Bill Sherwood's Engine Page - Reading & Sounds

Welcome, from sunny Australia!

Further suggested reading material

- Four Stroke Performance Tuning (ISBN 0-85429-275-6)
- Modern Engine Tuning, (ISBN 0 85429 978 5)
Both by A Graham Bell, published by Haynes. Both excellent books for modern engines, with good 'hands-on' writing and examples. There is a later version of the Four Stroke Performance Tuning book, but the earlier one is better.

- Smokey Yunick's Power Secrets. (ISBN 0-931472-06-7)
Not much to do with modern engines, but some very practical information, and well worth getting. By Smokey Yunick.

- Prepare to Win   (ISBN 0-85045-804-8)
- Tune to Win      (ISBN 999705024, or maybe 0879380713)
- Engineer to Win (ISBN 0-87938-186-8)
- Drive to Win     (ISBN 0-9651600-0-9)
All by Carroll Smith, and all of them are excellent. Buy them all; you won't regret it. They don't have a huge amount of info on engines as such, but they do have a great deal of information on suspensions and car building in general. If you can only afford one, get Tune to Win.

- Race Car Engineering & Mechanics. (ISBN 0-9617425-0-X)
By Peter Van Valkenburgh. Another very good book, full of great info.

For your listening pleasure

I have some MP3's of a 1953 Formula One BRM 1.5 litre V-16 Supercharged racing car. This car has the most glorious sounding engine from any car of any era I've EVER heard!
Note that these sounds are recorded from the CD that comes with the excellent book, "Into The Red", by Nick Mason, and so actually, um, 'ripped' ... So, if anyone has a problem with them being on my site, please let me know and I'll remove them straight away.
- The BRM being push started and then driving away. (984kb)
- The BRM making a full power run past the pits. LOUD!!!! (515kb)
- The BRM returning to the pits. (402kb)
- The BRM doing three laps of the circuit. (3.55mb)
- The BRM, as it sounds from inside the cockpit. (1.8mb)
I would highly recommend buying the book - I did, just for the CD of the BRM alone.

There's also some recordings of a 1984 Benneton Cosworth DFV powered Formula One car.
- F1 car starting in an enclosed garage. (593kb)
- F1 car making a racing start. (487kb)

Not quite in the same league is my AE-86 Sprinter when it had the old engine. I made a WAV file of it starting up a while ago, and it sounds a lot like a bridge-port rotary.
- AE-86 starting

For your viewing pleasure

	The McLaren F1 supercar one of the fastest road cars ever built. To test just how fast it would go, they got an otherwise stock one and took the rev limiter off it, then let it loose on a very long road. It reached a rather quick 391kph! (3.44meg zip file)
	This is a 750hp Toyota Supra, and the Japanese guys driving it is frying the tyres around a track coming onto the front straight. (3.1meg zip file)
	As for what the AE-86 can do when modified, here's a short video of one being driven to extremes. The guy does a full 360° spin out of a drift into another drift on the exit. Superb car control there.

I've also made some videos of my own cars running around on tracks, and here's a couple of videos of the racing car at Queensland Raceway a few years ago.
Race One has me making a very poor start, but gradually getting past a few cars.
Race Two has me doing a better start and a good tussle with a Westfield Se7en racer. I would normally be able to take him no problems, but the engine and tyres were limiting.

A quick & dirty utility to calculate engine capacity comes in handy every now and then. I found a good little one and it's here. Just enter bore, stroke, and the number of cylinders and it'll tell you the capacity in either imperial (cubic inches) or metric. (cc's)

Back to -
Intro & Inlet system - Combustion chamber - Exhaust system - Valve gear - Crank, con-rods, and pistons - The block - Other stuff - Other Tuning

For more motorsport links, try the motorsport section on my links page.

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