About F1 Engines

I just watch Formula one since 1994 and just for curious, but what was/were the worst F1 engine in history, Ilmor, Hart, Judd, Ford HB... something? Less power or unreliable, something...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2012 04:20AM by casssp.

What about that W12 engine that Life ran in 1990? Didn't do much. Otherwise the original Hart turbo engines were dodgy.

Or the Yamaha OX88 V8 Engine that Zakspeed ran in 1989 what a disaster.

The Real Story of the Race was that the Renault's fell apart and the Ferrari's didn't.
Rosberg headed for the sliproad and retired, probably because of Nicotin starvation they have still not given him a helmet with a little hole in it.

The question about who was the worst engine of F1 is quite interesting.
De all cases above Ilmor, Hart, Judd, Ford HB and W12, for me the most disappointing was the case of Yamaha.
Because it is a giant in the manufacture of motorcycles and engines in the design of its performance was disastrous in F1.
In the case of LIFE, we can not also credit all the car problems in motor, but yes in set as a whole.
The W12 engine, needed more investment and more development and the team never had these resources.
Yamaha already had technology, personnel, raw materials and essential!!
Money!!! Very money to make the necessary investments to having a beautiful motor.
Therefore, the case of the Yamaha adventure in F1 was disappointing.

A questão sobre quem foi o pior motor da F1 é bem interessante.
De todos os casos acima Ilmor, Hart, Judd, Ford HB e W12 , para mim o mais decepcionante foi o caso da Yamaha.
Por se tratar de uma gigante na fabricação de motos e na concepção de motores foi desastrosa sua atuação na F1.
No caso da LIFE, não podemos também creditar todos os problemas do carro no motor, mas sim no conjunto como um todo.
O motor W12, precisava de mais investimento e mais desenvolvimento e a equipe nunca teve estes recursos.
Já a Yamaha, tinha tecnologia, pessoal, matéria-prima e o fundamental!!!
Dinheiro!!! Muito dinheiro para fazer os investimentos necessários para ter um belo motor.
Por isto, o caso da aventura da Yamaha na F1 foi decepcionante.

Célio Jr. - Rio Verde - Goiás - Brasil

The Yamaha engine used during the mid 90's was actually a Judd engine rebadged as a Yamaha, in this case Yamaha tasked John Judd with building and developing the engine, it showed promise on occassion but its ultimate problem was reliability.

True, the Yamaha did actually score at least one podium at Barcelona 94, and the Hart was also a podium-winning car, hell even got on pole in 85 and 94. Also interesting to see people mention the Ford HB. It looked bad by 1994 when the Zetec was launched, but in actually fact it was the works engine in 1992-93, winning more than a few races so it wasn't too bad after all. Yes the original Yamaha 1989 engine was bad.

Good comments, very interesting! Today I found an article, in portuguese, talking about some of those engines:

[racingteam11.blogspot.com.br]

The Subaru/Motori Moderni 1235 flat-12 looks scary just looking



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2012 02:57PM by casssp.

That Subaru in the back of the Coloni was just an utter heap of junk.

Ilmor didn't make bad engines; they've been previously responsible for the Mercedes engines and also provided Ilmor-badged engines to Sauber in 1993. However, the fact that they ended up in the useless Pacific PR01 kinda muddied the waters somewhat.

The Life W12 was also dreadful, and eventually the team had to get hold of a Judd engine to see whether it was any good. After putting the Judd in, they couldn't get the engine cover to fit on. The car wasn't particularly good either; it was a cast-off from the FIRST Racing entry in 1989 which was scrapped for being too dangerous.

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GPGSL: S6 - TafuroGP Tester (14th) /// S7 - ART Tester (6th) /// S8 - Demon Driver (13th) /// S9 - Demon/Snake Driver (13th) /// S10 - Snake Driver (???) ///]
"My ambition is handicapped by laziness" - Charles Bukowski

Mercedes?

Häkkinen and Räikkönen have lost lots of titles only because of the engine, I think.
Of course the Mercedes was always one of the strongest engine in the field, but to finish first, you first have to finish...

The Subaru was atrocious. Its Coloni car never even pre-qualified using the engine, let alone qualified.

The BRM V16 (two V8s welded together) from the 50s was horribly unreliable, and never got close to out-putting the power it was theoretically capable of, though Clark somehow managed to win with it (though Clark could win in anything). Their 1966 H16 engine wasn't much better - it was just a huge block of metal that sometimes propelled the car forward before setting fire to itself. I do love the chaos of that engine though.

The Maserati engines from the mid-60s were crap too. Heavy and down on power. Not an ideal combination. They won a race, but only because everyone else retired at Kyalami - in 2nd place was a local driver, John Love, with an old Cooper and a 4-cylinder ex-Formula 2 engine. Everyone else had 3 litres and 8, 10, 12 or 16 cylinders.

The Porsche engine from 91 or 92. Two of the old World-Championship winning Porsche engines from the 80s welded together and minus the turbos. Such an embarrassment, yet somehow it manages to slip the memory.

Like the "V-angle" Renault in 2001, Yahama can at least be credited with trying something a bit different with a light-weight engine optimised for superior handling. I remember reading about the Yahama engine for 1995 or 1996, and thinking "ooh, that sounds rather good", but of course I was young and naive at the time and "thinking outside of the box" is often referred to as "a heap of @#$%&" in hindsight. Both the Renault and that Yamaha were poor.

i remember an article about the 2001 benetton renault, when fisichella drove it for the first time he genuinely thought it had a technical fault as it was so down on power compared to the previous years supertec engine, when the team confirmed there was no fault, they then realised they'd be in for a long long year.

nice looking car though!

thestig88 Wrote:
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> nice looking car though!


Heh, I have to say this - the 2001 Benetton was the car that got me interested in Formula 1. My brother had the PS2 game, and I borrowed it because I wanted to cause mega crashes this was before I cared about F1. In the game, I found a car that was a really, really nice blue colour, and it had some British driver I'd never heard of called Jenson Button. No idea who he was, but I promptly started watching F1 from the 2002 season, with that Button bloke being my 'hero' driver!

I still have a soft spot for that car, and that shade of blue is still my favourite colour to this day. Soppy story over. :p

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You know you want to. [judgegrudge.mybrute.com]

One that might not seem obvious to a lot of you would be the 1994 Peugeot A4 and A6 engines. Essentially, it was lifted out of Peugeot's 905 sportscar project and the reliability was horrendous. Most of the failures happened for Brundle, and Peugeot tried to place him at the centre of the blame as Peugeot wanted Alliot in the car.

There's some spectacular failures on Youtube, and Brundle talks about it himself in his autobiography...

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GPGSL: S6 - TafuroGP Tester (14th) /// S7 - ART Tester (6th) /// S8 - Demon Driver (13th) /// S9 - Demon/Snake Driver (13th) /// S10 - Snake Driver (???) ///]
"My ambition is handicapped by laziness" - Charles Bukowski

I used to love the Mild Seven Benetton's and then later the Renault's. My opinion on livery's probably doesn't count for much though as I actually quite liked the ING colours.

The Ford engine's doing the rounds in the late 90s were fairly useless as far as I remember, pretty sure Minardi had Benetton's 94 engine spec in about 1999.

I seem to remember that the 05 Mercedes engine liked to explode at least once a weekend in either Monyoya's or Raikkonen's car.

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Races: 163 - Wins: 23 - Pole Positions: 24 - Fastest Laps: 22
Season 9: Constructors' Champions

Yeah, Merc have had some horrendous seasons with crackers usually interpolated in between. I still remember the 1997 Luxembourg Grand Prix in Germany, with Hakkinen and Coulthard 1-2 and looking on course to at least challenge for the victory on a 1-stop strategy... and they both blew up during a single advertising break.

The Subaru would have to be the worst one which ever looked like being competitive.

The worst of all would surely have to be the Life F35 W12 though. It only produced 480bhp and it wasn't even powerful enough for an F3000 car. And it was unreliable too, apparently - which would make sense.

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The good ol 2001 rebadged peugeot engines in the Orange Arrows... Asiatech if I remember correctly, eugh, 1 point in the whole season compared to 7 the year before. other than that,


Here's a fact of the day, the price of the The cause of the failure in Damon Hill's Arrows Yamaha in Hungary.


A washer worth 50p.

Some of these sound embarrasingly bad, but it does make you wonder - where would some of these minnows be with a decent engine?

From what I can remember, the Honda engines during the early 2000s were by far the most unreliable (although they were pretty quick). I can remember countless occasions where a Honda powered car would be running well in the top 6 or maybe top 3, and then... bang. And not just a small bang, either! Who doesn't remember Sato at Monaco, 2004...? And all those failures that the Jordans and BARs had?

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You know you want to. [judgegrudge.mybrute.com]

In 1995, Minardi had Mugens swiped from under their noses. Then again in 2000, a Supertec deal was in the pipeline until Flavio vetoed the deal and had to persevere with the engines from the previous season, which were themselves from '98.

Due to the fact that the cars were usually quite decent, they could have been midfielders with those deals...

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GPGSL: S6 - TafuroGP Tester (14th) /// S7 - ART Tester (6th) /// S8 - Demon Driver (13th) /// S9 - Demon/Snake Driver (13th) /// S10 - Snake Driver (???) ///]
"My ambition is handicapped by laziness" - Charles Bukowski

I remember this one.

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Races: 163 - Wins: 23 - Pole Positions: 24 - Fastest Laps: 22
Season 9: Constructors' Champions