PAT SYMONDS
PLASTIC FANTASTIC: THE CARBON ENGINE
The first documented use of carbonfibre in motorsport was when some filaments gathered together as a light tow or string were used to reinforce the bodywork of the Ford GT40s that raced at Le Mans. The strands were laminated onto the glass fibre bodywork in a large criss-cross pattern which was very sparse since the cost of the fibres was $1,000 per kilogram. That equates to nearly $9,000 per kilogram in today’s money.
At the time it was an exotic material and, while it promised much, the costs kept usage limited. Today a general-purpose fibre such as T800 is under $30 a kilogram, cheap fibres half that and high-performance materials such as T1100 only around $100 a kilogram. Properties have improved no end with those early fibres having a tensile strength of around 2.5 Gigapascals (GPa) while the soon-to-be-available T1200 will reach 8GPa.
To set some background to composite use in engines, in 1981, as well as being involved in Toleman’s transition to Formula 1 from Formula 2, I was tasked with supervising the deployment of the previous season’s championship winning F2 design to customers via a replica built by Lola. This involved assisting works-supported cars run by Alan Docking for Stefan Johansson and Kenny Acheson. These cars were to use the Hart 420R engine but, early in the year, we came across a fascinating individual by the name of Matti Holzberg who was claiming he could build an engine largely out of carbonfibre.
While this seemed a fanciful idea, a little due diligence convinced me that what he was proposing was not just feasible – but that he had taken it to a demonstrable point which gave all of us the confidence that we could incorporate the engine into the Formula 2 car. At this stage Matti had built and run a four-cylinder engine which proved the concept and actually performed pretty well. For the F2 car we needed to upgrade this to a full race specification with a four valve per cylinder head, a dry-sump lubrication system and the various other accoutrements that a full race engine required. Matti set about this and we, while building the cars initially with the aluminium Hart engine, looked into the installation requirements such as the cooling system which was a bit of an u
