The racing world’s turbo troublemakers

FROM FORMULA 1 TO BATHURST, AND LE MANS TO THE MONTE CARLO RALLY: THESE ARE THE BOOSTED BRUTES THAT RULED THE RACING WORLD

Benetton B186

IT’S EASIEST TO think of the BMW M12/13 engine that’s nestled between the axles of the Benetton B186 as Formula 1’s version of The Mountain; the Icelandic weightlifter who made a habit of crushing people’s heads on Game of Thrones. Even now, 34 years after blasting onto the grid, this engine is unmatched in terms of outright power. Designed by BMW engineer Paul Rosche, the 1.5-litre four cylinder unit revved to 11,500rpm and was subjected to such incredible internal forces that it was built around used road-car engine blocks that had travelled more than 100,000km. The thinking was that if the blocks were going to break, they’d have done so already. “The car was like a bomb,” Gerhard Berger said of the B186 – the only driver to successfully tame the beast. “You’d open the throttle at the entry to the corner only to get the power at the exit. And if you missed it by five or 10 metres, there was nothing you could do – you just spun it. The lag was about one or two seconds.” A single run in qualifying trim, which wound the boost up to 80psi, was enough to totally destroy the gearbox. Power outputs were estimated to be 1118kW, though we don’t know for sure as BMW’s dyno couldn’t measure anything above 954kW. Central to the B186’s grunt was its fuel; a potent mix made mostly from pure toluene, a key ingredient in paint thinner, and cost US$300 a litre in 1986. Allow for inflation and that’s US$701 today!