planetf1.com

Sorry if repost - interesting article hear on the 2008 honda v8. Nice to see teams lifting the lid on this sort of thing now that we have the v6s coming, would be interesting to see someone else do the same.

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Thank you Rory, excellent photos. I could look at them all day.

Here's some things I picked up. The quality of the block is superb, the grain and consistency of the metal is excellent. Usually a valve cover is just held down by a few bolts to prevent oil loss. But the valve covers are substantial, and fastened by long and sturdy. This is because the engine carries the load path, and it is held to the tub by just four bolts, located as far apart, two bottom ones low and wide, two upper ones high and wider. The oil sump is usually located in front of the engine, but it appears not to be located here in the Honda.

The camshafts are truly hollow, more like thin walled tubing. This also produces very large cam bearings. The larger a bearing is the more friction it has, so Honda decided to allow more parasitic drag in the interests of less weight up high and more reliability (and more precise valve control). The pneumatic valve system is not metal bellows, but instead a sliding seal. The throttle plates do not have a rod running through the middle of the intake where they are fastened. Less turbulence, more efficient intakes. I would love to know how they install those plates. The camshafts have gears at each end, indicating that they are driven at both ends. This minimized twisting of the camshaft, where usually the last cam lobes are running at weird angles. Instead the two drives offer very precise cam control for all four cylinders each bank. The pistons are works of art, with the absolutely minimal skirt, just enough to keep the pistons from rocking inside the cylinders. They also have some treatment on the skirts to lower drag.

Why does it say in the first paragraph that Honda continued to develop the engine in 2009 and 2010, when obviously they were neither a team or an engine supplier. Makes me wonder if they wanted to return to an engine manufacturer much earlier than 2015.

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Team Vettel, Ricciardo, Bottas and Button.

Awesome article! I always eek to get glipses of the internals of the engines up close. So much of that is kept from the public.

Robbo-92, Honda is a company with a culture (especially prior to 1995ish) that loves challenges. I'm sure they kept trying to perfect the engine and cure its woes even after leaving F1 just so that their engineers could learn and pass those experiences on to new projects and engineers. So I don't doubt for a second that that sentence is correct.

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[ Kimi Raikkonen ]
2007 Formula 1 World Drivers Champion

I don't doubt that the sentence in that article is incorrect, but from a business and financial point of view it just seems a waste of resources to continue to develop the engine if they had no intention of returning to the sport with the same engine. So it does make me believe they intended to return much earlier than 2015, hence why they continued to work out the engine woes this engine had.

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Team Vettel, Ricciardo, Bottas and Button.

Honda manages to use the develop their engineering talent in a manner quite different than some industry practices. They place their brightest and promising engineers in racing departments before relocation to production cars. In the racing environment they face time, financial, performance, and engineering challenges, but if someone makes a mistake, it won't hurt the company as if one of their production cars had a serious engineering fault. If these bright engineers can succeed in the racing shops, then they are prepared to enter the high value and high risk world of developing production vehicles.

That's exactly the case. Yes, racing itself is risky, but as far as your employees are concerned, it's risky to only a few. Once you begin selling production cars to hundreds of thousands to sometimes millions of consumers, the liability of your company skyrockets. That's why companies constantly deal with safety recalls without hesitation. Combine that with Honda's genuine inquisitive nature in racing and development (definitely trailed off in the 90s and 00s, but seems to be picking back up again!) and you'll see why they branch off development in all sorts of areas. Gotta keep an open mind about things.

That's not to say they weren't considering a return prior to 2014 with the V8, but I have a feeling they were a bit jaded with the formula after 2007-2008, and they of course made the right decision to pull out to look after the bottom line of the company. I am pleasantly surprised, as a Honda engine fanatic, that they've released initial powerplant designs for the new NSX chassis - and it is turbocharged.

Blinky, I had honestly never seen the pneumatic valve assemblies in these before until now so had no clue what they might have consisted of. I had noticed they have retaining plates above them much like many bearings have - I'm wondering if the press fit was enough for the V10s, but maybe this was a solution to the increased vibrations of the V8. I have a feeling the V10s had those as well given the usage of the engines. But got me thinking anyhow.

And yes, the casts of the aluminum components are beautiful things.

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[ Kimi Raikkonen ]
2007 Formula 1 World Drivers Champion

Fantastic article. Thanks for posting.

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