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Argento e Rosso: Reimagining the Mid-Engine Revolution in Grand Prix Racing · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Brake 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
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Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
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Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
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Argento e Ebroso, an alternative story of the mid engine
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revolution by Carl Heinz Mertens.
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Dr.
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Karl Heinz Mertens holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering and a
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doctorate degree in engineering from the Technical University in Berlin, Germany.
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He has over 35 years of engineering and business experience in Europe
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and the United States with focus on product innovation and new business
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incubation using cross disciplinary methods and cross cultural sensitivities.
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His work includes experiments on intelligent mobile equipment and
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wind energy systems at the corporate engineering division of Deere and Company.
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His enthusiasm for Formula One began in 1961.
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Mertens presents a what if story.
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What if Robert Eberin von Eberhorst in 1953 would have joined the
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newly formed Unione Automobili instead of the Auto Union that was
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only a shadow of its former self?
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What if Francesco Di Virgilio and Ettore Zacconamina had been tasked with
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designing a compact V6 engine for the 2.
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5L GP Formula that would take on the rather conventional Mercedes W186?
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Eberin What if Joseph Michel's aerodynamic knowledge would have
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been applied to create downforce?
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Would lessons learned from pre war silver arrows and the untimely Sistalia
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Grand Prix project, when blended with elements of Lancia's passionate
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engineering culture, have accelerated rear engine revolution in Formula One?
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Our next presentation is, I love, I get to say this, I get to use some of my Italian.
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Argento e Rosto, An Alternate History of the Min Engine
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Revolution, by Carl Heinz Mertens.
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I love this topic.
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This is one of those things, thinking out of contrafactual history, is
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something that's being used a lot now to examine different events in history.
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I'm looking forward to this one.
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Thank you.
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Did it really need to take 25 years from the first cars that were winning
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Grand Prix races with the engine mounted behind the driver until it
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became commonplace and then all the U.
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S.
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Grand Prix's that were held here at this wonderful racetrack were all
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Contested by and won by cars that had the engine mounted behind the driver.
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It seemed to be the most normal thing in the world.
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So, let me run you through a few stages of what happened in reality,
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and then I will veer off into what I would submit as an alternative reality.
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And you can dispute that, and you can criticize me for some of the
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stupidities that I will throw out here.
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But it's something that I've been thinking about for a long time.
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And now in retirement, I've had time to really devote some
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quality time to this topic.
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And I want to share this with you, but I invite you to be critical with me.
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I start here at the year 1937, and this is just one of the races
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that we're counting towards the European Championship of Drivers.
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And what you see here is the typical view in those years.
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There are many silver cars, and they have just a sprinkle of red.
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There's a lot of Argento, a little sprinkle of Rosso in this image.
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The lone Alfa Romeo here of Tassio Nuvolari.
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In the pole position here is Bernd Rosemeyer in an Auto Union.
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As you may deduct here, the engine is really mounted behind the driver.
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Whereas all the Mercedes cars in the vicinity here, Herman Lang, Caracciola
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here, they all have the typical, classical front engined cars, just like
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the Thomas Flyer engine mounted in front of the person that drives the car, or
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the two people that were sitting there.
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That seemed to be the norm.
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Why even question that?
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And yet we know from many Instances in industry in art and so on things change
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and sometimes they have to change for good reasons But the underlying situation here.
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I want to point out quickly was that this happened all under the 750 kilogram
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formula that the CSI brought into action because the previous cars were
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getting too fast and too powerful.
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Thought was, well, if you limit the drive weight of the car to 750
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kilograms, then not much can happen.
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The engines will have to become smaller and there is just no chance
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for increase in performance and perhaps a decrease in safety of
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running these cars on the given tracks.
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The opposite happened.
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Rule makers did not really anticipate the tremendous progress that happened in
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metallurgy, in engineering in general, in tires, in many areas that compose the car.
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What happened was the technical complexity went up dramatically, the performance
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of these cars compared to the previous ones went up dramatically, and the
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dominance of that was held by the red cars, the Rosso element, switched over
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to the Agenta, to the silver cars, the ones that happened to be made
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in Germany, where I also come from.
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And as you see in the results here, the first three finishers were silver cars,
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Mercedes in the first two places, Auto Union number three, and Pazio several
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minutes distance came in as fourth.
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Two years prior, by the way, he had won this race because this man, von
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Bauchitsch, was abusing his tires and he didn't want to stop for a second
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tire change and he paid heavily for that and Nuvolari was the surprise winner.
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The organizers were not prepared to have a foreigner win the German Grand Prix.
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They were struggling to get the national anthem dug out and all those things.
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And it took a while for the spectators to recognize that they had a different
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winner than what they had expected.
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So there were a number of things happening under the 750 kilogram formula, but by and
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large, it was a duel between the silver arrows of Mercedes Benz and Auto Union.
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This period was one of disruptions.
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What became evident was that a complex car could no longer be designed and
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constructed by a singular genius.
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By an artisan, a craftsperson, it went to teams of specialists
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that replaced those individuals.
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That was difficult for some people, and as an example, Ettore Bugatti
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perhaps, and more pertinent to this talk than Vittorio Jano, were
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more in this category, I would say.
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They may not have been the best leaders of a team of specialists,
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and that's what came about.
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You can see here the Mercedes core team of their racing department, led by Uhlenhout.
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He was also the person that focused very much on a new chassis.
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paradigm where previously chassis were pretty flimsy affairs and the wheel
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suspension was pretty hard and the chassis was basically the suspension
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system, spring system that changed dramatically when the chassis was
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fortified and became much more stable.
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We also saw, as in the previous image, that the mid engined chassis,
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car concept became competitive.
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It was almost equal to the conventionals.
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So when that happens in a very short period of time, that's pretty
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amazing and should tell people that there's something to it.
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Because typically it takes a while for the new challenger to challenge
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an incumbent because the incumbent has naturally some 50 years of
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experience to refine the concept.
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So this was, was telling.
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I think also the uh, fascist governments in Italy and in Germany started to use and
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abuse GP racing for propaganda purposes.
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So it was no longer a matter of the individual driver and
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the team to be successful.
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Now you had to be successful for the whole nation or you would be criticized
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by masses and by the leadership.
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There were state subsidies paid in Germany.
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But they were relative minor contributions to the overall budget.
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This space race, so to speak, that happened in Germany was much
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more expensive than, say, the sums that were paid by the government.
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Going forward, Mercedes was well known, of course.
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But the challenger was Auto who?
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Auto Union.
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Not really an organization with a long history.
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Well, it was a company that was born out of necessity.
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There were four companies in Saxony, in Germany.
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And they were closely related geographically, but they all four
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had the same financial troubles and they had difficulties growing.
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The banks, namely the, uh, Saxon State Bank, was very worried about
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their investments and they said, something needs to change here.
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Why don't we bring those four?
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companies together and work towards economies of scale.
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So, in 1932, those four companies, previously independent, Audi, DKW, or
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DKW, Horsch and Wanderer, were brought together into this Auto Union AG.
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The company kept a multiple brand strategy.
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When you look at these bar graphs, you see that the portion of the
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bars here stands for the DKW, DKW.
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Contribution here, a very simple and low cost car made the majority
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of this business in terms of volume, sold cars per year.
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And you can see over the years, there was quite an increase.
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The company, Auto Union, became the number two in Germany, but not many people
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knew about the name and could relate the name to specific projects and products.
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So either they had to go big time into advertising or.
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and make a name for themselves.
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Now, Wanderer, one of the four constituents, had already had
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a good relationship with Dr.
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Ferdinand Porsche's engineering office out of Stuttgart, and he had
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designed some of the very successful Wanderer cars and engines for those,
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four cylinder, six cylinder, and he also had plans already in his mind.
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for a car from what was called then the P Wagen or P Wagen, a 4.
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4 liter V16 Grand Prix car with the engine mounted behind the driver.
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Wanderer was almost sold on it, but now they had to get approval from
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the Auto Union holding company.
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It took a while to get there, but finally that came to pass, particularly when
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the political landscape shifted around.
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at this time, and Hitler came into power, and he was very much into mass
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mobilization and automobile propagation.
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And he wanted to demonstrate, of course, the essential superpower of
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the German nation, and it could be demonstrated in some sort of a space
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race that at that point was auto racing.
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Now, the Porsche design, quite, Intricate and complex was only that.
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It was a design.
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Porsche's engineering office did not build anything, really,
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other than some rough prototypes.
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So it had to be done within Auto Union, that they had to come up with a real car.
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And the task was given to this gentleman here, who smokes, and the full picture
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would show there's a race car in this vicinity, and this is taken at the boxes.
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And it was Robert Eberhahn.
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from Eberhorst.
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His statement was from the get go he was completely convinced that this
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what he then called the rear engine concept was really the real deal and
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he was fully behind propagating that.
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Here we learn a little bit more about Ferdinand Porsche's P Wagen
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as documented in patent literature here and what you see here in
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particular is of course the general concept of the car and the engine is.
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The gearbox cantilevering behind the rear axle.
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What he pointed out in this particular text and claims was that the line
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here, the yellow line, which is close to what we today would call
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the roll axis of the vehicle.
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In those days, the term had not been coined, but he pointed out
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this axle was very important and it should go through the center
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of gravity of the unsprung mast.
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When that was accomplished, then there would be no sideway inclinations of the
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car, and they would be absolutely done with, and the car would really hold the
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road like a board sliding over the road.
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There would be no tilting or rolling of the car.
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You can see a little bit here, Bound Rosemeyer negotiating a corner at
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the Donington Circuit in England.
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You can see that there's not much roll here, But there's a lot of oversteer
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and opposite lock, and it wasn't easy to control these cars at the time.
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Because there's a bit of a flaw in this concept that looks good on
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paper, that there should be no roll.
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Roll is a pretty good early indicator that the car is getting closer to its
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limits, the adhesion limits of the tires.
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So, you want to have a little bit of roll, otherwise the driver will
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get much more surprised by the rear.
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That was a lesson after World War II.
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We skipped that dark part of history.
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The silver arrows were pretty much out of business.
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The Auto Union, as it was known then, was out of business.
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It was partially located in the Russian zone, what became then East Germany.
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And the smart people that worked there tried to get out
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of Dodge as quickly as possible.
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And they reestablished some smaller organization in West Germany, a
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new Auto Union, but not nearly as potent as the original was.
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And Mercedes Benz, the factories were in smithereens and they had to
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slowly rebuild their core business.
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Alfa Romeo, on the other hand, had a couple of challengers for post World War
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II Grand Prix racing at their disposal.
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They were smart enough to hide those assets well, protect them throughout
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the war, and they had two concepts.
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One was what we know as the 158 Alfietta, which was a conventional car with the
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engine in the front, and there was the second one, That was the 512, very much
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modeled after the Auto Union race cars.
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And you can see here, it had a very high roll center in the rear axle.
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And it pretty much copied the same slope of the roll axis as the 512.
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Porsche patented outline.
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This was more or less a brainchild or project directed by Fredo Ricard, who
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was a very theoretical man, studied, not necessarily the most practical
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person, and not a person who interacted well with the more practical people,
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maybe the previous artisan generation.
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There was a bit of a wall between them.
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So he persisted with this relatively high roll center here.
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The DDO are excellent.
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The back shows that there's a watts linkage.
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There was an unusual high placement of the roll center at the lateral
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arresting point of the DDO tube.
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So that was a bit of a flaw.
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Hence, there were some issues with the road holding of that prototype.
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There were almost two 512s.
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The first one was tested in 1940.
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It showed some difficulties with road holding.
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Now, on the other hand, the 158 had its own chassis impairments that
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would show up later as the engine horsepower increased quite dramatically.
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But for now you could argue when Alfa Romeo decided what to go racing
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with after World War II, the Alfetta, was the more reasonable choice.
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Early on, way back when I first thought about this alternative history, this
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seemed to be a perfect deviation point, you know, where you deviate from real
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history into La La Land, and my first thought was why don't we just shift from
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one car to the mid engined car, the 512?
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Well, it is not quite that easy.
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easy as it showed once I did a little bit of my way of research and dug
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into literature and all kinds of prior art that existed at the time.
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It seemed that there were issues obviously in the design which could
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have been changed and further developed.
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However, when Hugo Gombato, who was running Alfa Romeo at the time,
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was assassinated in 1945, Eric Cart, who came originally from
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Spain, felt for his own safety it was best to go back to Barcelona.
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And he had not made many friends within the Alfa organization, so when he left
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there were not many disciples that would have picked up and would have development
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of this quite visionary design of the 512.
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The engine, by the way, was certainly a superior element in that
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whole design compared to the 158.
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So, the revolution was suspended, and my story couldn't pivot at that point.
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In the meantime While Alfa Romeo was quite successful in the, um, driver
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world championship in 1950 and 51, at the beginning of the Formula One as we
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know it, Mercedes was still rebuilding the core business, but they had declared
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already in 51 that by 54, when the new 2.
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5 liter Formula One would come into being, that they would start participating in it.
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Now, they had a new project leader in Hans Schoenberg, But they also had
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some of the old experienced guys like Alfred Neubauer, Rudolf Uhlenhout
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at their disposal to start building this next generation of Silver Arrow.
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And they had roughly 200 staff members at their disposal, which is a huge number.
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Number of engineers and technicians and fabricators in those days.
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So they were going all out.
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They were not kidding when they said in 54 we want to be on the racetrack again.
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And they had further access to about 300 specialists within the
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corporation that they could get information from on a part time basis.
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So there was a lot of potential there in terms of.
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engineering horsepower know how.
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They also worked quite well with Bosch, that they had been working
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with as a partner during World War II, on fuel injection systems.
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So they got a lot of help there in optimizing their direct fuel
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injection system, which was also an improvement over competition.
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So you wondered who could be an opponent for this onslaught by
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Mercedes Benz after World War II.
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Certainly none of the German companies, we had already briefly stressed Auto
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Union, the newly formed GMBH, wasn't really in a position to do that.
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They didn't have the means.
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Burgwardt, who was kind of a, multi brand cluster of companies as well.
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They were into touring car racing to some extent.
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Veritas was a very small scale builder of race cars, kind of a silver arrow
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that they tried and they used the BMW 328 engine for their efforts.
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Well, as they were not that successful, BMW asked them to stop using their engine
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and then they had to make their own engine and they dabbled with two cycle engines.
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They wouldn't go anywhere.
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They didn't have anywhere near these resources.
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So that didn't work out well.
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Meanwhile, in Italy, after El Toromeo was already quite successful with the pre war
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designs, and they were thinking about, they needed to have a new design in order
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to stay competitive, Garagi was then.
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running Alfa Romeo and his leadership team felt it was enough with racing
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and it was good to stop at the height of their success rather than
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continuing and risking to lose the glory that they had accumulated.
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Ferrari was particularly in the context of mid engined cars.
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A big opponent to him, the Oxford horse, always must pull the cart.
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It's his style.
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It's thought kind of a faulty analogy because even front engine cars push the
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car as long as it's rear wheel driven.
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And then there was Cisitalia, who was a small company with huge
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ambitions and they had contracted the Porsche engineering team.
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to design the 360, a very advanced, mid engined, Formula car, Grand
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Prix car that was very complex.
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And Duzio, who owned Sissitalia at the time, was way over his head, I think,
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in terms of financial commitments.
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And understanding how much it would take beyond the initial design of a car.
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You have to field it, and then you have to also be aware.
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That when you start, even if you're very competitive at the
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beginning, competition isn't going to sleep, there will be upgrades
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and you will have to upgrade yours.
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And so they just didn't have, based on their relatively small, tiny
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boutique car company with beautiful cars, with bodywork styled by Farina.
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They were popular, but they didn't make much money, so there wasn't.
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the financial wherewithal to support a Grand Prix project like this.
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The engine by the time, you know, 54 would roll in, the 1.
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5 litre supercharged engine was obsolete, so they would have to,
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uh, to get a different engine.
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But by 49, Cisitalia was pretty much bankrupt, and Duzio took the car
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himself over to Argentina, and there was no real engineering support.
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So this project, which was very promising, died out before it
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ever really got onto a racetrack.
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Also, they waited way too long to do the first on track tests.
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They wanted to build six cars, ideally, and then think
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it was perfect to go racing.
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So they didn't really Very much about the four wheel drive that was part of this
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car and to try it out to understand How does it work on straight ahead and in
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curves and so on so there was a lot of?
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over optimism that would that project is good area Milan was even more
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optimistic in coming up with a kind of a raw prototype of a mid engined
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car that had a transversely mounted eight cylinder engine, air cooled,
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without showing any serious means of getting rid of the heat that this
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very powerful engine would generate.
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And they certainly didn't have the wherewithal, so I
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would say, don't do that.
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Now, of course, you know, the real history shows us, and Chris Nixon shows in his
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book very well, There was a arrival to Mercedes Benz in form of the Lancia D50,
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but I submit Lancia was not really in a position to get into Grand Prix racing.
22:56
They didn't have the financial wherewithal.
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Gianni Lancia, who was running the company then, should have been told to pivot more
23:03
to the money making side of the business and hold back for now on the Grand Prix.
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Passionate racing enterprise.
23:11
So I don't think that that was real.
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Also, although they had a car that after some development showed
23:17
promise and could have challenged Mercedes, they could probably not
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withstand the ongoing upgrades and competition that would raise the bar.
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So.
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My conclusion here is there was no single entity in Italy or elsewhere in France
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or England that could really mount a challenge to Mercedes Benz and therefore
23:39
something else would have to happen in order to fulfill my dream of propelling
23:43
forward the change to rear engined cars.
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So, I've defined two conditions that are necessary for enduring.
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success, it probably pertains to other classes as well.
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An effective project has to have a solid funding and a long term commitment.
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It can't just be a commitment.
24:01
It has to be more than one year.
24:03
It has to be an extended commitment from a potent industrial
24:08
corporation, I would say.
24:09
It doesn't necessarily have to be a car company, as Red
24:12
Bull today demonstrates this.
24:14
But, it should preferably be one.
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And, I would submit as a second condition, a component supplier
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should be involved also.
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Particularly since either tires or fuel are playing a big role in the
24:28
ultimate performance of the car.
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Maybe one of those suppliers should be involved actively.
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Not just putting their labels on the car, but being actively involved
24:38
in the development process, because they have some skin in the game,
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financially, but also image wise.
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And so when you have these two conditions fulfilled, I think then you
24:48
have a good shot at being successful.
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being ultimately successful, and I bring forward two examples here
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for your consideration, although they extend a little bit beyond
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the time period I'm talking about.
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But there is the FenWall effort to bring British Racing Green
25:04
into the forefront of competition.
25:05
Grand Prix Racing, Tony Vanderwaal, who was very committed, who had the
25:09
wherewithal, he was the head of a large corporation that built sliding bearings
25:15
for engines for the car industry.
25:17
Among other things, he owned Lucas, was responsible for the Prince of Darkness.
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And in so far, there was some potency there.
25:25
And over years.
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First, he started out with modified Ferraris, as you know.
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Then he pivoted towards his own design, which was ultimately successful in 1958.
25:34
He won the first Constructors Championship, which was then
25:38
open for the first year.
25:39
Not the Drivers Championship that went to Mike Hawthorne on a Ferrari.
25:44
And then, you could say, Rubery Owen, which also adopted the BRM project,
25:49
which was kind of flawed from the get go when it was this designed by committee
25:54
organization way back in the forties.
25:57
But it was like a cat with many lives ended up at some point once the, uh,
26:04
automotive component company, Rupert Owen pulled pretty much out of that venture.
26:09
Then we find an example where a different type of sponsor comes into
26:14
the picture and that would be one way.
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But That sponsorship was not really contributing to the technical development
26:21
and it was pretty feeble because they went from one car company to the next
26:25
and sometimes they supported more than one but it wasn't enough to stay alive.
26:30
So what I'm proposing And again, this is a bit of a leap of faith that you
26:35
may want to follow me with or not.
26:38
I think in Italy, there was enough potential, there was enough passion to
26:42
get big time into Grand Prix racing, but it would take that financial
26:47
underpinning of a larger company.
26:50
Renewal Fiat would not participate.
26:53
They were never interested after their successes in the
26:55
1920s to go back into GP racing.
26:58
So it takes a conglomerate effort.
27:01
very similar to the Auto Unione that we had seen prior to World War II.
27:07
I suggest in Italy there should be the establishment of an Unione Automobili,
27:11
a Finmeccanica company, part of the, uh, ERE, which was a public holding
27:18
company in Italy that had picked up, previously in the 1930s, already Alfa
27:22
Romeo, when they were in hard times.
27:25
And so Alfa Romeo was already part of this, I submit, when you look at the
27:31
categories here and the brands that Auto Union had, then Alfa Romeo probably
27:37
would be an equivalent to Vandra.
27:39
The DKW, I'm struggling a little bit with it.
27:42
I think Iso, Iso Rivolta and the Isetta would be an interesting play.
27:49
I think also, since DKW always had motorcycles as the point
27:55
of entry for automobiles.
27:56
Consumers to get into mobile equipment.
27:59
There may be a play for a Vespa in terms of a joint venture, perhaps.
28:04
Lancia would be the upscale part, not trying to compete with Alfa Romeo.
28:10
That would be fairly senseless.
28:11
There may be some overlapping, some platform sharing that I could
28:15
see, even with the eyes of somebody in the early 1950s, and there
28:20
may be in this low cost segment.
28:24
Bernard out of France, but in those days having multinational corporations
28:29
was probably not very feasible yet.
28:33
So, that's a bit of an open question.
28:35
And I add also a category, and we'll soon see why that is significant.
28:40
And I'm not really talking about mid engined race cars, as you recognize.
28:44
I'm building a platform that, uh, allows that technology to
28:49
really take place in a big scale.
28:51
I submit also tractors could play a role.
28:54
And there is a play for the Saame tractor company that also has a long history of
29:00
being connected to Alfa Romeo because the, uh, Cassani brothers that formed
29:05
Saame had previously formed Spica.
29:09
Some of you may know the Italian equivalent of Bosch in fuel injection.
29:13
And so these tractor guys, they needed for their diesel engines something to get
29:18
the fuel into the combustion chambers.
29:20
And since it was the autarky policy, they couldn't just go to Bosch
29:25
in Stuttgart and get their stuff, they built their own version.
29:29
And they got then into ERE and were delegated into the Alfa Romeo company.
29:36
Fold in the 1930s, 1940s already because we're seeing that they were
29:41
more relevant with their technology.
29:43
Now, people that were coming from the tractor faculty did not match very
29:47
well to the more structured corporate environment, and they left pretty soon and
29:52
formed their own tractor company again, which became very successful and exists.
30:00
So I put these elements together in some way because so far there's perhaps
30:05
a good story if you believe that this Onione Automobili could come into being.
30:10
But, of course, in every good story, you know, there are
30:13
heroes and there are villains.
30:15
I think a very obvious villain, kind of the white elephant in the room,
30:21
Fiat would probably not sit still and say, Oh, this is nice, there's
30:24
a new competitor being formed, and public money goes into that also.
30:29
So somehow, Unione Automobili would have to create a new competitor.
30:32
A competitive advantage that was compelling, particularly to
30:36
the politicians of that time.
30:38
Because Fiat had clout in the political space at the time,
30:43
and had that for decades.
30:44
So, one of the things Fiat was not terribly interested in was helping to
30:50
sustain or to develop the Mezzogiorno.
30:54
lower part of Italy, which was mostly an agrarian society with a
30:59
lot of manual labor in agriculture.
31:02
So, that's where the, um, slow development comes into play to gradually bring up the
31:09
the technical capabilities and financial wherewithals in southern Italy, rather
31:14
than putting some of these huge projects into place as had been done and was done
31:19
later on with steelworks and so on, that became cathedrals in the desert that
31:24
didn't really fit into the society yet.
31:26
So I submit that having a tractor, a very simple one, this was first some
31:32
tractor, later on they became much more sophisticated, it would help.
31:36
You know, to transfer manual labor into mechanized forms of
31:41
agriculture, it would free up labor.
31:43
But you could also now bring some of the farm boys into mechanics,
31:48
into working on vehicles on a very low level of complexity.
31:53
And then later on you could grow that.
31:54
So you could do something like Ford did when they had ramped
32:00
up the Model T manufacturing.
32:04
office assembly plants or branch assembly plants in different
32:08
parts of the, uh, country.
32:10
The building stands still there in Fargo, North Dakota.
32:13
It's no longer used for its original purpose, obviously.
32:16
It's a nicely converted office building.
32:18
But they assembled parts that were shipped from Detroit to these remote areas and,
32:23
and helped to reduce shipping costs for one thing, because when you ship
32:27
old cars, you're shipping mostly air.
32:29
They shipped some parts that came from the mothership, and then there was some
32:34
local content gradually introduced.
32:36
So when you do that, you have some more sustainable, gradual development
32:41
of a more agrarian company.
32:43
And frankly, people who come from the land, who see the progress that
32:48
mechanization can bring, they will buy more into this, and they will,
32:52
later on, become more productive.
32:53
Good mechanics and good people that can assemble more
32:57
complex vehicles in the South.
32:59
So also when you own an automobile, you can leverage a state development
33:03
funds that were available at the time.
33:06
Casa Peril Mesojorno and the INA Casa for public housing could have been
33:12
dipped into particularly if the political communication would have worked well.
33:16
Now, what you need then for the leadership in this new would be
33:23
somebody who's more politically astute, not somebody who is an engineer and
33:27
loves cars and digs deeply into it.
33:29
It's probably not the right person who can convince some of the politicians
33:33
and political powers in place parties that it's in their best interest
33:38
longer term to support this program.
33:40
And so you find a person in Luigi Rosari who has been a long term leader
33:46
within the Pirelli organization.
33:48
He was responsible for the cable business in Pirelli, not so much for the tires.
33:52
He was a person with a lot of soft skills.
33:55
He had honed those during the transition when committees ruled these large
33:59
corporations for a while in 1946.
34:03
And so he had good experience in labor relations, which down the
34:07
road would be He was very much about this gradual and sensible
34:13
growth of the, uh, Netzer Journal.
34:15
And so, now we look at the, uh, industrial supplier, the component supplier, and
34:21
we check in a due diligence process.
34:25
And the choice is pretty obvious.
34:27
There are companies that have technical know how, like these folks
34:30
that make frames for race cars.
34:32
They're very specialized in that.
34:34
They're very good at tubing and forming oval tubing and tapered tubing and so on.
34:39
Gilco, Autotillai.
34:42
But they also work for Ferrari and for Lancia and for whoever pays them.
34:46
So, you don't want to really get them too close to what you're
34:50
doing with your new concept.
34:51
Olivetti is certainly interesting from a technology perspective,
34:55
because they were getting into digital computation at that time already.
34:59
the typewriter folks, obviously.
35:01
Long term, they may be interesting, but short term, they were also a
35:04
little bit of an utopian company.
35:07
Pirelli, an obvious choice.
35:08
Monte Cattini, a large chemical company, could play a role in, uh, that they
35:13
wanted to get into the automotive industry so they could leverage, perhaps, this
35:17
entry point, and that may be good.
35:18
But, since we know that tires are so essential for the success of
35:22
race cars, And Pirelli had a long term success with their Biosupply
35:27
tires, conventional tires, in racing.
35:30
They've won world championships up to that point.
35:33
They also developed a radial tire already since 49.
35:37
So that kind of prompts me to think.
35:40
Why not introduce radial tires to racing, to Grand Prix racing,
35:45
at this early point of entry?
35:46
It would be doable, I think, and Pirelli would see benefits from doing that.
35:52
It would become a centerpiece of their marketing campaign, that
35:55
radial tires can work under the most harsh and demanding conditions.
35:59
They would have enough skin in the game in this project, because if they
36:03
lose, that doesn't look good for them.
36:05
But, on the other hand, of course, these tires compared to the previous
36:10
ones require a different driving style.
36:13
So there is something to learn for the people that run these cars.
36:16
In essence, the slip angle gets much smaller for a given lateral force.
36:20
But Pirelli has the opportunity to become, also, one of Automobili's
36:25
preferred tire supplier.
36:26
There is a volume business in the background.
36:29
And this is a depiction, obviously, of the, But we need a technical
36:35
hand, so we switch scenes here and we go to Burton on Trent in the UK.
36:41
You may ask, why do we do that?
36:43
Well, there is an interesting person to be met.
36:47
And that's, again, our friend Robert Everan Eberhorst, who was involved
36:51
in the Auto Union activities.
36:52
He also oversaw the Cisitalia construction in Torino.
36:56
And he's being invited by the, uh for a chat.
37:01
At the time he was in England, he worked as the chief engineer
37:05
at Aston Martin, the company that was then owned by David Brown.
37:08
He had been lured into England to work at ERA, but according to his
37:13
own words, that proved to be a disaster, a real disappointment,
37:17
because they didn't hire him.
37:18
nearly have the resources that he was used to at Aston Martin who was much better.
37:23
So the leadership of Unione Automobili talks him into coming back to
37:28
Italy instead, leave this misery in England behind, and don't get tempted
37:33
by this new Auto Unione because that's what he will do in reality.
37:37
He will find that the really lower ranks in the company really don't
37:41
like him, and even some of his peers on the upper echelon don't like him.
37:44
despise him because he's a little bit too far out there for their taste.
37:50
So, I'd suggest this new scenario has Evan Eberhorst become the technical
37:56
director and responsible for the GP project at Uniona Automobili,
38:00
and by doing that we combine this analytical spirit, the scientific.
38:07
race car engineering with the passion of the Italians and with
38:10
the willingness to experiment.
38:12
The car concept is somewhat influenced by the Sissitalia 360.
38:16
It's although less complex.
38:18
For example, I don't think the four wheel drive solution was already appropriate.
38:23
May never be in such a car, and I would place the gearbox behind the differential,
38:28
behind the rear exalt, which would increase the, uh, polar moment of inertia
38:33
in the your mode a bit, and would make the car a little bit more drivable.
38:36
The seating position would be more reclined than in the cisitalia, which
38:40
in a way was still old school, but it had already a good space frame.
38:44
Use that we extend the cockpit so the driver can lean back a little bit.
38:49
It makes a lot of sense to use a V six engine because luncher.
38:53
And its fame was built around V6 engines.
38:56
There were interesting engineers like the Virgilio, who came up with the
39:00
60 degree equal firing order distance angle V6, which at the time was not
39:07
well known or was not practiced.
39:09
But he introduced that successfully to Lancia.
39:12
And there were other folks from the Lancia team that would have been useful.
39:16
I submit, of course, the engine would have been useful.
39:18
It's a double overhead camshaft and it would have a
39:20
speaker fuel injection system.
39:22
You don't want to over freight a new project with too many
39:25
features, that are new and unproven.
39:27
So, for exploratory purposes, they should dabble with pneumatic valve
39:32
springs to have an alternative to the decimotromic valve train that Mercedes
39:35
had introduced, or would introduce.
39:37
So, the V6.
39:40
volume of two and a half liters, rated speed and piston speed in
39:44
particular, was well within the realm of possibilities of that time.
39:50
Uh, so I'm not exaggerating too much.
39:52
This would be a pretty competitive project.
39:55
It would be a good chance to introduce disc brakes.
39:59
preferably from Gerling that were readily available and somewhat proven.
40:03
The anti roll bar introduction to GP cars was long in coming and
40:08
should be introduced here for sure.
40:11
Then again, the exploration to future upgrades could be devoted to monocoque
40:16
chassis and more importantly, to the introduction of aerodynamic downforce.
40:21
Again, why did it take so long?
40:23
From today's perspective it's easy to say when you were living in 52, 53 it
40:29
was a little bit more of a stretch of imagination, but not totally uncalled for.
40:35
John and Charles Cooper in England had been working on
40:38
these Kinds of concepts already.
40:40
And Connot had its own program going on.
40:43
They were waiting for the Godiva Coventry climax engine to the V
40:47
eight engine to become ready, and they would've put it into the back
40:51
of their car, and it would've been a very interesting challenger.
40:54
But Coventry Climax got cold feet.
40:56
They thought the engine wasn't powerful enough.
40:58
When they heard of 300 horsepower plus, the Mercedes would be
41:02
delivering, which they never did.
41:03
And so they decided to deep six their very impressive V8 engine program.
41:10
Now, when you have so many unknown parts in your car, you
41:13
want to de risk your project.
41:16
And here I introduced another player.
41:19
Rudolf Ruska, who had been working with, uh, SysItalia, with Porsche.
41:25
So he was part of the inner team already.
41:28
He would be tasked with providing a test mule.
41:31
That would be a car that would not look like a Grand Prix car yet, but the
41:36
underpinnings would be exactly that.
41:37
And you could introduce new technologies.
41:41
and expose the drivers to the new driving characteristics and working
41:45
with disc brakes and radial tires.
41:47
In a very disguised way, you could do data acquisition and learn about
41:52
the optimization of this new package.
41:54
So, he was a good player for doing that.
41:56
He had good connections to Carrocerías.
41:59
Turing had already worked for Montecatini, previously mentioned,
42:03
on this little prototype with a resin fiberglass combination bodywork.
42:09
So we suggest they should just do something like this and use
42:12
that as the test and run it in Monza and on other tracks.
42:16
And Ursga will later on lead a project that will unify the
42:22
platforms of the Giulietta of Romeo and the Appia of Lancia.
42:26
It's a safe cost to get economies of scale, and this
42:29
project should be successful.
42:31
Now, we talk about advanced aerodynamics, and when we think of
42:35
wings, we think that's something that happened very recently with Chaparral
42:39
and Jim Hall, or maybe Michael May in Switzerland in the mid fifties.
42:43
But in the late thirties, when Mercedes wanted to build this T 80 world record
42:49
car, they had already experimented.
42:51
This was, again, a design of, uh, engineering firm.
42:56
They had already dabbled with the thought of wings, fixed
42:59
wings, even movable flaps here.
43:02
And this is all discoverable in late open patent applications and
43:07
patents that were accessible to people, certainly in the 1950s.
43:12
So this fellow here, Joseph Mikkel was a founding member of the Porsche
43:17
engineering team in Stuttgart.
43:20
His background was aeronautical and mechanical engineering, and he had a
43:24
specific interest in the aerodynamics.
43:26
So, these patents are very interesting to read and very visionary.
43:31
Because we need also drivers, obviously, in order to make
43:33
this a successful project.
43:36
And here I propose that Alberto Ascari is undisputable the best
43:40
choice to be driver number one.
43:42
He was the world champion in 52 53, and he left Ferrari not for Lancia, as in
43:49
real life, But, yeah, he comes to Unione Automobili and will be their star driver.
43:55
Most likely will not have a splash in the Monaco harbor, and he'll have no reason
44:01
to drive a sports car of Ferraris on May 26th, 1955, where he fatally crashes.
44:08
And the second one, just briefly to round this out, we learn from the Rosemeyer
44:13
experience and bring in somebody.
44:15
From the motorcycle faculty, a two time world champion that was proven on 500cc
44:23
motorcycles, Shillera, he won two titles.
44:26
And so he would be an interesting addition to the team because he would bring a
44:30
different driving experience with him.
44:32
And that's it.
44:33
Analog to Gantt Rosemeyer, he may be able to deal with these rear
44:37
engined cars better or mid engined cars better than, say, drivers that
44:42
were used to the conventional ones.
44:44
Anyway, so at the end, the happy end is Ascari will not
44:48
win the 1954 World Championship.
44:50
That would be too much of a stretch.
44:52
We leave that to Fangio.
44:54
And, but he's a close second and Massetti happens to win one Grand
45:00
Prix, British one, that was a bit of an aberration, bad weather conditions, etc.
45:05
So that's pretty much the framework of this story.
45:09
It brings together.
45:10
And, uh, The Italian element and some of the Germanic, which is
45:14
mostly Austrian, to be honest.
45:15
A lot of the good automotive engineers that work in Germany come from
45:19
Austria or from former Czechoslovakia.
45:21
That happened here too.
45:22
So it's this combination that could accelerate a rear engine
45:27
or mid engine revolution.
45:29
Give it to you to, uh, criticize that or tell me I'm totally out of
45:33
hundred pages and with real sources.
45:36
So this is not all just out of thin air.
45:39
So it has some.
45:40
Some validity and maybe some believability, but I leave it up to
45:44
you as the much more experienced folks.
45:47
A very different approach to all that history in an action.
45:50
Thank you.
45:50
That was really great.
45:52
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