| The V12 Engine | ||
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by David Finlay (04/01/06) He is by no means the only person in whom the V12 has inspired passion. Former F1 World Champion Damon Hill describes the sound of these engines as being "the sonic equivalent of strawberry mousse and cream". The great musician Herbert von Karajan told Enzo Ferrari that his engines produced "a burst of harmony that no conductor could ever recreate". Speaking of its appeal to discerning motorists, Colonel J S Napier said that the V12, along with the straight-eight, was "for the wealthy faddists of exquisite sensibility", even though nobody really needed an engine with more than six cylinders, while engineer Laurence Pomeroy wrote of "the psychology of numerical appraisal", defined by the fact that "in choosing a car, the ignoramus assumed that an eight-cylinder model must be twice as good as a four, and so on". The widespread enthusiasm for the V12, whether justified or not, has led Ludvigsen to write a book which is claimed - with, I'm sure, the greatest justification - to describe every car, and not a few other forms of transport, ever to have used an engine of this type, whether or not they actually went into production. His definition of a V12 does not include any unit in which the two sets of six cylinders are horizontally-opposed (properly described as "flat-12"), so the Ferrari 312BB and Porsche 917 are mentioned only to point out that they are not going to be mentioned again. In other cases, the definition is much looser. Ludvigsen goes into some detail about the Bimotore Type A Alfa Romeo Grand Prix car of 1931, which had two six-cylinder engines whose only connection was that they were mounted in the same chassis and drove wheels on the same axle. He also includes the W12, a term which confusingly enough refers to two quite different layouts. One of these is made up of two V6s sharing the same crankshaft, and is currently used by the Volkswagen Group in various products including the Bentley Continental. The other, with three banks of four cylinder each, has been found in aero engines, and also in the "conspicuously and comprehensively disastrous" Life F1 car of 1990. If you were asked who built the first-ever V12, you might guess that it was the manufacturer of some exotic sports car. In fact, it was London's Putney Motor Works, which built its 18.3-litre Craig-Dörwald engine of this layout for a racing boat way back in 1904. Eleven years later, US luxury manufacturer Packard became the first to sell a car with a V12, but the first such machine actually built was a 1908 one-off created by carburettor pioneer George Schebler. The Schebler car didn't merely make history - it also anticipated future developments in that half the cylinders could be shut down when full power was not needed, a development which the motor industry returned to many decades later. |
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As a schoolboy, Karl Ludvigsen sketched designs for V12 engines and cars that might use them, but this is the least of his qualifications for writing what must surely be the definitive work on V12s. Not only is he an established author and automotive historian (with an archive which has inspired awe in our mutual friend, the writer Eric Dymock, who recently e-mailed me to that effect); he has also worked at the top of the motor industry, having been employed in senior management positions by Fiat, Ford of Europe and General Motors. It's fair to say that Ludvigsen knows his stuff.
