Flywheel energy

Hybrid cars with gas turbines supplying power to an electric motor, and a flywheel battery storing energy, would warm the heart of English inventor and coalmaster John Barber (1734-1801). He had the prescience to combine the principles of both turbine and flywheel in a patent of 1791. 

The pioneering years of the motor car were awash with designs espousing propulsion through “systems of levers” or “gravity engines”. A good number never had much prospect of providing locomotion but Nottingham-born Barber applied himself to driving an engine from its own hot air. He proposed a perilous mixture of inflammable gas made from coal or oil, which was pressed into what he called with commendable sang froid an exploder chamber.

When lit, he found the gas, “rushed out with great rapidity in one continuous stream of fire.” One imagines it would. According to Barber the jet “issued out with amazing force and velocity against a fly wheel.” Vanes round its rim caught the rush of flame and it kept going until Barber could fix the next injection of fuel. 

This seems to have been the snag. Barber found it difficult to keep the explosion going steadily enough to rev up the flywheel for long. Perhaps if he had started with a blowlamp and worked his way up he might have got the thing spinning fast enough to provide motive force a century ahead of Daimler or Benz, and 80 years before Sir Charles Parsons blew steam on to a turbine blade.

Rudolph Diesel and Herbert Akroyd Stuart

Calling a compression ignition oil engine a diesel is only engineering shorthand. It could just as well have been called a carnot, after the Napoleonic theoretician who drew up its principles in 1824, or an akroyd after the English engineer who went ahead and built one in 1890. Like many nineteenth century inventions, the diesel was the work of several engineers. Nicholas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) was the son of Napoleon's chief of staff, the mathematician Lazare Carnot and while he worked out the thermodynamic principles and provided a detailed description, he never actually got round to making one.

Herbert Akroyd Stuart (1864-1927) did. His patented oil-fired engine of 1890 was manufactured by Richard Hornsby & Sons of Grantham, Lincolnshire and one was sold to Newport Sanitary Authority as a pumping engine. Alas, its compression was too low and it needed heat applied round its cylinders to start. Once running it worked quite well, and Hornsby developed a high-compression version in 1892 closer to the modern compression ignition engine through having the fuel injected by a plunger pump. Diesel was still blowing it into the cylinders in a blast of air. In any case Diesel’s fuel was not - to begin with at any rate - oil, but a mixture of powdered coal. Working out an effective injection system vexed him for the rest of his life and Akroyd was three years ahead of Dr Diesel's celebrated “Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Motor” but his lower compressions were about a fifth of what Diesel proposed. 

By the end of the century, small portable gasoline engines with spark ignition were driving cars, motor boats and motorcycles. Compression-ignition engines working on gas or coal-dust were generally large, heavy, stationary power generators or were used for working machinery as an alternative to steam.  

 One Hornsby-Akroyd Patent Safety Oil Traction engine was sold in 1897 to Hugh Fortescue Locke-King, builder of Brooklands, probably as an electric generator. Hornsby advertised four sizes between 16 and 30 horse power and although not many seem to have been sold, they hold the distinction of being the first compression ignition engines to drive motor vehicles. In 1895 four went to Valentine Lynn & Son, the Brooklyn, New York carriage makers, for installation in delivery wagons for the De La Vergne Refrigerating Company. 

Still, it is Dr Rudolph Christian Karl Diesel (1858-1813) whose name stuck and the first truly commercial high-pressure compression ignition engine was patented in Germany. It was 28 February 1892 and he was the Paris-born sales manager of the Linde Ice-Making Machine Company. The Franco-Prussian war had made life in Paris difficult, so at the age of twelve Diesel fled to London before moving to Augsburg Technical High School in 1878. His study of compressing machinery for the Linde company had led to a fresh look at Carnot’s theories on thermodynamics. With help from Krupp and the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg (later MAN the truck manufacturer) he set up a workshop.

 One early engine exploded when he tried to start it, and the air-jet injection system proved troublesome, yet by 1897 Dr Diesel felt confident enough to sell American rights to the German-American brewer Adolphus Busch for a million marks ($250,000). An engine built by the St Louis Iron & Marine Works, installed in the Anheuser Busch Brewery on 2nd Street St Louis, Mo., in September 1898 was the first diesel in commercial operation after Hornsby-Akroyd's municipal power unit of 1890. 

It was 1908, with the work of a British engineer James McKechnie, before Dr Diesel had injection pumps capable of delivering fuel at a pressure of 50 atmospheres. Slow, steady diesel engines found applications at sea, particularly in submarines, which had used petrol engines to generate electricity for their under-water motors. But in 1906 one of the German fleet was destroyed when refuelling and an alternative became imperative.

 Diesel fuel had a lower flash-point and it was more economical, giving submarine longer range. In 1906 the French navy commissioned two diesel-engined submarines and in May 1908 the Royal Navy launched its first diesel submarine the D.1 at Barrow. When Germany laid down the U19 in 1911 it was equipped with two strong diesel engines. 

Jane's Fighting Ships of 1914 carried an advertisement featuring a submarine Krupp built for the Italian navy but by then Dr Diesel was dead. On 29 September 1913 he disappeared off the cross-channel packet SS Dresden between Antwerp and Harwich. His cabin was empty, his belongings, watch and cash were intact, his bed not slept in, and when his body was recovered by the crew of a Dutch trawler in the mouth of the River Scheldt it had a head injury. The only item missing was the briefcase and documents Dr Diesel had brought on board. 

An Antwerp coroner claimed the wound must have occurred before Dr Diesel's death. British police interrogation of the Dresden's crew and Dr Diesel's companions, who had dined with him on board, led nowhere. Could the Kaiser's secret service have been trying to prevent him communicating with the British Admiralty? Admiral Lord Fisher had been in touch with him, but Grand Admiral von Tirpitz may have been determined to keep the secrets to himself.

Porsche 968 Club Sport

Cherished memories play tricks. I had always thought the 968 Club Sport one of the best Porsches ever, making it I suppose, one of the best sports cars ever. That was until I recalled what I wrote about it in 1993. Twenty one years seem to have erased the road noise. I had also forgotten the agility required, even then, for climbing in and out.

 The Sunday Times of 10 October : Porsche AG has gone through a crisis of confidence. It hiked prices to a point where Porsches came to be regarded as something of a rip-off. Sales collapsed, production was halved, the workforce cut, and it now assembles special-edition cars for Mercedes-Benz and Audi.

 Porsche quality never wavered. The firm may have had to take in lodgers to pay its way, but the essential ingredients of the 968 Club Sport I have been testing are everlasating - the elegant engineering, the eager acceleration, the responsive handling. A certain amount of whimsy remains, such as the scatter-gun facia layout, and the out-of-reach boot release.

 Road noise is bad. Corrugated concrete surfaces make the car resonate like a cheap van. After a thousand miles in four days, the thump of the wheels on catseyes was tiresome.

The 968 Club Sport is an adroit piece of marketing. At £28,975 it is cheaper here than in Germany, and Porsche likes to think of it as a car that can be used on the track. It is lower and 50Kg lighter than the standard 968 and there is a 'sports pack' suspension for racing.

It is arguable how much cash is saved by manual window winders, and there is not much weight in central door locks. Yet marketing ploy or not, this is a sports Porsche in the best sporting tradition and one of the best Porsches ever.

The seats are thinly upholstered lightweight racing shells, and tricky to get into. You bend double, then fall backwards into a sort of hard-edged hammock, ducking to avoid the low roof, and swinging your legs in afterwards. Climbing out is worse - you can finish up sitting on the kerb with your legs still inside.

There is no central locking and no rear seats. There are blanked-off spaces where other Porsches have accessory switches. Drivers are expected to adjust their own mirrors, and tall seat-backs make the interior inconvenient.

Yet the result is not far short of perfection. Once in the form-hugging seats you feel part of the car. When you move, it moves. It is like a well-tailored suit. You do not so much get into this Porsche as put it on.

I sat in the car for twelve hours one day, mostly on the driving side, and emerged uncreased, without backache, without cramp, still fresh, still alert. Who needs upholstery ?

Porsche academics at its Weissach engineering centre designed the cockpit of the Airbus, but you would never guess it. Porsche instrument binnacles have looked much the same for thirty years and the switches are placed seemingly at random or, like the trip meter reset button, cunningly hidden in the outflow grille from the ventilator.

The 968CS has the exquisite balance of the front-engined Porsches and the charisma of the rear-engined ones. It is refined (save for the body noise) at slow speeds, and never raucous going fast. The steering is precise and accurate, the ride smoother at high speed than it is going slowly, and there are reserves of cornering grip impossible to exploit on the public road. Strong brakes provide reserves of safety that offset the car's natural easy fast gait.

Top speed is 156mph and it accelerates to 60mph in about 6.5sec. The engine is an energetic 3.0-litre four cylinder with twin balancer shafts, and the six-speed gearbox has the swift precision of a racing car. Competition from worthy Japanese sports cars has stimulated Porsche. Its spiralling prices have been stemmed, and Porsches like the 968 are once again good value.

I always prefered front engined Porsches. Their balance was exqusite. This road test included driving THE 928S, the yellow one, from Wiltshire to one of the most delightful places on earth, Crinan on the west coast of Scotland. It is pictured at Bellanoch, a peaceful harbour on the Crinan Canal that connects Ardrishaig with the outer isles. Here is a place Para Handy knew. Here is a place you would want your ashes scattered.

Although maybe not just yet.

Mercedes Maybach

Mercedes-Maybach has an alliterative ring to it. Like Rolls-Royce. Or Range Rover. A hyphen is nice although there was never one in Armstrong Siddeley. But Stuttgart-Sindelfingen’s “Simple and transparent nomenclature to provide customers with better orientation”?

I don’t think so.

Not much is simple at Mercedes-Benz. Take the titles at the introduction of the new names. Ola Källenius, member of the Divisional Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Cars responsible for Marketing & Sales. Dr Jens Thiemer, Head of Marketing Communications for Mercedes-Benz passenger cars. They said:

“The model designation is always an acronym made up of between one and three upper-case letters. The different types of engine are indicated by a lower-case letter. The system centres around the five core model series, A, B, C, E and S, which will continue to be used to provide orientation for our customers. In the case of the model designations for the SUVs, in a tribute to the legendary G Class, all SUV models will in the future have the first two letters "GL" in their name. The "G" here denotes the car's lineage. The "L" is a letter that appears time and time again over the history of Mercedes-Benz. It is a linking letter that makes the model designations easier to remember and easier to pronounce; one that is familiar from the legendary SL, for example, or from the more recent CLS and CLA. It is followed by the third letter, which indicates the relationship to the relevant core model series. In specific terms:

GLA                 = GL A-Class

GLC                 = GL C-Class; previously GLK

GLE                  = GL E-Class; previously M-Class or ML

GLE Coupé       = GL E-Class Coupé

GLS                  = GL S-Class; previously GL

G                      unchanged

It doesn’t get any easier with 4-door coupés.

“The system is constructed along similar lines. The first two letters, "CL", denote the origin, the third letter the link to one of the core model series: in other words CLA and CLA Shooting Brake, or CLS and CLS Shooting Brake. From 2016 on the Roadsters will all include "SL" in their names to denote their origin, with the third letter again the link to one of the core model series. The SLK therefore becomes the new SLC. As in the case of the G, the SL retains its designation as hitherto, in recognition of its iconic status.

“In a development paralleling that of the model series designations, the different types of engines will also be given new designations. These provide clear orientation and are also shorter than the designations used until now. The boot lids will in future feature lower-case letters, whose meaning is as follows:

c for "compressed natural gas"

(Natural Gas Drive until now)

d for "diesel"

(BlueTEC and CDI until now)

e for "electric"

(PLUG-IN HYBRID, BlueTEC PLUG-IN HYBRID and
Electric Drive until now)

f for "fuel cell"

(F-CELL until now)

h for "hybrid"

(HYBRID and BlueTEC HYBRID until now)

“As has been the case until now, there will be no suffix for the petrol models. The defining and established designation 4MATIC for our all-wheel-drive vehicles will remain unchanged and, indeed, will be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary next year. Given the way that Mercedes-Benz has evolved into the leading brand for all-wheel drive, 4MATIC will in future play an even more important role in our model portfolio. As a result of a steadily growing demand, we will in future be adding further models to the all-wheel drive segment.”

They can’t even let Mercedes-Maybach stand alone. It will be the Mercedes-Maybach S600. The Maybach Maybach (in China above where Mercedes expects to sell the new model ) was not a success and was discontinued two years ago. Rolls-Royce doesn’t need letters and figures. “Phantom” is quite enough. Just as “Silver Ghost” was enough. Austin managed with Counties. “Cambridge, Somerset, Devon, Dorset.” Morris got by with “Cowley and Oxford”. Okay names get nicked. Remember Singer Vague, Humber Septic and the misbegotten “Starion” when Mitsubishi tried to rival “Mustang”.

Still it’s a pity to consign Karl Benz (1944-1929) to oblivion. He deserves better. He was more of a car inventor than Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929), who was big on engines but developed the carburettor. Benz’s greatest claim to fame was through his business partner, investor and beautiful wife Bertha (1840-1944) (below) whose pioneer drive from Mannheim to Pforzheim (with two children in August 1888) made history.

Audi's Watershed

Drivers are in denial. Cars will be better without them. It is a hundred and twenty years since horses were gradually consigned to history. The Light Brigade had been overwhelmed at Balaclava by Russian artillery, Cavalrymen were distraught. Horsey people knew things were never going to be the same again. Technology had changed, warfare had changed, everything had changed.

Audi RS7 Concept at Hockenheim

Last week was another watershed. Audi’s astonishing performance at Hockenheim with an empty car made driving history. The last bastion of skill at the wheel collapsed. Track driving could be done by an automaton. Car fanatics, like the gallant 600, need to contemplate change. One day controlling cars with people will be a leisure pursuit, like fox-hunting or show-jumping. There will be track days for show-offs, vintage and classic clubs will flourish, rather like steam buffs who now volunteer to run old railways. But town-to-town journeys, in particular the wearisome ones on motorways, will be automated and controlled. The inventive (although ultimately unsuccessful) Sir Clive Sinclair once once said, “Driving along motorways without electronic controls will be seen, in years to come, as savage and dangerous.” The Adam Smith Institute reported, “Fighter aircraft perform in ways inconceivable if a human brain had to regulate them. Cars under electronic control could travel at 100 miles per hour, closer together in safety.”

Passengers-only cars.

Google’s driverless cars have now done over a million kilometres. Their only accidents have been when humans took over the controls and the latest prototypes don’t have steering wheels or pedals. Steve Mahan of Morgan Hill California rides in a self-driving Toyota Prius. “Ninety-five percent of my vision is gone, I'm well past legally blind”. He goes to a drive-through restaurant, a dry cleaning shop and back home.

Driverless-ness is not going to happen just yet but all the ingredients are in place. It will be as regular as aircraft landing automatically in fog, which they have been doing for years. We park without steering. We have sat-nav and sensors regulating cruise control and changing lanes. Integrated circuits and microprocessors link functions to electronic engine controls, apply the brakes, then speed up. Traction control prevents wheelspin and, on Audi’s RS7 at Hockenheim corrected GPS signals came via WiFi and high-frequency radio. Infrared 3D cameras watched the track and a computer compared what they “saw” against stored data. Ultrasonic sensors steered the car to centimetre accuracy and the twin-turbo 4.0 V8 lapped in 1m57s.

Working prototypes have proved themselves.

Technology making drivers redundant is not new. It has been under development for years. Artillery started at Crécy (1346) so it was around five centuries before it saw off the gallant 600 at Balaclava. ABS was a 1980s milestone, proving that technology could do something better than a driver. Remember cadence braking? I thought that was the answer on snow and ice until I tried ABS and was wholly converted when I used it in an emergency. I saw demonstrations of driverless control, interactive trains of cars on motorway-style test tracks, guidance-by-wire and on 30 April 1989 wrote in The Sunday Times: “An automatic pilot for cars is practical. Prometheus, a pan European research and development programme now in its third year, looks like getting into the driving seat by the end of the Century.”

 So, maybe we are 15 years late, and I am not going to say I told you so. But all that's necessary now is to follow legislation in Nevada, Florida, California and Michigan and enable it.

Putin’s grand prix. Crisis times in motor racing

Magnificent Mércèdes. The 1914 French Grand Prix 4.5 litre.

Sochi was not the first grand prix overshadowed by conflict. The 1914 French Grand Prix took place six days after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In 1938 Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz fled Donington as the Munich Crisis broke. German tanks rolled into Poland during practice for the Belgrade Grand Prix run on September 3rd 1939.

 Putin’s grand prix has, for the moment, damped down Ukraine’s uncivil war in which 3,600 have already died. Or maybe it has kept a lid on it until Bernie’s circus moved on.

 In July 1914 feelings in France were already running high when the home crowd cheered Peugeots and Delages against the might of Mércèdes. In a seven hour contest on a triangular course near Lyons Georges Boillot’s Peugeot was overwhelmed by Christian Lautenschlager’s Mércèdes. It was a triumph for the German team, which took the first three places.

 SCH Davis: “As the crowds made their way dustily from the course there was an atmosphere of something more than motor racing. Everyone was extraordinarily quiet. Though we knew nothing of it there had come faintly in the wind the echoing thud of guns.” The gallant Boillot became a casualty, shot down over the Western Front in 1916. Yet there was a curious bonus for Britain. One of the Mercédès, sent for exhibition in London, was somehow forgotten when the war began and came to the attention of a young Lieutenant WO Bentley RN. The former railway apprentice had the job of improving Royal Naval Air Service engines. He knew the Mercédès, designed by Paul Daimler, was derived from an aero engine with 4-valve heads, steel forged cylinders and a thin welded water jacket to reduce weight and improve cooling. Mércèdes attention to detail was exemplary. The rear axle had double pinions and crown wheels machined integrally with the half-shafts, hollowed-out to save weight. The axle was a masterpiece of precision.

Lieutenant Bentley towed the Mercédès to Rolls-Royce at Derby where they knew about aero engines. It was taken to pieces, its secrets examined and some were incorporated into Rolls-Royce’s engines. Bentley meanwhile redesigned RNAS Clerget air-cooled rotaries.

The 1938 Donington Grand Prix was planned for 1 October but on 24 September talks in Bad Godesburg between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain over the future of Europe collapsed. The Royal Navy was placed on alert, which meant that Francis Curzon 5th Earl Howe a serving officer withdrew his ERA entry. The German teams, however, were already there, nearby Castle Donington having served as a World War I prison for German officers. Karl Feuereissen, Auto Union manager and Alfred Neubauer his counterpart at Mercedes-Benz were instructed to return to Germany at once. And, mindful perhaps of what befell the 1914 Mercédès, if there was any threat of confiscation the racing cars had to be set on fire and destroyed.

As it turned out they caught the ferry at Harwich intact, only returning after Neville Chamberlain waved his famous piece of paper on September 30. The race was re-scheduled for October and German cars took the first five places.

Nuvolari was late for practice. A mechanic warms his C-type Auto Union. Its designer Dr Ferdinand Porsche (behind cockpit) looks on.

It is only 75 years and a few weeks since 31 August 1939, when practice went ahead as planned for the Belgrade Grand Prix. Herman Lang (Mercedes-Benz) was fastest; 0.4sec ahead of Manfred von Brauchitsch and Hermann Paul Müller (Auto Unions). The motor racing correspondent of the Neues Tagblatt felt compelled to cable Stuttgart saying the racing teams were following the international situation on German radio. But it was Third Reich policy to keep the event going, “In view of our friendly relations with Yugoslavia.”

The “international situation” was Germany’s invasion of Poland. Von Brauchitsch practised his Mercedes-Benz on Friday then, on race morning, he went missing. It was Sunday 3 September and Alfred Neubauer fetched him back from Belgrade airport as news came through that France and Britain had declared war. Manfred’s uncle Walther was commander in chief of the Germany army and about to be made a Generalfeldmarschall. The still a-political nephew had wanted to join his friend Rudolph Caracciola in Switzerland.

Tazio Nuvolari wore Number 4 in Belgrade.

The Franco-British ultimatum on Poland expired that morning at 11o’clock, yet at 5 o'clock the flag went down to start the grand prix. More than 100,000 Belgraders, a quarter of the city's population came to watch. It was another 18 months before they heard big German V12s again, overhead, when the Luftwaffe bombed the city killing 17,000. Nuvolari won the grand prix in the Auto Union, Lang retired with broken goggles, and the Germans’ sole adversary, Bosko Milenkovic in an old Bugatti T51, finished 19 laps behind. There was a quarrel over the result. Mercedes-Benz protested that Nuvolari’s tactics were unfair; Auto Union complained von Brauchitsch had cheated.

Mercedes-Benz team manager Alfred Neubauer in the 1930s and 1950s with his drivers, left from top Rudolf Caracciola, Richard Seaman, Herman Lang and Karl Kling. Right, Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio