Vee engines
SIX, EIGHT, TEN OR 12 CYLINDERS – AND EVEN THE FLAT-12 IS A VEE…
NEARLY ALL FERRARIS have a vee-engine of some sort. Even a flat-12 is, functionally if not visually, really a vee-engine opened right out to a 180º vee-angle. At various points in Ferrari’s history there has been the occasional inline four or six, and even an experimental vertical twin, and in the 1950s the largecapacity fours raced with some success. But, really, Ferrari is all about the vee.
Most famous are the V12s, the archetypal Ferrari engines. One powered the first Ferrari, the 125S, and it was Enzo’s favourite configuration. In a mid-1980s company book of technical achievements he wrote about how he ignored everyone’s advice and insisted on 12 cylinders, and how that number has endured despite forays into other configurations. ‘It remains my favourite,’ he said.
So the scene was set. That first V12 began Ferrari’s most famous V12 engine dynasty, designed by Gioacchino Colombo. It started at 1.5 litres and finished at 3.3 litres, or right up to 4.9 litres once the block had been lengthened and the bloodline diluted, and it powered the most famous classic Ferraris – those with 250, 275 and 330 in their alphanumeric names. Gaining a second pair of camshafts in 1967, it endured all the way to 1989. There followed a three-year V12 famine, but that was put right in spectacular fashion. Perhaps strangely, that remedy owed more to an engine family with half the number of cylinders, but we’ll get to that.
It’s all about vee-angles. The cylinder banks of the Colombo engine were separated by 60º, which gives a perfect balance of rotating and reciprocating forces. It’s the classical V12, and similarly V6, architecture, and was used also in Ferrari’s second range of V12s, larger units designed by Aurelio Lampredi, whose story ended in 1959. Before then, though – revealed in 1956, and developed for racing in 1957 – a new vee-engine family appeared. This was the Dino V6, conceptualised by Enzo’s ailing son Alfredino, overseen by Vittorio Jano
‘Most famous are the V12s, the archetypal Ferrari engines. It was Enzo’s favourite configuration’
(see under ‘J’), actually engineered by Franco Rocchi and his protegé, Andrea Fraschetti.
This Dino engine, intially of 1.5 litres for Formula 2 racing, had a 65º vee-angle. This was mathematically slightly impure but pragmatically sensible, because it made for a lower engine with more inter-vee space for a free-flowing induction system. To give even firing intervals, the five-degree shift was accommodated by repositioning the crankshaft’s throws. Not much was sacrificed in the way of smoothness and balance, and much was gained in power and revvability.
For 1958 the Dino grew to 2.4 litres for Formula 1 and Mike Hawthorn’s World Championship win, and in 1960 it powered the last front-engined car to win a Grand Prix, fittingly at Monza. Other versions of the engine powered various other Ferrari racing machinery, the design gradually evolving towards the form in which it was re-engineered by Rocchi for road car production. Part of the motivation for this was the re-casting of Formula 2 rules to require engines to be production-based; the other part was Fiat and Ferrari’s plan to capitalise on this and build Dino-badged road cars powered by this exotic, now Fiat-built, four-camshaft V6.
It was clear by this time that the 65º veeangle worked very well so, when the Ferrari 456 rekindled the roadgoing V12 flame in 1992, the new 5.5-litre engine, too, had a 65º vee-angle. This engine continued through the 550, 575 and 612 models, growing to 5.75 litres en route, but its days were numbered when the Enzo supercar arrived in 2002 with an all-new V12, now up to 6.0 litres but still with that vital vee-angle. A more productionised version of that engine powered the 575-replacing 599 of 2006, and descendants of that engine, now well past 700bhp, are still in Ferrari’s range today.
Those are the main road-car threads of Ferrari’s V12 and V6 motors, latterly united by vee-angles, but of course there have also
been many racecar-specific engines with these cylinder-counts over the years. Examples are the 120º 1.5-litre V6 that powered Phil Hill to the 1961 Formula 1 World Championship, a similar configuration two decades later for Formula 1’s turbo era, and a strengthened one with an iron block – all other Ferrari engines have been aluminium – and a 90º vee angle. And then there was the mid-1990s Ferrari F50 road car, its 4.7-litre V12 derived loosely from that of the Scuderia’s 1991 Formula 1 engine of 3.5 litres.
Before Formula 1’s turbo era, Ferrari’s ultimate race engines tended to be flat-12s; great for a low centre of gravity, less great for ground-effect aerodynamics as they got in the way of the airflow. This flat-12 era was mirrored in Ferrari’s fastest road cars as the V12’s first age began to fade, beginning with the 4.4-litre, mid-engined Berlinetta Boxer of 1973. The engine grew to 4.9 litres to power later Boxers and the model’s successor, the Testarossa of 1984, which continued right up to the V12engined 550 Maranello’s launch in 1996.
So that’s the sixes and the 12s. There have been V10s, too, in Formula 1. The fact is, though, that any Ferrari you happen to encounter on the road is more likely to have a V8 engine, with which there is unlikely to be a vee-angle argument: it’s 90º. But these are not the woofling, throbbing V8s of luxury transport and American muscle. A Ferrari V8 is a flat-plane-crankshaft V8 in which pairs of cylinders fire simultaneously and high-revs power trumps refinement, except when Ferrari supplied a modified, appropriately-beaty version of its first production roadgoing V8 family (the 308/328 unit) for Lancia to mount across the nose of its Thema 8.32 saloon.
Previous Ferrari V8s had included, in 1961, a 2.5-litre motor initially intended for a stillborn road car but used in sports-racing cars, and the 1.5-litre Formula 1 engine designed in 1963. The 2.9-litre 308 engine arrived in 1969 for the Dino 308 GT4, joined by the 308 GTB on the V6-engined Dino’s demise (and that of the Dino name). It shrunk to two turbocharged litres for the tax-friendly, Italian-market 208, then later acquired four valves per cylinder and, for the 3.5-litre F355 of 1994 and its 3.6-litre 360 replacement of 1999, five valves per cylinder.
This V8 line’s peak of potency came with the F40 of 1987, 478bhp of 2.9-litre, twinturbo terror, but the line died out when the F430 arrived in 2004. Its all-new, 4.3-litre V8 was back to four valves per cylinder but nevertheless gave more power than an F40. This new engine had the same block casting as Maserati’s concurrent non-flat-crank V8, this casting (but nothing else) also shared with the next V8 chapter, the 4.5-litre, five-valves-percylinder, 570bhp 458 of 2009.
Today’s V8 Ferraris, 488 and California, are turbocharged and their cylinders slightly downsized. Their engines are half a universe away from Colombo’s first V12, but there are still threads of Ferrariness to link them. Such as beautifully intricate aluminium castings, sometimes crackle-painted. Looks that appeal to the aesthete as much as the engineer. An instant throttle response. A tendency to erupt with energy at high revs. And, perhaps most of all, the sound: always a sharp-edged, throbless, resonant, richly harmonic, open exultation of combustion, reciprocation and rotation. That’s a Ferrari.