LEO KUZMICKI
Six decades ago a Polish Air Force officer helped bike and car makers beat Gilera, MV Agusta and Ferrari to world championship glory. The story of
The unknown genius who helped Norton to its greatest sporting glory
Norton’s reign as a winning force in the premier class of world championship motorcycle racing was brief. In fact, Britain’s most renowned racing marque challenged for the 500cc title just twice – in 1950 and 1951 The architects of that brief flash of glory – the constructors’ title in 1950 and both riders’ and constructors’ crowns in 1951 – are usually presumed to be ace rider Geoff Duke, race department chief Joe Craig and chassis designer Rex Mccandless. However, there was another engineer – who has never been properly acknowledged – involved in squeezing title-winning performance from Norton’s venerable single-cylinder 500.
There are good reasons for this lack of recognition. Leo Kuzmicki was a Polish Air Force officer who joined the RAF in 1942 and stayed in Britain after World War II. In 1945 the Russians asked Polish refugees to return home, but like most of his countrymen Kuzmicki had no intention of doing so – the USSR had been massacring his people since the early 1930s and Kuzmicki had suffered horribly at the hands of the NKVD (the Russian secret service) in the early years of the war. No wonder he remained in Britain and kept a low profile at Norton.
Before the war, Kuzmicki had been an internal-combustion engineer in Poland. He studied thermodynamics, gaining a particular expertise in the understanding of flame propagation in combustion chambers. After the war, his friendship with a fellow RAF officer got him a directorship at AJW motorcycles, where he designed the beautiful Jappowered Grey Fox and Silver Fox 500cc twins.
In 1949 he joined Norton, where his knowledge of combustion played a massive part in helping Norton’s overhead-cam single – which had originally been designed back in 1927 – stay ahead of the Italian fours just long enough to win the world championship.
In 1953 Kuzmicki moved to racing car constructor Vanwall, where he built a Formula 1 engine using four 500cc Norton top ends. The Vanwall took Stirling Moss to half a dozen F1 victories and won the 1958 F1 constructors’ title, beating Ferrari! Kuzmicki’s last big job was engineering the Hillman Imp car in the early 1960s.
Kuzmicki’s big thing was squish, which became particularly important in the post-war years, when people went racing with 75-octane, so-called ‘pool’ petrol. “Little better than paraffin,” according to Joe Craig.
The concept of squish is straightforward: by aggressively squishing the air/fuel mixture as the piston reaches top dead centre, gas turbulence is increased which improves air/fuel mixing for better combustion and increases heat transfer for better cooling.
Squish had been used for several decades in side-valve engines, but Kuzmicki’s similarly equipped engines were the first overhead-valve squish engines. They gained Norton a vital and rare winwin, simultaneously improving performance and reliability.
Kuzmicki’s input at Norton was never celebrated, partly because he wanted to keep his head down and partly because the proud Birmingham marque wasn’t in the habit of attributing its success to foreign expertise.
‘Leo was a brilliant engineer,’ wrote Duke in his 1988 autobiography, In Pursuit of Perfection. ‘In my opinion he was never given the credit he was due by Norton... Painstakingly methodical and strictly taking only one thing at a time, Leo showed me a flat-topped piston with which he replaced the previous massively domed design. He explained to me the theory of squish, which seemed so unconventional at the time. The net result was a phenomenal 30% increase in power. And that was on fuel with a lower octane rating than the present-day two star! After the way he transformed the singles I had great respect for him.’
‘HIS KNOWLEDGE OF COMBUSTION PLAYED A MASSIVE PART IN HELPING NORTON’
Factory Norton rider Ken Kavanagh kicks up the dirt during the 1952 Dutch TT at Assen. After Norton’s most successful season ever in top-class world championship racing the previous year thanks to the Kuzmicki/mccandless single, ’52 saw its inevitable overpowering by Gilera and MV Agusta fours
Legend has it that Kuzmicki’s first job at Norton was sweeping the floors. No one is quite sure whether this was the reality, a cover-up or a myth.
“When I came in one morning Leo was sweeping the experimental department and we got talking,” recalled race mechanic Charlie Edwards in Mick Woollett’s book Norton. “It was soon obvious that this man was no ordinary sweeperup. I told Joe [Craig] that this guy might be able to help. Well, it wasn’t long before Leo was in the drawing office, and in my opinion it was he who vastly improved the 500 and then the 350. He was brilliant on cam profiles, combustionchamber shapes, valve-timing, porting, the lot.”
Kuzmicki’s expertise helped Norton’s 500 and 350cc singles reap major power increases going into 1950. At the same time the improved engines were housed in the seminal Featherbed frame, created by eccentric genius Mccandless. Like Kuzmicki, Northern Irishman Mccandless was considered a foreigner at Norton, as had been the case at Triumph, where he first tried to sell his fully-sprung chassis. During dinner with a senior Triumph engineer, Mccandless was told that the Meriden factory couldn’t possibly use foreign technology in its motorcycles. Mccandless was so enraged that he upended the table – food and everything – in the executive’s face. That’s why he went to Norton. Craig was the man who made things happen at Norton, but he was incredibly lucky that Kuzmicki and Mccandless arrived at a time when he needed some fresh thinking to challenge the faster Gilera four and the nascent challenge from MV Agusta.
Craig and Kuzmicki worked together. “Joe and I are a team and we both need each other,” Kuzmicki said at the time. This was another perfect match – Craig’s practical knowledge allied with Kuzmicki’s engineering excellence allowed Norton to run their engines at maximum compression ratio and with the leanest possible air/fuel mixture to stay ahead of the Italian fours.
The Kuzmicki engine and Mccandless chassis made their debut together, shortly before the start of the 1950 GP season, in a national race at Blandford army camp in Dorset, where Geoff Duke blitzed everyone, watched by 40,000 fans. Six weeks later Duke won the Isle of Man Senior TT to lead the 500cc world championship. He won again at Monza and the Ulster, and would’ve taken the title if his Dunlop rear tyre hadn’t fallen apart at Spa and again at Assen. Instead, the riders title went to Gilera’s Umberto Masetti – by one point. Norton switched to Avon tyres for 1951 and this time there were no mistakes. Duke dominated the 1951 GP season, taking 500cc
victories at the Isle of Man, Spa-francorchamps, Assen and the Ulster, plus 350cc wins at the TT, Spa, Albi (France), the Ulster and Monza. This was by far Norton’s best season of GP racing, with them taking four world titles – both riders’ and constructors’ in the two senior categories.
Through all this success, Kuzmicki continued to keep his head down. There are hundreds of photos of Craig enjoying the spoils of victory with his riders throughout Europe, but only one of Kuzmicki – on British soil, after Reg Armstrong won the 1952 Senior TT on a Craig/kuzmicki/ Mccandless Norton. Unravelling Kuzmicki’s back story reveals exactly why he didn’t want to risk spoiling things.
He was born in 1910 in Novocherkassk, southern Russia, where a counter-revolution broke out following the Russian revolution of 1917. Local pro-tsarist Cossacks fought against a Bolshevik army from Moscow. Many civilians fled to Poland, where Kuzmicki grew up in the city of Dubno. He went to college in nearby Lviv, where he graduated as a mechanical engineer. In 1932 he was conscripted into the Polish infantry and in 1933 started training at the Aviation Cadet School in Deblin, near Warsaw.
By 1936 he had risen to the rank of Second Lieutenant in the 6th Air Regiment of the Polish Air Force. In August 1939 he was mobilised, just weeks before the Nazis invaded Poland from the west and the Soviets invaded from the east. Kuzmicki was captured in the defence of the city of Lviv, which was attacked from both sides by the Soviets and the Nazis.
Kuzmicki was lucky, because he wasn’t one of the 22,000 Polish officers executed by the NKVD during the early stages of the war. Instead, he was one of several hundred thousand Polish prisoners transported to labour camps throughout the USSR by the NKVD. He ended up in a camp in Kermine (now Navoi) in south-west Uzbekistan.
The Russians didn’t consider their Polish prisoners to be prisoners of war, but rather anti-soviet counterrevolutionaries, so the Poles didn’t even have the fragile rights of Pows. They were routinely interrogated and tortured, with many being executed or dying from other causes. Kuzmicki spent five months in hospital during this period, although we don’t know why.
This ordeal continued until the summer of 1941, when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and began Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Overnight Stalin switched sides, so his Polish captives were now allies. Kuzmicki joined tens of thousands of Polish military prisoners and civilian captives on their long trudge to freedom. The Soviets provided little transport, so prisoners made their way however they could; walking hundreds of miles, hitching rides on carts or on trains if they were lucky. “The hunger was terrible,” recalled one fellow traveller. “It was a hell – hungry, sick people, children in railcars filled with lice. Illnesses – typhoid, dysentery... it’s a miracle that we survived, with thousands dead.” Kuzmicki travelled hundreds of miles through Central Asia to the Caspian Sea, where he was put on a boat that took him to Persia (now Iran). Many evacuees either couldn’t (or didn’t want to) go any further, so they settled down in Tehran. Others, including Kuzmicki, kept going, travelling a thousand miles to the Persian Gulf, where he boarded a troop ship that took him to Bombay, India. From there Kuzmicki took another troop ship that sailed around Africa to Liverpool, from where he was taken into quarantine in Auchtertool, Scotland. His application to join the RAF was accepted and in the autumn of 1942 he had a joyful reunion with older brother Mieczysław, who was an RAF navigator flying Liberator bombers and transport planes with the 301 Polish Bomber Squadron, one of many Polish units affiliated to the Royal Air Force. Captain Mieczysław Kuzmicki was killed in January 1944 when his Liberator was hit by flak and crashed off the east coast of Italy. Kuzmicki loved flying, but his engineering expertise kept him on the ground. He worked at a number of air bases during the final years of the war – RAF Henlow, Chedburgh and East Waltham – fettling Hurricane fighters and
LEFT: Kuzmicki’s Vanwall Formula 1 engine used Rollsroyce crankcases topped off with the cylinder head technology he had applied at Norton
Stirling, Wellington and Lancaster bombers. When he was demobbed in 1946 he held the rank of Flight Lieutenant.
After what he had been through, it is no great surprise that Kuzmicki had his struggles while he was in the RAF. His RAF papers reveal gleaming reports, which also mention mental health issues and mood swings. ‘An intelligent and very talented mechanical engineer. Ambitious, with high ideological levels. Sometimes has bouts of depression due to nervous exhaustion.’
In 1952, after AJW and Norton, Kuzmicki was seconded to Vanwall, owned by former Brooklands rider and driver Tony Vandervell, who was also a director at Norton. Vandervell was a larger-than-life character who wanted to beat the Italians – Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo – in Formula 1 and believed that four Norton top-ends would make a great F1 engine, so he sent for Kuzmicki.
“I am going to build a Grand Prix car to beat those bloody red cars – and you are going to design the engine for it!” he told his new engine designer, who joined Vandervell’s race department at the Vanwall bearing factory in Acton, West London.
The Vanwall 2489cc (96 x 86mm) straight-four F1 engine was essentially four over-bored, water-cooled Norton top-ends attached to an aluminium crankcase from a Rolls-royce B40 engine, usually found in military vehicles like the Daimler Ferret armoured car. The Norton/rollsroyce hybrid was housed in a tubular-steel spaceframe designed by Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus.
Stirling Moss took Vanwall’s first three F1 wins in 1957, at Monza, Pescara and Aintree. The following summer the firm won six more races (three each by Moss and teammate Tony Brooks) to win the constructors’ title. Once again Kuzmicki had proved a meticulously developed simple design could beat brute horsepower and problematic complexity, as represented by Ferrari’s 2.4-litre V6.
Next Kuzmicki became chief of engine and transmission design and development at Rootes in Coventry, where he created the engine for the Hillman Imp. Finally, in the early 1980s, he was hired by Lord Hesketh to fix the V1000 superbike’s engine problems – but before he could undertake this job he died, due to health problems brought on by the hardships of his war years.