Aston Martin Engine Development: 1984-2000. Arthur Wilson L.
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a lot of midnight oil. The eventual solution involved new special surface treatment Schmitthelm valve springs, stronger valves with a reduced dish in the head and stronger top spring retainers. The last two parts were to ensure that the fitted spring length did not open up and allow the springs to go into surge. Despite this concern the car – entered by Lord Downe and run by Richard Williams – did very well in its first season, coming third in the championship. It ran very well at Le Mans that year, running consistently in fourth place for some considerable time until, in the early hours of Sunday morning, the engine started to use a lot of oil and eventually lost a cylinder. But with some careful coaxing by the RSW team it got home in a creditable seventh place overall, the fourth Group C car.
I did an inspection report on that engine when we got it back to AML after the race. I have to say that it is the only time that I have ever seen a completely wornout Aston Martin engine. Valve guides were worn, piston rings were rattling around in their grooves and pistons were worn in the bores. The crankshaft was not too bad. It seems that – due to some aerodynamic effect – the air intake for the engine was vacuum cleaning the race circuit, taking in road grit to the engine in the process with the inevitable result.
For 1983 the engine was extensively redesigned and lightened. It also became used as a stressed member for the EMKA race car. Further improvements were made to the valve gear, and peak power rpm was reduced to 7,000 rpm in the interests of durability. The EMKA was a beautiful car, built very close to the regulation weight. It was prepared and run by Michael Cane Racing and had a great deal of potential but needed development – it was its first year after all.
Figure 5.3 The EMKA with the AMT engine installed.
So 1984 was supposed to be our year, but our threeyear project to win the Le Mans 24-hour race was thrown out of kilter when the fuel efficiency regulations that we had been aiming at were relaxed at the last minute. More fuel available meant more power could be used, more than we could reliably make from our engine in normally aspirated form. So the engine was turbocharged for the 1984 season. I didn’t do the development work on the turbocharged engine as I was about to leave Tickford to take up my new position in charge of engines at AML.
AML Engineering Department, 1984
When it came, the AML/AMT separation was a painful experience for both companies but probably more so for AML, as not only had we lost the benefit of having a significant engineering resource but also we were now worse off than before. The Tickford side of things had evolved out of the AML experimental department and had absorbed all of those resources, which – as it was now to become a stand-alone company – effectively left AML without engineers or an engineering department.
At the time I was still working on engines as a development engineer within the Tickford division of AML. Along with a few others I was offered a position within the new AML engineering department, which meant that I had to make the very difficult decision to stay with AML or with Tickford. I had been with AML since the very early part of 1959, and had a strong loyalty for the cars and the company. On the other hand, I had been in at the beginning of the Tickford venture, which had provided me with a much wider engineering experience; also I had a lot of very good friends there, not to mention a great deal of respect for the directors and engineers that I worked with – as I said earlier, they were all top guys in their respective fields. But eventually a few of us were persuaded to jump to the AML side of the line to form the nucleus of a new but much smaller engineering department, with Michael Bowler as director of engineering.
The new AML engineering department had to hit the road running with – from my point of view – a major engine project in progress; a project that I had completed most of the base engine development as part of AMT, but for which I would now be the project liaison engineer for AML. At the same time there was an oil consumption problem beginning to show itself and some customers were concerned about the amount of oil that their engines were using. Oil consumption is a major problem to sort out and, as I had just started, it was decided that this would be best returned to our piston manufacturer to sort out for us. Apart from building test engines for them, this released me to tackle the next major upgrade to the Vantage engine derivative for the Zagato Coupe with a 300 kph target speed. And then the big one, the creation of the new 32-valve engine for a completely new car, the Virage. It was this last project that again brought home the reality of the costs involved in producing a completely new model to conform to the new, more stringent, European emission regulations, costs that would take an awfully long time to recover at a production rate of one or two cars per week, if ever. The twin supercharged Vantage that followed was an even bigger project and the costs were rising accordingly. So the opportunity offered by the Ford Motor Co. must have looked very attractive to Mr Gauntlet when it came.
Changing Times
There were many changes at AML during the 1990s, the most significant being the takeover by the Ford Motor Company, which happened midway through the supercharged Vantage project. People’s reactions were very mixed when this first looked like becoming a reality, but there can be little doubt that we had reached a point in AML history where we could no longer go on as we had been. The increasing costs of design and development to comply with the ever-more stringent safety and environmental standards for each new model were not recoverable by making motor cars at the very low production volumes that we were used to – particularly as they were already very expensive and labour-intensive hand-made motor cars built to the highest possible standard with almost the entire car being manufactured on-site. From raw casting, sheet of aluminium or leather hide to the finished article, Newport Pagnell was a true manufacturing plant. It wasn’t that AML was a badly run company; quite the contrary, we had achieved a number of industry firsts, many coachwork awards and accolades from the motoring press – such as the fastest car ever tested – and we were well-respected within the industry as a whole, all on a small volume manufacturer’s budget. Looking back, it is amazing what we were able to achieve for so little; we certainly didn’t need any lessons in economics. Let’s face it, the heritage that the people at AML had created was what attracted a major player like the Ford Motor Company to invest in it. And we must not forget that James Bond drove one of our cars – what better recommendation can you have? It was just that times were changing, the exclusivity of hand-crafted coachwork, etc. didn’t hold the same appeal as it once did and even if it did, it would always be for a very limited market and we needed to sell at least one of our range of cars at much higher volumes to recoup the increased costs of making them. So we had to adapt if we were to survive. The motor business was becoming much more international with major units being sourced from specialist suppliers, the actual build process was to become much more of an assembly process, albeit to the same high standard.
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