THE GENIUS OF COSWORTH’S
KEITH DUCKWORTH
H ow could I possibly write an appreciation of the man who changed the face of Grand Prix racing? If Keith Duckworth had only designed the legendary Ford DFV V8 engine, it would have been difficult — but when you start to consider everything else that Cosworth engines achieved in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it was plumb impossible. Keith was a one-off, the DuckworthCostin partnership was a one-off, and the Cosworth company they built up after 1958 was unique.
Although it was a shock to all of us when Keith Duckworth died, just before Christmas 2005, all of us — Keith included — knew that he had been enjoying himself, on borrowed time, for some years. The first heart attack came, in 1973, and another followed in 1986. Duckworth, the world’s leader in hydraulic and gasflow engineering, was always disgusted with his own failings, offered to pay for his own heart transplant if needed, gave up smoking, and soon retired from stressful business.
Not that was the end of Cosworth, for Keith’s aims, ambitions, and above all his engineering philosophies carried on without a hiccup. If the DFV had been his One Big Thing we would have admired him for that. When you add in other Cosworth masterpieces like the BDA engine for Ford, the first four-valve engines for Mercedes-Benz, the magnificent YB turbo for Ford’s Sierra RS Cosworth and Escort RS Cosworth, modern, light and powerful V8s which gave Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna many victories, and an endless stream of turbo V8s which dominated US racing into the 2000s, you’ll see why some worship the man and the company he co-founded.
First principles
Born of a prosperous cotton family in Lancashire, Keith soon developed a healthy
disrespect for most complacently accepted theories, and resolved to spend his life working out everything from first principles. From his very first job at Lotus in 1957, when he soon concluded that Colin Chapman’s newfangled sequential-change gearbox (the ‘Queerbox’) was a non-starter, he queried everything.
His Formula Junior engines only produced real power after he had ditched textbook methods of designing cam profiles and established his own ideas, Lotus’s original twin-cam engine prototypes were a disappointment before he was asked to rescue them according to his — Keith Duckworth’s — principles, and when he eventually sat down to design the ‘heavenly twins’ (Ford’s FVA F2 engine, and the DFV V8 F1 power unit) he soon discarded all established thinking — hemispherical combustion chambers with wide-angle two valves per cylinder — as archaic.
It took him weeks of solitary thinking and drawing, at home in Northamptonshire, to come up with the DFV/FVA head layout — and 50 years after that, almost every engine designer in the world still follows what he worked out.
Time after time, he or his trusted colleagues at Cosworth tried other newly-fashionable layouts (the five-valve episode with Yamaha and the DFR engine, and desmodromic valve gear were classic cases), and time after time Keith discarded them just in time.
It’s worth recalling that today’s F1 engines produce three times as much power, per litre, as the DFV did in 1967 — yet it was Keith and his colleagues who pioneered the method of getting engine weights and sizes down, and pushing up the revs, without losing anything in terms of breathing or reliability. Only in later years did Keith comment cheerfully that 2000s-type Cosworth F1 engines show just how over-engineered the DFV actually was, but it
“50 YEARS AFTER DUCKWORTH CAME UP WITH THE DFV HEAD LAYOUT, ALMOST EVERY ENGINE DESIGNER STILL FOLLOWS WHAT HE WORKED OUT”