The title-winning MotoGP engine that also won a Formula 1 world championship

MotoGP

As MotoGP travels to Silverstone, where Formula 1 cars raced five weeks ago, now is as good a time as any to tell the story of how a Norton-based engine beat Ferrari to the F1 constructors' championship

Geoff Duke on a Norton in the 1951 Isle of Man TT

Geoff Duke and a Norton single on their way to Isle of Man TT victory in 1951 – seven years later the Vanwall F1 car, with four over-bored Norton top ends, won the F1 constructors title

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Mat Oxley

Norton was the dominant name in motorcycle racing in the first half of the first century of the internal-combustion engine: dozens of Isle of Man TT victories, plus world championship successes in the 350cc and MotoGP categories. (Yes, the class was called 500cc back then.)

All these successes were achieved with the Birmingham factory’s single-cylinder engines, particularly the company’s first overhead-cam unit designed by Walter Moore in the 1920s. Moore was so keen to understand what was required from engines at the TT – the world’s most important motorcycle race at that time – that he became a sidecar passenger, so he could study Norton’s current engine from the closest quarters.

Moore won the sidecar 1924 TT and used what he learned during that race to help him design his overhead-cam engine – tagged the CS1 (Camshaft Senior Model 1) – which won its debut race, the 1927 Senior TT, with Alec Bennett on board. Bennett was an Irishman whose had family emigrated to Canada in the early 1900s. He returned to Europe to fight in the First World War, first as a despatch rider and later as a fighter pilot. He later settled in Britain and became a factory Norton rider.

Kuźmicki walked much of the way from Uzbekistan to Bombay, then boarded a boat to Blackpool.

Anyway, Norton’s successes in grand prix racing – seven riders’ and constructors’ world championships between 1950 and 1952 – were so impressive that it didn’t take a genius to realise that four Norton 500cc top ends might be gathered together to create a two-litre Formula 1 engine.

This was the bright idea of Tony Vandervell, a British industrialist who had raced motorcycles and cars in his youth. Vandervell’s business was Thin-Wall engine bearings, so his Formula 1 team was christened Vanwall.

Vandervell, “a tough nut, spoiling for a fight”, wanted to build a British F1 car, painted in British racing green, which would beat Italy’s blood-red Ferraris.

Vanwall F1 engine

Kuźmicki’s Vanwall F1 engine, with four Norton top ends standing upright and sitting atop Rolls-Royce crankcases.

Bernard Cahier/Getty Images

He hired Polish Norton engineer Leo Kuźmicki to design his engine. Kuźmicki, like TT winner Bennett before him, had had his life transformed by war.

Kuźmicki was a mechanical engineer and an officer in the Polish Air Force. In August 1939 he was captured during the Russian invasion of Poland and sent to a labour camp in Uzbekistan, run by the NKVD, Russia’s vicious secret service.

He remained there for almost two years, beaten and brutalised throughout, until Germany invaded Russia and Stalin switched sides to join the Allies, so Poland was now an ally and hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners of war were released. Kuźmicki travelled from Uzbekistan to Bombay in India, walking much of the way, where he boarded a boat to Blackpool.

From the archive

In Britain he became an RAF engineer and not long after the war he joined Norton. His speciality was the concept of squish – by aggressively squishing the air/fuel mixture as the piston reaches top-dead centre gas turbulence is increased, which improves air/fuel mixing for better combustion and increases heat transfer for better cooling.

Kuznick’s work on Norton’s singles therefore increased both horsepower and reliability. Without his input it’s likely that Norton would never have won the MotoGP world title, because its machines needed all the power they could get to beat their main rival, the faster four-cylinder Gilera 500.

“Leo was a brilliant engineer – in my opinion he was never given the credit he was due by Norton,” wrote 1951 MotoGP champion Geoff Duke in his autobiography, In Pursuit of Perfection. “He was responsible for a phenomenal 30% increase in power.”

This was the funny thing about the second and last British motorcycle to win the MotoGP title. The winning Norton 500 used an engine tuned by a Pole and a chassis designed by an Irishman, Rex McCandless, whose renowned Featherbed design remained the blueprint for motorcycle frames into the 1980s.

RAF papers of Leo Kuzmicki

Kuźmicki’s RAF papers record his career from arriving in Britain in July 1942, after almost three years in a Russian labour camp, to his demobbing in 1947

Ministry of Defence

McCandless initially tried to sell his invention to Triumph, until a Triumph executive told him during a business dinner that his company would never use a “foreign invention” in its motorcycles. McCandless, not a man to be messed with, upended the dinner table in the executive’s face and tried Norton next.

Duke was won over by the Featherbed the first time he tried it. “I soon realised that this machine set an entirely new standard in roadholding,” he wrote.

From the archive

In 1953, shortly before Norton withdrew from GP racing forever, Kuźmicki was hired by Vandervell, who wanted him to create an F1 engine using four of his Norton top-ends. There were no copyright issues, because Vandervell was also a Norton director!

The first Vanwall engine was a 1992cc inline-four, arranged longitudinally, with four 86.1 x 85.6mm cylinders and heads, fed by four AMAL motorcycle carburettors. Kuźmicki added water-cooling and his top end sat on a set of Rolls-Royce crankcases, taken from an engine originally designed for military vehicles.

The Vanwall didn’t achieve much success until Kuźmicki bored out the engine to 2489cc to take full advantage of F1’s 2.5-litre engine regulations. By then it made around 280 horsepower, or 112bhp per litre, compared to the 1951 Norton 500’s 80bhp per litre (on low-octane post-war ‘pool’ petrol).

At the same time the Vanwall’s original chassis was replaced by a tubular-steel spaceframe designed by Colin Chapman (founder of Lotus cars) and Vandervell signed up-and-coming youngster Stirling Moss for the 1957 F1 world championship.

Stirling Moss in a Vanwall in 1957

Stirling Moss drove the Norton-powered Vanwall in 1957 and 1958, taking the car to six Formula 1 victories and missing the 1958 drivers title by a single point

Keystone-France via Getty Images

That year Moss drove the Norton-powered Vanwall to victory in the British, Italian and Pescara Grands Prix. In 1958 Moss won another three GPs, while team-mate Tony Brooks also won three. This was good enough to give Vanwall the F1 constructors world title, eight points ahead of Ferrari. A remarkable achievement for a tiny British concern battling with F1’s greatest name.

Vanwall also came within a single point of winning the drivers championship, with Moss beaten by Ferrari’s Mike Hawthorn.

Once again Kuźmicki had proved that a meticulously developed simple design could beat brute horsepower and problematic complexity, represented in this case by Ferrari’s 2.4-litre V6.

Vanwall went downhill after 1958, as Vandervell suffered health problems, and contested its final race in 1960.

Kuźmicki’s next big job was designing the engine for the Hillman Imp car. In the early 1980s he was hired by Lord Hesketh to fix the Hesketh V1000 superbike’s engine problems, but he died before could start the job, due to ill-health provoked by the cruel hardships of his war years.

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