Rules enforcing the same engine configuration for every car have made engineering less ingenuous and cars less exotic. By Richard Willaims.
A few miles inland from the north coast of Sicily, on a bare and rocky plateau about 2,000ft up in the Madonie mountains, there is a crossroads called the Bivio Polizzi. If you are coming from the town of Caltavuturo on the route of the old Targa Florio, you ignore the right fork, which would take you to the small hill town of Polizzi Generosa, and bear left on the road that leads to the sea. Back in 1973, which was the last time the race was run, you could stand on a grass bank at the crossroads on a practice day and hear the sound of a car long before it came into view. Then you watched it snaking through a series of bends before it passed you, a blur of noise and colour so close that you could almost reach out across a ditch and touch it.
The circuit was 45 miles long, and sometimes there were extended silences between the cars. On that day 35 years ago I was standing at the crossroads with a group of locals, waiting for the next competitor. Suddenly the lull was broken by a sound like a distant hornet, rising and falling. We cocked our ears, and within a few seconds one of my companions uttered a single word: "Lancia!" A few seconds later a dot appeared on the horizon, about a mile away, before turning first into a motor car and then into the futuristic wedge shape of a Lancia Stratos, painted in the red and white colours of a well known brand of American cigarettes. But to at least one pair of ears the sound of its 2.4-litre V6 engine was as identifiable as its distinctive bodywork.
Racing engines used to have a kind of musical quality, individual and collective. A V8 Cosworth barked, a Matra V12 was so loud as it passed the pits at peak revs that it actually hurt the unprotected eardrums, and a 12-cylinder Ferrari sang an octave above everything else. Together they made a symphony. In the turbocharged era a V6 Porsche whispered and a four-cylinder BMW rumbled. There was a season at the beginning of the present decade when the exhaust of the Mercedes V10 engine used by McLaren was tuned in such a way as to produce a sustained scream that seemed to express the car's sheer joy at being alive.
All that disappeared when Formula One's governing body decreed several years ago that in the cause of reducing costs every team's engines had to share a single configuration - first V10, currently V8. Out went engineering ingenuity and the sort of experimentation that occasionally led to technical breakthroughs - and the glorious polyphony disappeared along with it. Now all the engines sound the same.
And then, recently, our old pal Max Mosley took time off from his battle to establish a new privacy law to announce a proposal to make all the Formula One teams use a common engine design. So not only will they sound the same, they will actually be the same, made in the same factory. At first glance, this seems like a terrible idea. And the longer you look at it, the worse it gets.
To those who love motor racing, the sport has always been about the combination of man and machine. The engineering is of as much interest, both technical and aesthetic, as the driver's style at the wheel or competitive behaviour. Formula One is about competition at every level, starting with the engines. Enzo Ferrari wasn't interested in who drove his cars, or how they looked. What he cared about was the piece of engineering that lay beneath the bonnet: the heart of a car, as well as its voice. The likes of BMW and Honda, using the sport to enhance the high-tech image of their road vehicles, are likely to respond by walking away - which, given their recent opposition to Mosley, may not be seen by the governing body as an entirely unwelcome development.
Green measures such as Mosley's forthcoming energy-recovery system may help motor racing survive in a more critical era. But to take the engine out of the Grand Prix equation is to stop its heartbeat.
©Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
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