I Believe We Are Doing This Wrong

[tspear]

Those rules that allowed multiple engines for qualifying, practice and races are decades old. Now, they are only allowed three engines per season, with 24 race weekends.

The street car engines are slightly different, but you're still talking about 600 hp designed for reliability at full power for the same or less $$$ as a 200hp Lycoming. And the engines in McLarens and Ferraris don't have the sort of volume advantage that we see in a Mustang or Corvette engine.

Now I am kinda curious, and searching online did not get me an answer. I recall watching multiple car shows over the years (ok, a decade ago when I used to watch Top Gear along with others), where they discussed and test drove hyper cars on a semi-regular basis. I think, every example the engines were all based on mass production engines which were "tuned", or were decades old designs that have been incrementally improved.
I now wonder what is the current state (and how my recollection holds up too!).

Tim

 

[Pinecone]

In the past, some higher performance street cars used street engine based power plants.

The DeTomaso Pantera used a Ford 351 Cleveland. The BMW M-1 used an engine based on the "big" six, used in the M-5 and M-6 at the time.

Most all Ferraris use engines designed and produced by Ferrari.

As for F1, they are now 4 engines per season (without a penalty), but even so, that is 6 race weekends. 3 practice sessions, that if they run the full time is about 4 hours. Qualifying, which is max of 3 sessions, where they run a few laps a couple of times, but say another hour. And the race for max of 2 hours, but most are more like 1.5. So each weekend is a max of 7 hours. Time 6 is 42 hours. So the engine, if it makes it the required time is done in less than the time between oil changes for an aircraft engine.

 

[Dave Palacios]

Consider this:

What other modern engines use magnetos instead of electronic ignition?
What other modern engines run on leaded fuel?
What other modern engines use carburetors instead of fuel injection?
What other modern engines use manual mixture control instead of closed-loop automated control?
What other modern engines must run at air densities from below MSL to 25,000+?
What other modern engines are air/oil cooled instead of water-cooled?

The list goes on and on. GA has boxed itself into a corner with our application requirements. As a result, we're on a technological island all by ourselves, with no other industry helping to share our development and tooling costs.

As a point of comparison, Jasper is a company that rebuilds automotive and marine engines, differentials, and transmissions. Every year, they rebuild 65,000 engines and 75,000 transmissions. Compare this to the GA market as a whole; there are only ~ 200,000 total GA aircraft, so if each one gets a rebuild every ten years (unlikely), it would still be less than 1/3 of one automotive rebuild company's volume.

https://www.jasperengines.com/about/about-remanufactured-engines/ [Full disclosure - I got a rebuilt V-10 from Jasper about15 years ago. It ran flawlessly for more than 100,000 miles until I sold the SUV it was in - longer than the OE engine had survived.]

apples and oranges