Motori Moderni
Motori Moderni was an Italian racing engine manufacturer that supplied engines to various Formula 1 teams in the 1980s .
history
The company was founded in autumn 1984 and was based in Biandrate (Province of Novara ). The founders were the Italian engineer Carlo Chiti and the businessman Piero Mancini, a Fiat dealer in Florence . The company was ultimately created on the initiative of Giancarlo Minardi .
Carlo Chiti has been a fixture in Italian racing for decades. After a long commitment at Ferrari , Chiti launched the Italian car manufacturer ATS in 1962, together with Giotto Bizzarrini and a few partners , which produced a legendary street sports car and a less successful racing car for Formula 1. ATS disintegrated just a year later. Some employees switched to the Venetian project Scuderia Serenissima ; Carlo Chiti founded the company Autodelta , which was to be closely associated with Alfa Romeo for the next 20 years . From 1979 Autodelta operated Alfa Romeo's Formula 1 program; Since 1983, however, Autodelta has only supplied the chassis and engine constructions, while the racing operation from 1983 to 1985 was organized by Gianpaolo Pavanello's company Euroracing , which a few years later also participated in the Formula 1 team EuroBrun Racing . After Alfa Romeo Corse went through a difficult period in 1984 , Alfa Romeo changed the organizational structure at Autodelta, whereupon Chiti had to give up part of his influence to the former Lancia engineer Gianni Tonti. Chiti was not happy about this and he repeatedly voiced his dissatisfaction in a few press interviews.
In the spring of 1984 Giancarlo Minardi contacted Carlo Chiti. The established racing team Minardi had been active in Formula 2 with their own cars for a long time and worked from the beginning of the 1980s on, recognizable, on the rise to Formula 1. Giancarlo Minardi was looking for a partner who could supply his team with an affordable turbo engine could. At first Minardi tried to get the turbo engines from Alfa Romeo, which Carlo Chiti had designed and which had been used in Alfa Romeo's works team since 1982 and in the Osella customer team from summer 1984 . Minardi's first Formula 1 car, the M85, which was completed in July 1984, was clearly designed for the Alfa engine, and according to some press reports, a test drive of the M185 with an Alfa Romeo turbo engine actually took place in late summer 1984. Ultimately, however, Alfa Romeo decided against supplying Minardi; To what extent this is due to an intervention by Enzo Osella can hardly be verified.
After Giancarlo Minardi's efforts to get Alfa Romeo failed, Minardi succeeded in getting Carlo Chiti enthusiastic about his cause. Chiti separated from Autodelta or Alfa Romeo and founded a new company called Motori Moderni with Minardi and with considerable financial support from Piero Mancini in autumn 1984. The aim was to develop and build its own turbo engine for the young Minardi team, which should be ready for use as early as the 1985 Formula 1 season.
In the second year of its existence, Motori Moderni had 15 employees. Carlo Chiti declared at the beginning of 1986 that in the medium term his company should produce engines similar to Cosworth for very different racing classes. In addition to Formula 1, he also explicitly mentioned Formula 3000, the American IMSA series and offshore boat races. Finally, he brought the construction of his own Formula 1 chassis into play. However, none of these plans came to fruition.
The products
Between 1985 and 1990 Motori Moderni developed two different engines that were used in different Formula 1 teams. Neither engine earned any championship points.
The Motori Moderni F.1
The concept
The first product was a turbo engine called Motori Moderni F.1 . The engine was developed in a very short time. In October 1984 Chiti began with the first drawings, and by the third race of the 1985 Formula 1 season , the San Marino Grand Prix , the engine was working in the rear of the Minardi M85 for the first time. The team (like Tyrrell) had to contest the first two races of the year with a Cosworth naturally aspirated engine .
From a technical point of view, the Motori Moderni F.1 was a six-cylinder engine in a V-arrangement with a cylinder angle of 90 degrees. Initially, Chiti used a mechanical injection from Kugelfischer , later the electronic injection used by Ferrari from Magneti Marelli (although at the level of development from 1984). It was charged via two KKK turbochargers. Motori Moderni gave a value of around 720 hp as output. As far as this was true, it was about 150 hp below the level of the Renault EF15 engines and was roughly on a par with the Zakspeed engines.
The races
Minardi used the Motori-Moderni engine from 1985 to 1987 (with the exception of the first two races in 1985). During this time, the engine was used 72 times by Minardi. The best race result was two eighth places at the 1985 Australian Grand Prix by Pierluigi Martini and at the 1986 Mexican Grand Prix by Andrea de Cesaris . At the end of the 1987 Formula 1 season , Minardi parted ways with Motori Moderni. The young Italian team promised better performance by using the now again approved naturally aspirated engines. Minardi's choice fell on Cosworth .
During three years of operation, the Motori Moderni F.1 turbo engine was only used by one customer team. In the early autumn of 1986 , the southern French team AGS , Minardi's former competitor from Formula 2 days, made its debut with its own car in Formula 1. It was the last season in which only turbo engines were permitted. Brokered by the Italian sponsor Jolly Club, AGS used a (used) Motori-Moderni unit for its JH21C for its first two Formula 1 races, the Italian Grand Prix and the Portuguese Grand Prix . AGS driver Ivan Capelli was able to qualify for both races, but retired with a technical defect in the car.
In addition, Osella tried to get Motori-Moderni engines for the 1986 season. The team prepared the Osella FA1H for this engine ; the connection was ultimately not established. It failed because of a lack of capacity at Motori Moderni, and possibly also because of an objection by Giancarlo Minardi, who remembered that Enzo Osella had objected two years earlier to the transfer of the Alfa Romeo engines to Minardi.
Finally, Motori Moderni was associated with the still mysterious Swiss Formula 1 project Ekström Racing . The Swede Cecilia Ekström, who temporarily ran a Formula 3000 racing team in 1985, repeatedly announced that she would build her own Formula 1 car in Flims , which should be equipped with a Motori-Moderni engine. With this claim she even made it onto Swiss television. What they presented as their own car, however, was only the unpainted hull of a 1983 ATS D3, and the Motori-Moderni block that could be seen in the background was just a wooden model. In the late summer of 1986, Carlo Chiti announced that he had sent such a model to Ms. Ekström; Another delivery of engines was not made due to the lack of payments from Switzerland.
The Subaru M3512
In the 1990 Formula 1 season, another engine developed by Motori Moderni appeared in Formula 1. It was a twelve-cylinder naturally aspirated engine with a cylinder angle of 120 degrees. The engine was named Subaru M3512. It was a commissioned work for the Japanese automaker Subaru , who wanted to enter Formula 1 as the third large Japanese producer in the wake of Honda and Yamaha .
The concept
In this way, Subaru wanted to promote its popularity and sales of its cars through sporting success. To this end, the company planned a broad line-up, which in addition to activities in rallying should also include participation in Formula 1. Initially, the idea was to use a dedicated team with a self-designed car and engine, and by autumn 1987 Japanese engineers had brought a V12 engine to the prototype stage. But then this project was discontinued; possibly due to the lack of performance of the prototype, perhaps also with regard to the costs of the project. Instead, the company's management soon decided on an easier way: they wanted to have an engine built to order at an established company and make it available to an existing Formula 1 team as an engine supplier. Carlo Chiti's Motori Moderni company was chosen in the winter of 1987/88. Chiti had already developed concepts for its own naturally aspirated V12 engine for the post-turbo era, but found no buyers for it in Formula 1.
In October 1987 the partnership between Motori Moderni and Subaru was decided. For this purpose Subaru set up its own branch in Italy, the Subaru Technica Europe company in Milan , of which the Japanese racing driver Yoshiro Takaoka became the head. In the course of 1988, Motori Moderni developed a twelve-cylinder engine based on Subaru's specifications, which, in accordance with the company's concept, was designed as a boxer engine. Chiti was also inclined to the boxer concept; In an interview he described his Alfa Romeo boxer engine of the type 1260, which had been used by Brabham from 1976 and later in the Alfa Romeo works team, as his favorite engine.
The new boxer engine was completed in autumn 1988. It was named Subaru MM 1235. As planned, the engine had a low center of gravity, but it was extremely wide: the pure block measured 72 cm in width and 81 cm in height without the exhaust. It was overweight and had little performance. Chiti claimed the engine had 600 horsepower, which was roughly 50 to 80 horsepower below the level of a Cosworth DFR; But later drivers agreed that it could actually have been at most 500 hp.
During 1989, Chiti and Subaru tried to find a Formula 1 team that would use the engine for the coming season. The contacts with Minardi grew furthest. In the summer of 1989 a Minardi M188 was equipped with the Subaru engine and a Minardi gearbox that was matched to it. According to an article in Auto Italia magazine, Gianni Morbidelli, Pierluigi Martini and Paolo Barilla undertook several test drives in Misano in spring and early summer. Martini managed to complete 55 laps in a row in a series of tests; on another day, however, the engine collapsed after just 11 laps.
In December 1989 there was finally the opportunity to race the Subaru engine. Subaru took over the majority stake in the ailing Italian racing team Coloni . The engine was to be used in a Coloni vehicle as early as the first race of the 1990 Formula 1 season .
They run
At the beginning of 1990 Coloni was a financially and organizationally troubled racing team. There was hardly any substance and, above all, hardly any development work. There was no new car; rather, only one of the existing Coloni C3 chassis was converted to run on the boxer engine; the car was now called Coloni C3B . Overall, the vehicle was considerably overweight and difficult to handle. Coloni's only driver, Bertrand Gachot , failed to qualify eight times in eight attempts. Apart from the hopeless Team Life Racing , Coloni was the weakest racing team of the season during this time. Gachot had his own view of this. In a newspaper interview a few years later, he said: “The engine wasn't that bad. But the rest ... ".
In view of the test results from the summer of 1989, Subaru had already realized that Motori Moderni's boxer engine had no future. Therefore, in 1989, Chiti was commissioned to develop a new engine in a classic V-12 orientation. This engine was not yet ready for use at the beginning of the 1990 Formula 1 season. If Subaru nevertheless decided to start the season with the uncompetitive boxer engine, it was because they did not want to equip their own team with a third-party engine - namely from Cosworth . The expectation was that Coloni would develop a new car during this time that would be powered by the future V12 engine. In fact, there was no discernible development work at Coloni. In the summer of 1990, Subaru recognized the hopelessness of the project and immediately withdrew from Formula 1.
See also
A V12 engine
By his own admission, Carlo Chiti completed the V12 engine initially commissioned by Subaru in autumn 1990. A copy of the engine is said to have been tested on test benches. It had a cylinder angle of 67.5 degrees. Chiti spoke of an output in the range of 620 hp. In the period that followed, no team was found willing to try this construction.
literature
- David Hodges: Racing Cars from A – Z after 1945 . Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-613-01477-7
- Adriano Cimarosti: The Century of Racing. Cars, tracks and pilots. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-613-01848-9 .
- Loader our. 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.
- All twelve. In: motorsport aktuell . Issue 4, 1990 (report on the Subaru engine).