The Soundtrack to a Generation

Forty years ago this week the Ford-funded, Cosworth-built DFV engine was born. MARCUS SIMMONS leads the celebrations for Formula 1's greatest ever engine

Think of the 1970s in Formula 1 terms and you conjure up a scruffy paddock at Silverstone or Brands Hatch, full of primary-coloured, fat-slicked machines, sideburned drivers standing in the sunshine signing autographs.

It was the decade when F1 was at its most democratic. Entry lists were bulging, to the extent that pre-qualifying - where a driver had to qualify for the right to qualify - was invented. Exactly three decades ago, in 1977, no less than 21 constructors turned out over the course of the year.

It says a lot for the importance of the Ford Cosworth DFV, straight outta Northampton, that, of those 21 constructors, 16 were powered by an engine that had first been produced 10 years earlier. And it's the 40th anniversary of the DFV's winning debut, on June 4 1967 at Zandvoort, that we're celebrating here.

The DFV (it stood for Double-Four-Valve) was more than just an engine; it was a phenomenon. Ford stumped up the £100,000 cost to develop and supply the new V8 to Lotus for 1967, but no one could have predicted that it would unlock the gates of F1 to a horde of privateer teams that would never otherwise have been there.

Some were hopeless; others, such as Williams and Tyrrell, would rise to become powerhouses of the sport. The DFV teams were derisively known as garageistes. Some literally were, as you will see in our colourful look back at all of them over the page. Others harboured real talent in designers, engineers and drivers.

It went on until 1985 before finally being made obsolete by the turbos, scoring the last of its 155 world championship grand prix wins (albeit in short-stroke DFY form) in June 1983 in Detroit.

Its versatility was impressive too: the DFV was a force in sportscars, winning twice at Le Mans, in 1975 and '80; derivatives were used in endurance racing (the DFL), Indycars (the turbocharged DFX) and the Tasman Series (the DFW). And it got another lease of life from 1985-95 when, in rev-restricted form, it was the staple power unit for F3000.

As anyone between the age of 35 and 60 will tell you, the DFV was the soundtrack to a generation.

"I liked to do a bit of driving in those days and we engineered it so that I did the first test of the Lotus 49. On the first day we zoomed up and down the runway at Hethel [the Team Lotus base].

"Colin Chapman leant me his aeroplane to fly back to Northampton, and I was back the next day to thrash around Snetterton. I was told later that the first time Graham [Hill] drove the car he did the same time that I had done!

"It was interesting, because the engine had so much more power than the tyres could cope with. The back end would hang out, and Jim Clark could drive it like that quite happily. Then the tyres started going wider, from 9 inches to 22 - absolutely barmy!

"The most significant output of that was that you could use more of the power more of the time. I remember Bruce McLaren moaning to me that his DFV was drinking petrol. I told him it was because he had his foot against the bulkhead all the time.

"When Ferrari did a lot of winning in the mid-1970s with their flat-12 engine, I thought we were in trouble, but then Colin came out with downforce and it was a different era again. Downforce with our V-configuration was quite possible, but with their flat engine poor old Ferrari couldn't manage it. The DFV was rescued by that!

"There were two things that really got F1 up and going forward - one was the DFV, the other was the Hewland gearbox. Lotus had an exclusive deal for 1967, and of course Colin wanted exclusivity forever, but Keith told him to jump in the lake!

"Looking back, Keith and I thought we were lucky to be in F1 in that period. We wouldn't want to be now: it's a different kettle of fish. Not that it was totally a sport then - it was already a business."

"It opened up the opportunity for people like Frank Williams and Ken Tyrrell to come in, and it also enabled Paul Michaels from Hexagon of Highgate [who ran Watson in a Brabham in 1974] to follow the privateers like Lord Hesketh and Rob Walker.

"Cosworth blew the doors off the old thinking. No one believed that a three-litre engine could produce 420bhp, let alone the 500bhp the DFV had by the end. And its compact nature allowed Hewland to produce a gearbox that you could bolt onto the back. It meant that anyone could manufacture an aluminium tub and stick the engine and gearbox in.

"The 90-degree V8 was such a perfect package. Its width, weight and height gave the engineer a much better flexibility in placing the engine and the car's centre of gravity, and that was the beginning of the refinement that's made F1 cars what they are today.

"The Alfa flat-12 I had with Brabham in 1977 and '78 had its strengths - on low fuel it was better, but it consumed more fuel and the race-start weight you had with a DFV was better. The flat-12s had higher crankshafts, and that's the greatest weight of an engine.

"The V8 also meant you could get ground-effect tunnels under the car, and people like Patrick Head at Williams, Gordon Murray at Brabham and John Barnard at McLaren maximised that.

"In many ways, due to what Cosworth did, we saw a period of the greatest motor racing, and it's questionable that we'll ever see that again."

"I drove at Snetterton on the very first day in the life of F3000. The first prototype was the '84 F2 March. Mike Earle [team boss of the Onyx team that ran the car] was friendly with Ron Dennis and got one of the engines.

"The engines weren't really brilliant at first. They had the FIA rev limiter, but it was the early days of electronics and, when you hit the 9000rpm limit, you got a three-second break in power. No warning - it came almost to a halt!

"Once F3000 got going there were different engine builders. I had one from Alan Smith: my old engine wasn't pulling, and from Pau we got a new version with long trumpets. It looked silly but that was the breakthrough - I won the race and went on to win the championship.

"Why I loved that engine so much is the fact that there were no Hondas anymore, because in F2 our BMWs had a 60-70bhp disadvantage. I was very happy. For the 1988 F1 season, I suggested to Zakspeed to dump the turbo and go for the 3.5 Cosworth DFZ [another derivative of the DFV]. Anyway, they didn't want to do it. And then they fired me!"

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- The Autosport.com Team

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