limits for Mercedes.
• 39:45
  I cannot imagine that any of these companies, particularly Dunlop,
• 39:49
  that helped Jaguar, would also help Mercedes to beat the snot of Jaguar.
• 39:55
  I think that was off limits, and I think Mercedes understood that.
• 39:59
  And so they were.
• 40:00
  Working with these aerodynamic breaks that we saw already, this roof mounted effort.
• 40:05
  And there's also a, uh, patent that was issued to Auto Neon in 1941.
• 40:11
  Fortunately, that image didn't make it, but it's a German patent
• 40:14
  that was issued, and that shows an aerodynamic break, basically
• 40:18
  a wing that you can flip up with.
• 40:21
  Server power from the engine and assist in braking, probably tailored
• 40:26
  to those records trips that people made on the auto barn, but it could
• 40:30
  be used in Grand Prix racing as well.
• 40:32
  There was nothing.
• 40:33
  That would prohibit that Anyway, that would be one way to get
• 40:37
  around the, this great embargo that I would think was prevalent.
• 40:43
  The other thing is driver position is one thing, particularly with the
• 40:47
  front engine car, the typical bomber seat, you know where you sit pretty
• 40:51
  upright, like in an arm chair or the chairs you're sitting on, the driver.
• 40:57
  Sits very upright and provides quite an obstacle to the aerodynamic profile.
• 41:02
  And fortunately, this picture came across here and that is
• 41:08
  in, uh, what is called Zenger.
• 41:11
  He erased this thing that was.
• 41:13
  Based on the Volkswagen 64 or Porsche 64 project, got one.
• 41:19
  You know, he was an Austrian, so he was close to the Austrian
• 41:22
  Porsche office at the time.
• 41:24
  So he got one of these, uh, 60 fours, which they were intended for the, uh,
• 41:28
  Berlin, Rome long distance arrays.
• 41:31
  That never happened, if I recall that correctly.
• 41:34
  So he got that and you have to consider and had a, a pretty
• 41:40
  severe motorcycle accident.
• 41:41
  So his right arm was not useful to him and he needed to be able to lean on the
• 41:48
  steering wheel when he changed gears.
• 41:49
  So he had a shifter on left hand side.
• 41:52
  And he leaned forward on the steering wheel to shift gears.
• 41:56
  So it was a bit of an aberration.
• 41:57
  He needed that kind of seating position.
• 41:59
  But you can see here it's unfortunate.
• 42:01
  It's, uh, not the optimum solution when you have a rear engine or mid engine.
• 42:06
  In our case.
• 42:07
  On the other hand, what we learned from aeronautics, and particularly from
• 42:12
  glider planes or sail planes, there was a development going on at the, uh,
• 42:17
  polytechnic in terrain in, uh, 1953 in particular, there was a new Chro d Olo
• 42:25
  Avela that was founded, and it was kind of an operation in the corner of a lab first.
• 42:31
  But the, uh, team there wanted to change the whole composition of sail planes.
• 42:37
  'cause in sail planes, they have no engine.
• 42:39
  Obviously you need to have a very low frontal profile.
• 42:43
  You need to have very low drag coefficient.
• 42:46
  And what they introduced was a leaned backwards position of the pilot.
• 42:52
  It's almost a position like you find in or found then in the, uh, say the
• 42:57
  low grand Prix cars, particularly the monocoque versions, you know, and
• 43:01
  they could also beef that up with, uh, some scientific investigations.
• 43:06
  I have the source given here that there are optimum angles for body parts.
• 43:12
  And they're not 90 degrees.
• 43:14
  And so the upright sitting position is not necessarily the best, particularly
• 43:18
  if you don't have to have high steering forces to work with, which was one of
• 43:22
  the reasons why people set so upright or why NASCAR drivers also hang on close to
• 43:28
  the steering wheel, at least the past.
• 43:30
  But in the case of a front, well of a, um, car with mid-engine, there's
• 43:35
  not much load on the front ax.
• 43:36
  Excellence of the steering effort, it's much lower.
• 43:38
  So you can get by with this more relaxed.
• 43:42
  Leaned back sitting position and it's now a standard practice
• 43:45
  of course in sail planes.
• 43:47
  But in 53 that was something that was, was pretty new, in fact it was unheard of.
• 43:53
  And people were wondering, can the pilots do that?
• 43:55
  And they had some test flights and they felt, Hey, this is great actually.
• 43:59
  And so, uh, we sent of course Kalo Kitty around different universities.
• 44:05
  Naturally he has to go to, to and to Milan and understand what's going on there.
• 44:11
  And so he comes across this and the innovator and the young man who wants
• 44:16
  to make his place in the history comes across this and says, Hey, why don't
• 44:20
  we experiment with that and reduce the frontal area of foreign Grand Prix.
• 44:25
  And that goes on with, with engines also quickly talking
• 44:28
  about different engine choices.
• 44:31
  It seems quite reasonable for the two and a half liter formula, first of
• 44:34
  all, that it shows the, uh, naturally aspirated one and the, uh, supercharged
• 44:39
  version that was allowed at 750 cc.
• 44:43
  The penalty for supercharging was just too high.
• 44:46
  So you look at the 2.5 liter engine and you ask yourself, how
• 44:50
  many cylinders do you really need?
• 44:52
  You need 16 cylinders or 24 or or four, maybe six is a good compromise.
• 44:59
  Very likely because you can see Jaguar was very successful.
• 45:02
  Was there six cylinders?
• 45:04
  Mercedes had just proven, uh, with the, uh, 1 94 project that, hey.
• 45:08
  We can win the races and championships with six cylinder engines.
• 45:11
  And of course, they had slammed it at Mercedes, their engine.
• 45:15
  That was brought to an even more dramatic fact in the Cummins Diesels
• 45:20
  special of 1952 that participated in the Indy 500, and there was Freddie
• 45:26
  Cummins desire to prove that diesel engines could be very successful in
• 45:31
  any application, including race cars.
• 45:33
  So you built this special.
• 45:35
  Car with the Watson chassis, elongated and modified in many ways, but he chose to
• 45:41
  tilt the engine practically by 90 degrees.
• 45:44
  So the crankshaft is about here, and this is the cylinder head.
• 45:48
  Now this was, uh, overhead valve engine, as I understand it was turbocharged and
• 45:54
  it was, was tilted for minimum front area.
• 45:57
  So you could think Mercedes should think about those lines as well.
• 46:01
  In our case here for mobility, we say, well, Landa is really our
• 46:07
  flagship brand and it relies on V six engines to a great extent.
• 46:11
  Why don't we also make our racing engine just like, say that D 20 V
• 46:16
  six lunch here that they had already at a 60 degree cylinder angle.
• 46:20
  Makes good sense.
• 46:21
  It's a short engine.
• 46:22
  It allows more space for the reclined driver position.
• 46:26
  So let's do that.
• 46:28
  But maybe we should change the angle as.
• 46:32
  The Vergilio had proposed you can do that 220 degrees to make a shallower engine.
• 46:38
  So I put in this image here, which to be honest is not from the time we're talking
• 46:44
  about this, uh, a more recent South African aircraft engine, and it's a 120.
• 46:51
  Degree V six cylinder engine, just to show you what the, the
• 46:55
  form factor would look like.
• 46:57
  I think that would give a pretty optimal configuration for a, uh, mid engine
• 47:03
  configuration that minimizes the frontal area and the, uh, a drag coefficient.
• 47:09
  That's it.
• 47:09
  So we assume that Mercedes will do this and, and use an inline six
• 47:15
  system, which we can't know at the time that that was the wrong assumption.
• 47:19
  Uh, I can live with that.
• 47:20
  And fuel injection is almost inevitable.
• 47:23
  And the, um, question is, can you even go as far as direct injection into the
• 47:28
  combustion chamber, or do you allow for an indirect injection ahead of the, uh.
• 47:35
  Inlet valves.
• 47:36
  Mercedes obviously had some experience in the, uh, DB 601 aircraft engine of
• 47:43
  World War II with direct injection, and we know that Schonberg, who was
• 47:48
  the engineer involved, was parked at the time, still at a small company.
• 47:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 47:53
  Called Good Broad until he got through his deification process
• 47:57
  and then could join Mercedes again.
• 47:59
  Very likely that he would push for an adaptation of this kind of injection.
• 48:05
  On the other hand, Italy had quite a lot to offer in terms
• 48:08
  of indirect uh, injection.
• 48:11
  Fellow Avi Fudo had patented the application in in 1937, a solution for.
• 48:20
  A very smart electrical injection.
• 48:23
  Very much like most cars that we drive today have their injection
• 48:28
  system and no electronics obviously.
• 48:30
  'cause that wasn't invented yet, but the basic makings were already there.
• 48:34
  And this thing raised in the, uh, Elia of, uh, 1940.
• 48:39
  There was an alpha Romeo, two and a half liter six C equipped with
• 48:44
  this type of injection system.
• 48:45
  And it ran on a mix of palm oil.
• 48:48
  I understand.
• 48:49
  And some other non-conventional fuel component.
• 48:53
  'cause that was when Italy was in this archy.
• 48:57
  Mode and couldn't import a lot of mineral oil.
• 49:00
  And so it was a, a theme that fit into the landscape and it, it demonstrated and
• 49:05
  also in a gera motorbike, as I understand that the system worked quite well.
• 49:11
  It got forgotten for quite some time, but you could see electromagnetic
• 49:15
  injection valves here, actuated and timed by a distributor system.
• 49:21
  Very much like your time, the ignition.
• 49:23
  So it was not a continuous injection.
• 49:25
  Like say the Hillborn system in the US would've been.
• 49:28
  So that's basically what we decide, or we leave it to the engineering team.
• 49:33
  Do they want to go with a speaker direct injection that they also
• 49:37
  have at their disposal within for Mayo, or when they go with something
• 49:41
  like this indirect injection.
• 49:43
  So then we say our, our special source will be the emphasis on aerodynamics
• 49:49
  and we want to create downforce.
• 49:51
  And we saw this picture of the TAD yesterday that was explained to us.
• 49:55
  You can see the fellow who was behind it was a, uh, who was behind the
• 50:00
  patent that you see figures from here.
• 50:02
  And you can see that he not only had side wings, but he also had an elevated
• 50:09
  wing with end caps and all the makings of a modern aerodynamic concept.
• 50:13
  So we put all this together into a final product and we think we can beat Mercedes.
• 50:21
  On a good day, not always, but on a good day.
• 50:29
  Thank you, Carl.
• 50:31
  I think we have some questions.
• 50:32
  My thing that strikes me always when you have these discussions, why wasn't
• 50:37
  this sort of analysis carried out then?
• 50:40
  It's very capable.
• 50:41
  Everything's there.
• 50:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 50:43
  So why was the contemporary thinking not along these lines?
• 50:48
  Because it's, I know it is just retroactively.
• 50:50
  Yeah.
• 50:51
  But all that was available then.
• 50:54
  Yeah.
• 50:54
  And I limit myself particularly to the availability of
• 50:58
  technology bits and pieces.
• 51:00
  In hindsight, it's very easy to throw in electronics, for example,
• 51:03
  which wasn't available then.
• 51:05
  But a good answer of that is.
• 51:08
  I think I mentioned it briefly, people want to survive in
• 51:11
  their organizations, right?
• 51:13
  And for example, if you're in it, at least in the time when computers
• 51:18
  first came up, if you specified IBM computers, you were home free.
• 51:24
  It didn't matter that they were not as functional performance wise.
• 51:29
  They may have had bad service whatsoever, but it was IBM.
• 51:33
  And so if you were issuing the purchase order for IBM computers.
• 51:38
  You survived easily, even if things fell by the wayside, if you would've specified
• 51:43
  some more exotic, more powerful computer and it would've given you difficulties.
• 51:48
  Everybody points at you and says, you, why did you do that?
• 51:53
  You know, how could you do that?
• 51:55
  So it's always safer to stay with the incumbent solutions, and it takes risk.
• 52:00
  It takes the right personalities to venture out a little bit.
• 52:04
  And with this.
• 52:05
  Evolution window, you have to be really careful not to
• 52:08
  go too far out and and fail.
• 52:10
  So I think there's more incentive for playing it safe than being too daring.
• 52:17
  And there's a herd mentality.
• 52:19
  So if everybody uses Webber Carburetors in rating, why
• 52:23
  should I do something different?
• 52:24
  Right?
• 52:25
  But if you want to beat the other guy, as I mentioned, you cannot out Mercedes.
• 52:30
  Mercedes, don't even try it.
• 52:33
  You have to do something different and you have to take the risk
• 52:35
  and to be willing to risk.
• 52:37
  I think Iran Horst had demonstrated it throughout his career that
• 52:41
  he was willing to do that.
• 52:43
  Thank you, Carl.
• 52:44
  Thank you.
• 52:55
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