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No proper motorsports museum collection is complete without a Ferrari or two. The IMS museum did not disappoint with this muscular looking Ferrari 250LM. It was the outright winner at LeMans in 1965 with Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory driving. That's only two drivers for 24 hours which is completely psycho, but that's how they used to roll back then. The Ferrari's V-12 is 3.2L and has 76.3mm bores and a 58.2mm stroke that was fed through 6 downdraft Weber carburetors. Imagine having to tune, build, and sync those carbs.
Check out the copper headers on this Monroe 4 banger.
I'm not sure what kind of block this is, but looking at a lot of these older engines, it looks like these types of block designs were most common. I can see why they used the word “crankcase” back then because that's literally what they were.
I cannot figure out how this engine went together. Short studs on the deck mean that a head probably didn't go on top. Then there are ports on the bottom. But there's no hole on the front face for a crank snout to poke through. Or was there yet another housing that carried the crankshaft and bolted to the short studs? If you know or have a theory, pop it in the comment section below.
Old school race engine designers would design engines with the the exhaust ports in the valley so they could run a flat plane crankshaft and still get the headers to scavenge the next cylinder. But imagine being the mechanic that had to install them in the first place. It probably sucked to be him.
Here's a supercharged Duesenberg straight 8 from the late 20's that featured dual over head cams and 4 valves per cylinder. You'll notice that on all of these old engines, the valve angles were extremely wide for whatever reason. It was Keith Duckworth who was the first to design a successful modern narrow angle 4 valve per cylinder engine. Anyhow, the carburetor directly fed the gear driven supercharger and there is no intercooler. It must have been fun to play with blowers back in those days since it was an all new technology.
