Keith Duckworth O.B.E: a tribute to outspoken, and very British, genius

Make no mistake, Keith Duckworth, who died on Sunday, December 18, aged 72, was the outstanding racing engine designer of his generation.

Cosworth Engineering, the company he founded with fellow engineer Mike Costin in 1958, produced a staggeringly successful series of Ford-based and Ford-sponsored engines which from 1960 to 1983 not only won a record 155 World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix races but also dominated international Formula Two, Formula Three and Formula Junior, won the Le Mans 24-Hours sports car race and added multiple victories in American Indianapolis-style speedway racing.

Duckworth was most proud of having manufactured such precision-built engines in substantial quantity, opening Formula One's doors in particular to a flood of new car manufacturers buying competitive Cosworth power 'off the shelf'. To that extent, the Cosworth DFV engine - master-minded by Keith Duckworth and detailed largely by Mike Hall - revolutionised Grand Prix racing and heralded the era of modern Formula One in highly commercialised, thoroughly well-packaged style.

David Keith Duckworth was born on August 10, 1933, at Blackburn, Lancashire, second of two sons of textile engineer Frank Duckworth, who owned a moderately-sized cotton-weaving works, Oak Street Manufacturing, and traded textiles on the Manchester Cotton Exchange. Keith was thus not a Yorkshireman, as many tributes have declared, but a Lancastrian, the red rose rather than the white...

His maternal grandfather had been a blacksmith and his mother the first lady demonstrator of cookers in the Blackburn electricity showrooms. He was educated as a boarder at Giggleswick in Yorkshire, while at home in Wilpshire on the north side of Blackburn his father fostered Keith's engineering interest by converting the old air-raid shelter at the back of their small house into a workshop, equipped with a Myford lathe, vertical drill and grinder.

Keith used them to craft his own model steam and aero engines while he also earned a reputation as the 'Whizz-kid from Wilpshire' sorting out any neighbours' electrical or mechanical problems. He would recall: "I once won a bet with my uncle by switching on an electric blanket at two miles range by radio control."

He favoured Frog aero-modelling kits and also scratch-built flying models from what he described to biographer Graham Robson as "...spills and bog paper, rubber bands and all sorts of odds and ends."

His father died in 1944, when Keith was just 11. At 16, he bought his first road vehicle, a non-running side-valve 250cc BSA motorcycle, which set him back £25. National Service conscription loomed. He was keen to fly and decided to seek an early call-up before possibly going up to University, and on his 18th birthday he joined the RAF, and began pilot training, progressing from Tiger Moth biplanes at Digby near Sleaford, Lincolnshire, through Chipmunks at Booker near High Wycombe to twin-engined Oxfords at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor.

There, disaster struck as he fell asleep while flying in the circuit. This was partly due to an allergic reaction to treatment for a sprained ankle (he was allergic to the adhesive in Elastoplast), and partly because he was "clapped-out after having been off for a time and working like a madman trying to catch up on my course." He still found himself being canned as a prospective RAF pilot for "dangerous and incompetent night flying."

Sent for re-training as a navigator at RAF Thorney Island, he then made waves by contradicting his astro-navigation tutor. "I don't compromise easily", he would later admit, "I simply won't accept theories that are wrong. I can spot bullshit at 100 yards, and I have to say so". He was released early, entering Imperial College, London, in 1952, "...where engineering was actually taught as an intended subject".

There he was introduced to motor racing by fellow undergraduates and bought a Lotus 6 kit car from Colin Chapman's embryo company behind father Stan Chapman's pub in Hornsey, North London. He raced it three times and crashed it through the famously floral-decorated Goodwood chicane, ending up against the bank "with a potted geranium in my lap." He concluded he was not cut out to be a racing driver, and then "just scraped through" his BSc degree at Imperial after his dissertation emerged as a lengthy critique of the course, its content and methodology!

He did holiday work in the Lotus gearbox department in Hornsey, which was then headed by budding racing driver Graham Hill. It was there that he first met fellow-Lotuseer Mike Costin, and when Graham left in August 1957 to concentrate upon a life as a professional racer, Chapman took on Duckworth formally as gearbox development engineer. He identified the notorious Lotus 'queerbox' design's limitations, ultimately telling Chunky: "I'm not prepared to waste my life developing something that will never work."

He and Costin consequently founded Cosworth Engineering in September 1958, renting garage space in Shaftsbury Mews, London. Keith operated there full-time, while Mike worked out his contract with Lotus and attended to Cosworth business out of hours. Their pals - and enemies - within the tight-knit British motor racing world lampooned the new venture as 'Cosbodge & Duckfudge Ltd'. That stage didn't last long...

The new company's first job was to make the jig for the experimental cockpit bubble-canopy tried by the Vanwall Formula One team at Monza before the Italian Grand Prix. Keith also maintained and prepared private owner Dennis Taylor's front-engined Lotus Type 12 Formula 2 car, and spent much time investigating and tuning all manner of customer engines.

Larger - but rat-infested - premises followed in Friern Barnet where he installed his pride and joy, a dynamometer for serious engine test and development work. In 1959 a new Formula Junior racing class emerged, for which Duckworth recognised development potential in the new Ford Anglia 105E production engine.

He reworked the unit which Cosworth put into production - with great credit going to contract machine shop owner Ben Rood, who would become a full partner in the business alongside Duckworth, Costin and Keith's sometime Imperial College flat-mate Bill Brown who became business director and sales manager.

Keith was a stickler for financial rectitude, with new wife Ursula keeping the books during the evenings. He'd say, "I always employed the 'Jewish Accountancy System'. You extract your money promptly from customers, ensure that you pay up promptly, so that at any time the money in the bank represents your position, and you don't have to do much paperwork."

Ben Rood was not alone in being amazed by this infinitely non-motor racing approach to business. He recalled: "It was unbelievable the way Keith used to pay his bills. Everybody else would string you along, not Keith. He'd actually come to you and say 'We owe you some money', and give you the cheque. People would do anything for him...He was a straight-shooter."

The Ford-derived racing engines manufactured and sold by Cosworth Engineering went on to dominate Formula Junior for the next four years.

The company grew rapidly, moving to an ex-Lotus works in Edmonton in 1961, then to its definitive home in Northampton in 1964. The new 3-litre Formula One class was due for 1966 and Colin Chapman asked his former employee if he felt ready to tackle a Grand Prix engine design. Keith relished the challenge, though not without trepidation and - typically - not without deep, deep thought. Chapman talked Ford into footing the bill, and their sponsorship famously became "The best £100,000 Ford ever spent."

Duckworth produced first a Ford-based 4-cylinder 1600cc Formula 2 engine with four valves per cylinder and twin overhead camshafts, from which he then developed the 3-litre V8 Cosworth-Ford DFV unit - the legendary 'Double Four-Valve'. Used by Jim Clark's new Lotus 49 it won the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix upon its debut. One rival engine designer - upon looking at the new car - admitted: "We knew then, the game was up!"

Overnight, Duckworth's transcendent DFV engine design had set entirely new standards in Formula One power and ingenuity.

Perhaps most indicative of Keith's peerlessly practical design genius was his adoption of a cushioning quill-drive to minimise destructive shock-loads in the DFV's cam-drive gear train.

Mike Costin: "That was his master-stroke with that engine - twelve little quills, six mating to one gear, six to the other, and just enough cush to prevent the gears from eating each other. It made the DFV reliable, more important than merely being capable of dominating races on power and torque alone..."

The long litany of successful Cosworth engines from his drawing board and from his team's is well known. But most significantly this man was so much more than just a dry engineer.

Far beyond the immediate group of men with whom he worked, and particularly in later years amongst those whose careers and futures he so readily fostered - once they had earned the privilege of his respect - he was a truly inspirational figure, a dynamic teacher and a celebratedly blunt philosopher.

'Duckworthisms' have become renowned throughout the motor racing and engineering worlds - including "It is better to be un-informed, than ill-informed" - "It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and prove it" - "A genius can make for a penny what a good engineer can only make for 10p" - and, perhaps more deeply: "Very few straight answers are ever possible, the decisive man is a simple-minded man."

"Development is only necessary to rectify the ignorance of designers" was a pretty pointed, and perhaps unusually self-deprecating one, while "It's simple to tell the truth. If you tell lies you have to remember what yesterday's lie was, so it's safer to be honest" is, like so much of the gospel according to Duckworth, unchallengeably true.

He also based his job-candidate interviews upon the simple principle that "Young fools go on to become old fools."

His directness and incessant questioning left him seldom at ease in dealings with the politicians and empire-builders of big business, but Cosworth grew rapidly as he and his co-directors reinvested its profits in the company.

However, Duckworth had suffered a heart attack in 1973 - forcing him to stop piloting his adored helicopter - and with his 85 per cent stake in Cosworth threatening huge death duties, in 1980 he sold to United Engineering Industries - "too cheaply" as he would later observe.

He continued to be involved in a consultative role with Cosworth engine design and development of a new turbocharged Formula One engine, but difficulties with it coincided with the emotional turmoil of divorce from his first wife, Ursula.

Early in 1987 he was found to require urgent and major heart-bypass surgery. He would subsequently remarry - Gill - and effectively retired to his hill-top house, 'The Folly' outside Northampton, gradually losing interest in the company whose engineering work in every area he could no longer control. He relinquished his Chairmanship on August 30, 1988, and while remaining a consultant, particularly on race engines, he was made Honorary Life President in April 1989.

One of the hobbies he indulged was a return to his boyhood interest in steam, and he and a group of friends took it in turns to be master, mate and engineer of a lovely steam boat, whose engine he - of course - rebuilt and perfected. He also supported a deep family interest in microlight aviation, taking control of both Cyclone Airsports Ltd and Mainair Sports Ltd, constructors of Pegasus and Mainair microlights.

Mike Costin remained a close and staunch friend, and in their retirement they have worked together part-time in recent years as consultants with the revived Triumph motor-cycle company, where their input - particularly regarding general engineering practises, outlook and philosophy - has been immensely valued by the full-time staff.

Talking this week about Keith's passing, Mike Costin said it all: "I have been privileged to spend more than forty years learning at the University of Duckworth..."

The great man was apparently hospitalised only two week ago with a badly infected knee, undergoing minor surgery but failing to recover. He passed away due to cardiac failure around 8pm last Sunday evening.

Keith's sudden death has come as a body blow throughout the motor racing world, for this singular personality was one of its most widely-respected - indeed revered - not-so-elder statesmen. He is survived by his second wife, Gill, by his son Roger (a director of Integral Powertrain Ltd, Bletchley) and daughter Tricia, by his step-daughters Amber and Tina, and by his first wife, Ursula.

What an engineer, what a man...what a very great Briton. Whenever the ultimate history of 20th Century engineering is written, Keith Duckworth should be amongst its brightest stars.

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- The Autosport.com Team

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