John Phillips: Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain
From the August 2013 Issue of Car and Driver
Worried that Kim Jong-un might momentarily launch irradiated kimchi into your salad crisper? Let it go. We have scarier things to fear. Namely, the exhaust sounds of the 1.6-liter V-6 turbos that the FIA has mandated for the 2014 Formula 1 season. As that “aural cliff” looms, fans are popping Pepcid while texting end-of-days proclamations in which F1 has scant months to live before Fox News announces that Bernie Ecclestone and Jean Todt both have vestigial horns and twin bastard sons who are plumbers named Darrell.
The upcoming single-turbo V-6s are said by FIA president Todt “to be more relevant,” by which he means more relevant to road-car manufacturers with checkbooks as thick as the Yellow Pages. On the other hand, it is comforting to imagine longtime V-6 proponents Toyota and Honda—the latter already linked to McLaren in 2015—scurrying back to the foie gras–smeared VIP suites. Another possibility: Volkswagen.
I’m one of maybe six F1 onlookers who abhor the harpy screech of the current 2.4-liter V-8s and the V-10s before them. What care I about pneumatic valve springs that sustain 20,000 rpm? Can anyone even name a production engine that relies on valves closed by air pressure? To me, the current V-8s sound like weed-whackers jammed at full throttle as they’re attached via scalding C-clamps to the calves of Girl Scouts. I recall enduring a recent monsoon at the Japanese GP, where the only busy vendors were those hawking earplugs. Who, other than racing devotees, would embrace a sport that damages one of your five senses? Who’d attend an NFL game if the spectators had to share in the concussions? (Well, yeah, me too.)
Fans now dissing the as-yet-unheard turbo V-6s derive most of their aural information from two-inch loudspeakers dangling beneath flat-screen TVs. They can’t feel the engines; many have never heard one live. So, please, allow me to recollect the unholy emanation from the ’87–88 Honda, TAG-Porsche, and Ford V-6 turbos. It was—well, the only word that comes to mind is “violent,” as in capable of knocking birds out of the sky. And those engines were revving to a “mere” 12,500 rpm, whereas the 2014 V-6s will whirl right up to 15,000. What’s more, the new V-6s should uncork 750 horsepower, on par with today’s soprano V-8s.
I’ll grant you that those last turbos nearly lapped themselves in the Bad-Idea Olympics. At part throttle, they belched bus-black smoke and regularly spit flames capable of singeing corner-workers’ eyebrows. Today’s nostalgia seekers may yet find comfort in a few dandy fires before the engineers pinpoint the safest turbo plumbing. And, as before, we may find joy in the occasional supernova engine meltdown, reminiscent of the old Megatron four-cylinder BMWs, which were said to develop 1200–1300 horsepower in qualifying trim and occasionally embedded their ballistic valvetrains in the asphalt. I recall Zakspeed reportedly welding its cylinder head to the block, that being pretty much the only method of later locating the head gasket—if there was one. Back then, the engineers all bore the facial expression of Robert Oppenheimer right after the big blast.
Speaking of big blasts, now comes Bernie inquiring whether these new V-6s “will sound like a lawn-mower engine” and suggesting that some sort of exhaust “modifier” might alleviate the ugliness. Ignore him. Whenever Bernie speaks, what’s crucial is to wonder what he isn’t saying. Like all magicians, Bernie directs his gullible audience to observe what’s in his right hand—usually a populist controversy he’s gratuitously inflamed, à la Lawn-mowergate—while deploying his unseen left hand to resolve backroom knife fights to placate and enrich bitchy entrants, promoters, and flocks of vulpine hangers-on, all slavering around the Grand Prix buffet. The older I get, the more I love Bernie. Like all silver-haired despots, he knows at all times—you can be sure—the precise location of the goose and her many golden eggs, being, as he is, the manipulator least likely to parboil either. He wants us to worry. It is the magician’s smoke of misdirection.
I also love race-car designer Adrian Reynard, who offers this take on F1 contretemps: “In the first turbo era, Keith Duckworth [of Cosworth fame] told me he had reservations because he correctly viewed a turbocharger as a secondary engine. At the time, there were few electronic means to govern them. He was right to want fuel-flow-metering devices, which the new V-6s will have.”
The new V-6s are initially being built by Renault, Mercedes, and Ferrari—the latter a public enemy of sixes but also without a constructors’ title since 2008, so maybe Maranello will be doubly motivated.
Reynard further told me he’s glad to see new F1 rules simply for the sake of new F1 rules: “I like forcing people to figure things out. That’s what F1 should be about.”
Well, that and a pair of Red Bull drivers hating each other’s guts over the meaning of the radio instruction “Multi 21."
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