roon wrote: ↑21 Jul 2019, 05:36
Makes me wonder. Given the height, mass center advantages, would we see pushrods in F1 given the chance. Can still pull off 4v/cyl, much to the chagrin of our resident Europeans. 12k rpm? Feasible. Air springs? Applicable. Common camshaft? Doable. Given nothing fancy is being done with valve timing and duration due to the regs. 1.6L block. Small valves, tiny pushrods.
Weight of nine(?) timing gears+four camshafts vs twelve pushsticks+twelve forked rockers+one camshaft+two timing gears.
No, not a chance.
Look, I see why you guys love the corvette. It looks like a proper sports car and drives like you own the world. And that for a good bang for the buck. But that buck had to be saved in multiple places. The frame is steel instead of aluminium, the body plastic instead of carbon, etc etc. The engine is dirt cheap.
There was a Dutch football player who had an interesting saying: every disadvantage has its advantage.
If a pushrod engine made any sense in a car, or a sports car, there would be others. In Europe at least, the last pushrod in production was the Rover V8 that was based on an American block, it finally was fased out in the early nineties. Every car, from dirt cheap, high tech, from tractor to F1 car ditched pushrod engines. Even Chevy.
So, everybody including GM got it wrong and the LT2 engineers came up with this amazing tech that will change how we look at engines (again) or its just perfect to push it in a certain price point.
“But it won Indy with Mercedes”. Yeah... because they could use a larger capacity.