Hart Racing Engines

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Hart Racing Engines (later Brian Hart Ltd.) was a Harlow , UK- based manufacturer of racing engines . The company was founded in 1969 by former racing driver Brian Hart . Engines designed by Hart were a fixture in Formula 2 in the 1970s . From 1981 to 1997 Hart was represented almost continuously in the Formula 1 World Championship; the company appeared here both as a manufacturer of its own engines and as a tuner for CosworthMotors in appearance. Hart was one of the smallest engine manufacturers in Formula 1. The company mostly operated on a very small budget, so that the engines were not always up to date. Not least because of this, Hart's self-developed Formula 1 engines were less successful than the Cosworth engines that he had revised on behalf of customers. In 1998, Tom Walkinshaw took over the engine manufacturer and incorporated it into his Formula 1 Arrows team . Formula 1 engines designed by Brian Hart were launched under the Arrows brand name until 1999 .

Hart motors in Formula 2

Brian Hart began in 1969 with the maintenance and tuning of Cosworth engines, which were used at the time in the Formula 2 European Championship. Initially, Hart dealt with Cosworth FVA engines, from 1972 also with the larger BDA four-cylinder engines. The first successes came in 1971 and 1972 when Ronnie Peterson ( March ) and Mike Hailwood ( Team Surtees ) won the European Formula 2 Championship with Cosworth engines that had been prepared by Hart.

The first engine to bear the Hart name was the Hart 420R, a 2.0 liter in-line four-cylinder engine that was derived from the Cosworth BDA. The 420R appeared in the 1976 Formula 2 season with the Project Four Racing and Kauhsen teams ; Drivers included Eddie Cheever and Klaus Ludwig . Project Four was a racing team founded by Ron Dennis , which was absorbed into the Formula 1 team McLaren in 1981 ; the prefix MP4, which is still placed in front of the names of McLaren racing cars today, is an abbreviation for Marlboro Project Four. In 1977 Keke Rosberg drove in a Chevron B40 for the Fred Opert Racing team the first victory of a Hart Motor in Formula 2. In 1979 Hart entered into a relationship with the Toleman Formula 2 team , which was primarily, but not exclusively, supplied with engines. Numerous smaller private teams used older Hart engines, including Onyx Race Engineering or Divina Galica's private racing team. Toleman's driver Brian Henton won two races in a Ralt- Hart in 1979 and came second in the Formula 2 championship; In 1980, Henton won the championship for Team Toleman-Hart, and his team-mate Derek Warwick was runner-up. In 1981 Toleman rose to Formula 1 together with Hart; Harts engines were used by smaller Formula 2 teams until 1982.

Hart motors in Formula 1

Toleman TG184 from 1984 with a hard 415T motor
RAM 03 from 1985 (in the cockpit Manfred Winkelhock )
Force THL01 from Team Haas from 1985

Engines designed by Brian Hart were used in Formula 1 in 1981 and 1986 and from 1993 to 1997. Between these two phases, Hart worked on tuning Cosworth engines for numerous Formula 1 customer teams.

The turbo era

In 1981 the first Hart engine appeared in Formula 1. It was a 1.5-liter inline four-cylinder engine with turbocharging. The Hart 415T was the third turbocharged engine in Formula 1 after the Renault EF1 and the Ferrari 126C and it was also the first to be built without the support of a major car manufacturer. It was not until 1985 that other private manufacturers of turbo engines were added with Motori Moderni and Zakspeed .

The Hart 415T was derived from the successful Formula 2 420R engine. Its peculiarity was that it did not have a removable cylinder head. The engine block and cylinder head were cast in one piece, so the valves had to be installed through the inside of the cylinder. ( Sack cylinder ) The hard engine was one of the weakest turbo engines. In its debut year, its output was around 490 hp (360 kW); so it was on the level of a Cosworth DFV suction engine. In 1984 the Hart engine with meanwhile 560 HP (412 kW) exceeded the output of a Cosworth DFY naturally aspirated engine by around 30 HP, while Ferrari's turbo engine already developed 660 HP (485 kW). In addition, the Hart engines were considered unreliable: In the debut season, Brian Henton's Toleman-Hart fell out nine times in a row before reaching the finish line in the tenth race.

In the turbo era, Hart mainly supplied small, financially weak teams. Customers included Toleman (1981–1985), RAM Racing (1984–1985), Spirit (1984–1985) and Team Haas (1985–1986). Only Toleman achieved world championship points, who in 1983 finished the manufacturers 'championship (constructors' championship) in ninth place with ten points and was seventh in 1984 with 16 points. The most successful driver of a vehicle equipped with a Hart turbo engine was Ayrton Senna , who took second place and two third places in 1984. He achieved the best result at the rainy and prematurely canceled Monaco Grand Prix , which he finished second between Alain Prost (winner) and Stefan Bellof (third).

The use of Hart's turbo engines ended in the spring of 1986 . After Toleman was taken over by Benetton at the end of 1985 and then used engines from BMW and the other teams RAM and Spirit had ceased operations, only the Haas Brian Harts team used engines in 1986. Haas, too, finally gave up the 415 engines when the long-awaited Cosworth turbo engine was ready for use during the 1986 season.

Brian Hart then worked on the tuning of Cosworth naturally aspirated engines between 1987 and 1991, before returning to Formula 1 with his own ten-cylinder engines in 1993.

The naturally aspirated engine era

Taki Inoue in the Footwork FA16 of the Arrows team with a Hart 830 eight-cylinder

In the course of 1992 Hart developed a ten-cylinder naturally aspirated engine (type 1035) with financial support from the South African oil company Sasol , which was used exclusively by Jordan Grand Prix in 1993 and 1994 . The Hart 1035 had a cylinder angle of 72 degrees. In 1994 it was one of the weakest in the field with an output of around 715 hp (526 kW). The power output was about 10 hp above that of the Cosworth HB engines; the most powerful engine, from Scuderia Ferrari, made almost 100 hp more. Nevertheless, Jordan was able to perform increasingly successfully with the Hart engine. In the 1994 season in particular, the drivers Rubens Barrichello , Eddie Irvine and Andrea de Cesaris, who was briefly used as a substitute, regularly scored points; The highlight was Barichello’s third place in the Pacific Grand Prix .

When the FIA decided, among other things, to reduce the displacement to 3.0 liters for the 1995 Formula 1 season after the fatal accidents of Senna and Ratzenberger at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994 , Hart was the only manufacturer to combine this step with a reduction in the number of cylinders . Hart's engine for 1995, the Type 830, was therefore a 3.0 liter eight-cylinder engine. It was used by Arrows in 1995 and 1996 . At that time it was the only Formula 1 engine without pneumatic valve springs. The best result with a Hart 830 was achieved by Gianni Morbidelli when he finished third at the 1995 Australian Grand Prix . In 1997 it was used again by Minardi - now with pneumatic valve springs - but as the weakest engine of the year it could no longer achieve any championship points.

From 1998 to 1999 ten-cylinder engines that Brian Hart had developed were used by the British racing team Arrows Racing under the name Arrows 3.0. The success remained small, however; In both seasons together, the vehicles only achieved points in three races, which was usually helped by numerous failures by the competition. In 2002 the British team Phoenix Finance (later: DART Racing) tried to bring a chassis from the recently failed Team Prost with a ten-cylinder Hart engine to the start. However, the team was not allowed to participate in the Formula 1 World Championship.

420R in rallying

The 420R engine from Hart, which was mainly used in Formula 2 with a displacement of two liters, was used by Ford in the early 1980s for tests of the Ford Escort RS1700T . The vehicle should the after end of the production Escort '75 at the World Rally Championship to take part and, after the new regulations of Group B set up. During test drives in Portugal , test driver Ari Vatanen was not very enthusiastic about Hart's naturally aspirated engine. Because the performance of the RS1700T with the almost 1.8 liter Cosworth BDA engine with turbocharging was better, the 420R was not tested any further. The RS1700T never went into series production either, as the project was abandoned in favor of the Ford RS200 with all-wheel drive . The 420R in the Escort RS2300 developed around 220 kW (300 PS) and had a torque of around 515 Nm.

Hard as an engine tuner

Between 1987 and 1991, Hart prepared Cosworth naturally aspirated DFZ and DFR engines for customer teams. Along with Heini Mader Racing Components in Switzerland and Langford & Peck in Great Britain, Hart was one of the major tuning companies in the new naturally aspirated engine era. Hart's clients included:

literature

  • Adriano Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9 .
  • Malte Jürgens: Our loader. With self-built turbos against the Formula 1 establishment. Brian Hart, Erich Zakowski and Carlo Chiti. In: auto motor und sport . Issue 5/1986 of March 1, 1986, p. 251 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. P. 481.
  2. ↑ Ian Bamsey: The 1000 bhp Grand Prix Cars , 1988 (GT Foulis & Co. Ltd.), ISBN 978-0854296170 ,, S. 93rd
  3. ↑ Overview of the Formula 2 championships from 1964 to 1984 on the website www.formula2.net
  4. ↑ auto motor und sport issue 5/1986, p. 251 ff.
  5. ↑ For the performance data cf. Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. Pp. 314 and 342.
  6. ↑ In motorsport literature there has long been a rumor that race director Jackie Ickx stopped the race prematurely to prevent Prost from being overtaken by the faster Senna and possibly also by Bellof. See Motorsport aktuell, issue 15/1984.
  7. ↑ For the performance data cf. Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. P. 468 f.
  8. ↑ Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. P. 514.
  9. ↑ Overview of the tuning companies for Cosworth engines on the website www.research-racing.de (accessed on February 19, 2011).