Best known for its motorsport success, Cosworth has found branching out to be a worthwhile endeavour.
The latest instalment of Beyond the Racecar looks at the British company’s work developing engines for high-performance road cars.
Cosworth is best known for its six decades in motorsport, especially its decorated tenure as a Formula 1 engine builder.
The British company, founded in 1958 by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth, won a dozen World Drivers’ Championships with the double four valve (DFV) which, in its 1970s heyday, supplied almost the entire grid with Ford branding.
Cosworth is the third most successful engine builder in F1 history, behind only Mercedes and Ferrari, but it has been a decade since one of its engines last appeared on a grand prix grid.
The group is still involved in other motorsport categories, such as the British Touring Car Championship where it supplies the electronics package, but racing is no longer its solitary focus as it aims to achieve long-term success.
Like many motorsport engineering firms, Cosworth has diversified by applying its knowledge, technology and working practices to other sectors such as aerospace, defence and marine.
In recent years, it has gained substantial traction in the high-performance automotive industry too, developing and building engines for limited-edition hypercars such as the Aston Martin Valkyrie, Gordon Murray Automotive T50 and T.33, and the Bugatti Tourbillon.
Those projects, all featuring large capacity, high revving, naturally aspirated engines, have helped give the powertrain side of the business plenty of work for the foreseeable future.
According to Cosworth managing director Bruce Wood, the order book is long enough to keep the production department busy until the end of this decade. That’s the kind of assurance most motorsport companies can only dream of.
Applied history
Cosworth has a history of flitting between race and road, applying its motorsport expertise to production projects to varying extents.
It built engines for the Chevrolet Vega in the 1970s and the Mercedes 190E in the 1980s, the latter enabling the German manufacturer to go racing in the DTM.
However, Cosworth’s most famous road project was the Ford Sierra RS Cosworth of the late ’80s. Its development came as the company was noticing a dramatic shift in the composition of the F1 grid as the commercial position changed.
‘The DFV had been hugely successful,’ recalls Wood. ‘At some point in the 1970s, two [cars on the grid] would be Ferrari powered and the others would all be Cosworth powered. All the grandees of teams that we think of now – McLaren, Williams, Brabham – all ran Cosworth DFVs. That was a great business then.
‘What Keith and Mike saw going into the ’80s was Formula 1 becoming the domain of the car manufacturers. Porsche, Honda and Alfa Romeo came in. For them, it was a marketing exercise. They were looking at giving engines to teams and sponsoring them to promote their vehicles.’
Cosworth quickly realised that, as a company selling engines to customers, it wasn’t going to compete with a road car manufacturer that could offer a team its engines in a more cost-effective package.
Therefore, Cosworth’s dominant share of the grid was bound to get chipped away, and so it did. By 1984, it was only supplying the Tyrrell, Arrows and Spirit teams.
Badge engineering
‘That’s the premise under which the Cosworth Sierra was started,’ continues Wood. ‘Keith realised our business was going to get taken away from us.
‘He put it to Ford: you’ve won the F1 championship [with Cosworth] for many years in a row, but the man on the street has no idea because you’ve never made anything of that. So, why not put the Cosworth badge on the back of a Sierra?’
The project was a resounding success. Cosworth established a new engine build shop at Wellingborough just to produce YBB engines for the Ford Sierra RS, such was the demand. The car appeared on bedroom wall posters and achieved cult status through its usage in touring cars and rallying.
‘We made something like 25,000 engines for the Sierra, followed by the Sapphire, followed by the Escort, over a 10-year period,’ recalls Wood. ‘Cosworth has been through these phases: we were heavily motor racing, then we went to road cars, and then we went back to wholly motor racing.’
There was a brief F1 renaissance for the company in the 1990s, which included supplying the 3.5-litre V8 for Benetton that powered Michael Schumacher’s first title, but it never returned to the halcyon days of the DFV.
Cosworth’s final F1 engine was the 2.4-litre V10 for Marussia’s entry into the 2013 season.
Times change
Heading towards the 21st century, the company’s electronics division, established in 1987, ramped up supplying new control and telemetry systems for IndyCar and sportscars.
In 2014, it launched the Performance Data Recorder with General Motors, enabling Corvette and Cadillac drivers to record and analyse their drives. This was followed in the 2010s by the AliveDrive system.
Meanwhile, the powertrain division’s road car work had morphed into consultancy, stepping away from the higher volume production that had been achieved with the Ford Sierra RS Cosworth. Instead, it focused on manufacturing engines for clients in small volumes, or provide design advice.
That wasn’t to last forever, though, as the automotive industry took another turn in the 2010s that helped set Cosworth’s current trajectory.
Bespoke engineering
The arrival of the Aston Martin Valkyrie, which was conceptualised in 2016 and manufactured from 2021 until last year, changed the game for Cosworth in terms of how it approached the automotive sector.
The company was contracted to develop a 6.5-litre V12 engine for the Adrian Newey-designed machine, capable of revving to 11,100rpm.
‘It made us realise there was a much better business model for us,’ says Wood. ‘We’re not a consultancy; we now see ourselves as a product business, albeit the products are very low volume, very high value and bespoke.
‘Nonetheless, the Valkyrie engine is a product that has to be fully validated. We deliver it, hot tested, to Aston’s production line where it is bolted into the car.’
Fast forward to the present day and the high-performance automotive market has accelerated to dizzying heights, with ever more expensive cars powered by hugely powerful, yet efficient engines that make a thousand horsepower seem average. Cosworth has been central to that movement.
The Valkyrie, for example, which had design input from Adrian Newey, uses a stressed-member V12 linked to a Rimac KERS battery system that results in a 1140bhp total hybrid power output.
The story goes that the Valkyrie was originally designed to have around 950bhp, but inklings that the rival Mercedes-AMG One would breach four figures led Aston’s then CEO, Andy Palmer, to request an increase.
As it turned out, Cosworth had already exceeded 1000bhp on the dyno, and so it was done.
Aston Martin’s production run of 150 Valkyries, which concluded last November, has given Cosworth plenty of business and put its name as a high-performance engine builder back on everyone’s lips. The project was a major coup for the company, although Wood admits he wasn’t expecting it to be the genesis of a wider movement.
‘I’d be lying if I said we saw it coming,’ he says regarding the onset of big engine, roadgoing hypercars. ‘I don’t think the world saw it coming, but I think the world changed with the arrival of the Valkyrie.
‘On paper, it was a nice business model because it used every part of the company. But we thought it was going to be a once-in-a lifetime [project] to make the most of. We didn’t really imagine there was enough business out there to make it viable.’
Luxury wheeled goods
On the heels of the Valkyrie, another hypercar project emerged with a celebrated F1 designer behind it.
Gordon Murray Automotive (GMA) enlisted Cosworth as its engine partner with records in mind for its recent bursting onto the scene. Weighing just 178kg, the 3.9-litre powerplant in the GMA T50 is the lightest naturally aspirated V12 available, as well as the highest revving at 12,100rpm.
It is positioned low in the monocoque, allowing for a low c of g and heightened agility. Its size restricts the output to 660bhp, although its high power-to-weight ratio helps to compensate.
GMA and Cosworth further worked on this engine for the T.33 model, which produces just under 600bhp at 10,250rpm, with 90 per cent of the maximum torque available between 4500 and 10,500rpm. Both the T50 and T.33 are limited to 100 units.
At this point, Cosworth knew it had the potential for a sustained business model, using its motorsport expertise to develop high-revving engines for what Wood terms the ‘luxury wheeled goods’ market.
‘It’s got nothing to do with transport, or how you get from A to B, but how you arrive at B,’ he says. ‘They are luxury goods bought for emotion. That is what has driven this